[IAEP] Redesigning: Library, Read, Get-Books, and Content bundles

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Reuben K. Caron <reuben at laptop.org> wrote:
> deployments that would like to install content bundles. They package
> these files into .xol packages and these packages get installed into
> the "Library," which is contained on the left hand side of the Browse
> activity. Yes, you read that correctly..."the BROWSE activity," an
> activity intended for online exploration is used to view offline
> content. Every deployment that I have shown this to has found it very
> unintuitive. Consider another example: You want to use Get-Books to

The original goal was to blur the boundary between offline and online
as much as possible.  You would have a large-ish cache of "online"
material available "offline" -- including not only your textbooks, but
also many other web sites or educational resources.  Updating a
textbook would be as easy as updating the "online" source of that
textbook, and the "offline" copy would get updated from that.  Surfing
while "offline" to a page which was not available in the offline cache
would create a request for that content, which would be fetched when
you are next "online", or added to a queue for your teacher to fetch
next time they travelled to a place with internet access.

This is a pretty straightforward extension of the wwwoffle program,
but the necessary tuits to integrate all the pieces never appeared.

Anyway, that's just to say that there was justification once for
putting library content in Browse.  Don't know if that justification
still applies.
  --scott

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