In order to document our process as we develop the
Learning Library, we are going to be using our blog to share information, materials, and correspondence with our web development partner
Platform Shoes Forum (PSF).
Right now, we are working on the content management system that we need to build for the Learning Library. PSF created an initial document that described how that system might work. PSF had a lot of questions for us to answer, and I have revised the document, trying to field all the questions. I'm going to share that revised document with Vini tomorrow, but I also created some visual aids to support the document.
To see these and my correspondence with Vini, keep reading...
Hey Vini and Russ,
I made so many changes to the document that I thought these "drawings" might help. We've moved away from the idea of a strict video-script-activity model, towards something I hope will be more flexible for the "content providers" (NML team) and our "end user" (NML teens). Using the idea of "elements", I have sketched out the syntax of
the two modules we created last week. A strength of the new model is that will function as a tool to upload/share something simple (with only a few elements), or something more complex (with many elements).
The visualization module:
The simulation module:
I hope that looking at these along with the modules online will help to clarify the ideas in the revised document. A few additional notes:
starting from a skill: In both of these, the starting point is an NML skill, but other starting points could be offered in the content management system. For instance, a user could create a module about one of the forms of participatory culture, or one of the challenges to participatory culture, like the transparency challenge. A user might start from one of the Good Play ethical categories (identity, privacy, ownership & authorship, credibility, participation). We'll have to decide on the final list of ways to start a module soon, but the key will be for us to model clearly what all these things are in the modules that we share in the Learning Library.
"invites" (invitations to participate): The document does not address the idea of "invites". You'll see in our modules online, we offer ways to participate in the
yellow box at the bottom - those "try it out!"'s correspond to the pink
invite boxes in my sketches. We want to offer ways to "close the loop" at the end of modules. We have been talking a lot about different ways to learn and to participate. We don't want to limit the experience by assuming that teens will only want to create and share - they might also want to question, tinker, socialize, explore, hack, build, and more. I was wondering if we could create an "invite" template that would offer a pulldown menu with many different kinds of invitations to participate. Could that "invite" template exist as an option when users are publishing an element? We can discuss this further during our phone meeting.
user interface: I have not addressed the question of interface in the revised Module Generator document. The interface we've temporarily used for our online modules is just a simple site map structure, which lists all materials and is easy to navigate. We want this as one option, but still need to address the other idea of a nodal, animated, search interface.
