[etoys-dev] popups in project-info

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 01.09.2009, at 10:54, Timothy Falconer wrote:

> On Sep 1, 2009, at 2:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg wrote:
>
>> K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
>>> On Monday 31 Aug 2009 9:10:39 pm Timothy Falconer wrote:
>>>
>>>> What does the larger group think?   Would you see "sixteen and  
>>>> older"  in the drop-down as saying "put your adults-only stuff  
>>>> here"?
>>>>
>>> I am wary of using ages in Etoy projects. It is tough on children  
>>> who drop out and rejoin later. How about culturally neutral terms  
>>> like  "Levels" 1 thru 5 or multi-age groups like {primary, higher  
>>> primary, secondary, higher secondary, graduate}.
>>>
>> I think that we are mixing up two things here:
>>
>> - projects that are meant to help teachers getting started using  
>> Etoys in the classroom, where the age category would be helpful  
>> (I'm fine with grade, age or elementary/middle/highschool), and
>>
>> - projects that will be uploaded by the broader community, which  
>> are meant to show what someone did, where we don't need any  
>> categories at all
>>
>> I see two different structures for these different kinds of  
>> "showcases". The "official" showcase will be the one with  
>> categories, age groups etc., because we want to help teachers  
>> getting ideas. And these projects will be selected carefully.
>> All the other projects belong to a "public" showcase, where we  
>> don't need these categories. Most of the students will not bother  
>> to think about subjects when uploading their work, and they don't  
>> have to, since categories are optional. We could even use tags for  
>> the public showcase, because this showcase serves another purpose,  
>> it is the possibility for everyone to share their work. We can pick  
>> up the best projects from the public showcase to put into the  
>> official one, "we" means all the people who apply to do that.
>> So it wouldn't be necessary to categorize every project that goes  
>> to the showcase, the categorization could be done later, when a  
>> project gets selected. And of course there are projects which are  
>> explicitly developed to be on the official showcase, but I don't  
>> think that anyone here has a problem with categorizing these  
>> projects by age, because that clearly means "target age".
>>
>> Greetings,
>> Rita
>
>
> A few thoughts from this . . .
>
> First though, everyone should know that there are now two sections  
> in the showcase that we're launching this month, the "featured"  
> section, and the "public" section.   Featured projects are hand- 
> picked by the squeakland education team.  Public projects are  
> moderated for inappropriate content, but otherwise left alone.   As  
> Rita says, there will be 30 to 100 featured projects, and many  
> thousand public projects.
>
> 1. I see the public showcase perhaps a bit differently, not just as  
> a place for individual users to show off their work (as they do on  
> the Scratch website), but as the place for teachers from around the  
> world, such as Chris Gordon from USeIT, to show off their students  
> work, and their own demonstrations, etc.   My belief is that there  
> will *MANY* projects that come from classes and homeschoolers that  
> are appropriate for categorization.  These will all start out in the  
> public section.   The Squeakland showcase is really focused on  
> encouraging such projects, in contrast with the Scratch site which  
> is more "look at what I did".    Obviously we don't want to restrict  
> "look at what I did", we want people to do what they want.  But the  
> tone I'm hoping to set is that of a worldwide educational resource,  
> with many, many examples of teacher/student use, not just what we  
> feature.
>
> 2. These categories are optional, and that the drop-down says that  
> they're optional.  No one has to pick target age, subject, or region  
> if they don't want to.
>
> 3. We want to encourage people to choose these categories from the  
> very beginning, so that when we promote a project from public to  
> featured we don't have to guess what the author's intent was.
>
> 4. Let's at least see the new showcase before critiquing it.  It's  
> just about done, and we can change things as we go (aka, agile :)
>
> Take care,
> Tim


1) "Public Showcase" is a misnomer. We want a "public" repository for  
everyone to share projects, *and* a "showcase" with selected content.

4) having two sites with different designs and contents is a  
fundamentally different user experience than one "showcase" with a  
"public" toggle. Sure it can be implemented as such behind the scenes,  
but the public sharing site needs to be clearly separated, and hence  
visually different from the edited site.

- Bert -