<div dir="ltr">On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:09 PM, Michael Stone <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:michael@laptop.org">michael@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Bryan Berry wholly captured my attention tonight when he said (in<br>
summary):<br>
<br>
"Sugar offers an excellent mode for discovery but no excellent way to<br>
manipulate narratives. Both discovery and narrative are essential for<br>
learning." [1]<br>
<br>
This statement seems to me both indisputable and damning; if true, it<br>
strikes to the core of the claim that Sugar is appropriate for learning.<br>
<br>
Even though Bryan has already found some partial solutions to this<br>
problem [2], we should take time to debate the more primitive thesis<br>
that:<br>
<br>
"Narrative is a basic component of much educational material which<br>
Sugar ought to 'natively' recognize, respond to, and manipulate."<br>
<br>
so that we may decide whether this issue should receive a greater share<br>
of our limited design and implementation resources.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
Michael<br>
<br>
[1]: Sugar presently records actions which may occasionally be<br>
decomposed into narrative or situated within an external narrative;<br>
however, Sugar is presently blind to these relationships.<br>
<br>
[2]: Bryan is currently encoding narratives in HTML and is attempting to<br>
use Offline Moodle to make this cheaper to support. I decided to write<br>
this email because I believe that it might well be worth our time to<br>
either give him a hand with his effort or to bake support for similar<br>
use cases directly in to Sugar.</blockquote><div><br><br>bryan's ideas are explained more fully in this article on olpcnews:<br><a href="http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html">http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/scaling_constructionism_with_dynabooks.html</a><br>
<br>the comments there are worth reading too<br></div></div><br>it's hard to discuss without having the ideas spelt out <br>"narrative is good" is not really a sufficient basis for a discussion but bryan's article has more detail<br>
</div>