On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Walter Bender <walter.ben...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Over the past month, Gonzalo and I have had weekly discussions > with the Learning Team about proposed enhancements to the Journal > [1]. The discussion has been mostly focused on the theme of the > use of the Journal for assessment and reflection, although a few > usability issues have been raised as well. The result is the > compilation of a collection of Feature Requests [2]. While some > of these proposals have been on the table for quite some > time (e.g. Write to Journal any time) and some are only > tangential to the theme of assessment (e.g. Journal volume > toolbar enhancement), Gonzalo and I thought it would make sense > to discuss them as a group with the Design Team. > > (Note that there are other Design-related feature proposals, but > we thought a meeting focusing exclusively on the Journal would > be most efficient.) > > Gary, since your calendar is most constrained, could you propose > some meeting times that might work for you? Also, any additional > up-front work we might do in preparation for the discussion? > > A brief summary of the features: > > 1. Write to Journal anytime: The intent is to enable editing the > description, tags or the title at any time easily from the activity, > and not have to wait to close the activity. The pedagogical goal is to > facilitate the use of the Journal as a lab notebook, where notes can > be recorded while the user is actively doing something, not just after > the fact. We've been around the block on this one but I think we are > still lacking consensus on how best to do this. One POV is to have a > toolbar button (and/or Frame submenu) to involve the modal Journal > detail view [3]. A second POV is to add a toolbar mechanism for simply > adding text to the description field much the way we already have a > mechanism for updating the title (Simon had a mockup of this at one > point.). (Regardless of our approach, it is proposed that we add a hot key > as well, perhaps the unused Bulletin-board key.) > > 2a. Journal tagging private or public: A problem raised by some > teachers is that student Journals (and school servers) are filled with > music or games. With this proposal, a student would mark school work > as "public" and personal work as "private". These tags could be used > as a filter in the Journal and during the backup process. > > 2b. Tags in Journal: a collection of predefined tags that can be > associated (dragged onto?) with a Journal entry. Teachers would like > students to use tags to organize their work, bu the current mechanism > is too unwieldy to use. > > 2c. Activity-specific metadata: The idea is to record data > related to the use of activity and display it in the detail view > of the Journal. > > These are old (and new) proposals, somewhat outside of the scope of > the pedagogical discussion, but they have a big impact on the general > usability of the Journal: > > 3. Journal volume-toolbar enhancement: The intent is to make it easier > to find example programs and media objects associated with an > activity. If an activity can mount a directory on the Journal volume > toolbar, the files in the directory would be available to the Object > Chooser. This is both an aesthetic and work-flow issue. We would be > able to eliminate the GNOME file selector and, as with the > $HOME/Documents enhancement we made in 0.94, we make moving > back and forth between the Journal and the file system much more fluid. > > 4. Multi-selection in Journal: Allow selecting multiple files for > operations in the Journal. > > 5. Thumbnail view in Journal: Several ways of approaching this, but > some visualization of the contents from a list-like view would make it > much easier to browse the Journal contents. > > [1] > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chat_Espanol_2011#Charla_35:_Evaluaci.C3.B3n_.E2.80.93Metadatos_Actividades > [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Journal_features_for_0.96 > [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Detailview_20110313.pdf > > regards. > > -walter and gonzalo > > -- > Walter Bender > Sugar Labs > http://www.sugarlabs.org See also the discussion pages on the wiki in general, and in particular, these have content: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Write_to_journal_anytime http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Journal_data_tagged_private_or_public http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Activity_specific_metadata_in_Journal --Fred
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