Hello Dave,
found your detailed replies to my lengthy post - if only under subject "use-revolution Digest" and quoting me as "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Although I sympathize with Revolution from a critical distance and defended the documentation as the better part of the IDE, I naturally still feel as a person as distinct from and surely not in total symbiosis with Revolution.
I had written in my post "This does not mean that I would not agree with you on some of your proposals." and I had also expressed the expectation that the Rev team were in a state of mind to accept the direction of your proposals.
Part of the discussion following your first post dealt with sample stacks, an aspect I certainly had neglected in my reply.
Actually, we make ample use of tutorials and sample stacks in our courses, i.e. in our multimedia workshops at our university which are open for students from all departments, the majority of enrolling students coming from informatics/economy and social sciences. The tutorials and sample stacks are adapted to the presumed needs of these students, part of which have only the minimum requirement of feeling at least familiar with a text processing application, others may come with some knowledge of Powerpoint, Visual Basic, Javascript, HTML etc.
This means we need to design our own samples especially directed at this audience. There are three places in the course where sample stacks are used as additional material:
At the beginning we show sample stacks to motivate and give an idea of what can be achieved with Metacard/Revolution. Some of the stacks we use at this point are examples developed by students in earlier courses.
Then, accompanying the first assignments, a number of sample stacks are introduced (or made accessible for free use) that cover basic principles and illustrate simpler tasks - like modification of textchunks, changing object properties, animated icons, using backgrounds and menus, adding pop-up annotations with the help of a glossary card, developing a simple word (vocabulary) trainer, matching and drag-and-drop exercises, using polygons over images to create sensitive areas, using and combining visual effects, using modal dialogs, cursors and graphic buttons, read from and write to external files, connect to the net and download stacks etc.
The last category are sample stacks that are geared nearer to the field of study or interest of the individual student, as each student has to complete a project from his special field until the end of the semester or shortly after that. The students develop their specific ideas which are assessed in group or personal discussions about which seems feasible - according to the individual level of competence and the possibilities of the xtalk language. At this stage we offer proposals for design and algorithms, may produce sample scripts and small stacks showing a possible direction of development, snippets of code and stacks they can exploit and further develop or integrate into their final product.-
What you probably have in mind are sample stacks and tutorials from category two. As complements of the documentation they would indeed be helpful and they may be urgently needed by persons learning on their own. The task remains to determine which "basics" really need to be covered and how and by whom they could be collected or produced. I think, as a first basic collection we need about 30 sample stacks?
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke
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