[Xerte-dev] Re: Connector Pages

[Julian Tenney]

that would begreat, thanks,
________________________________________
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Kemp Johnathan [johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com]
Sent: 25 April 2012 10:04
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Connector Pages

Can everyone play around with the connectors and can we have some debate about this please?

I will be out this morning, but this afternoon I will put together a brief introduction to Connector pages. You can learn all you need to know about the use of Connector pages by becoming familiar with the Menu, Plain Text, MCQ and Redirector Connector pages. All the Connector pages essentially work the same way.

The other three pages introduce nothing new with respect to their being Connector pages. What they add are features specific to themselves e.g. the different things the hotspots can be used for in the Hotspot Image Connector; how you can manage the variety of things that you can add to a tab in the Tab Navigator Connector; and with respect to the Scenario Connector the whole concept of what a Scenario is and how you can use scenes, props, conditions, actions and outcomes to develop sophisticated interactions with the learner.

These latter three pages deserve separate coverage in their own right, once you have an understanding of Connector pages in general. It will take me a little longer to produce something to cover the items specific to these pages.

Kind regards

Johnathan




On 24 April 2012 13:02, Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
Why have the author set ‘mode’? What’s the point of this, and if we need it can we not detect it? What happens if I forget to set it back? Couldn’t this be a global setting?

With the connector pages, do we need to have the options for back / next buttons stuff on each page, or are there global / automatic settings we could make?

It is a pain when buttons are turned off to quickly get to the page I want to get to – so If I add a new page, I can’t navigate to it to check it’s how I want it, because the buttons suddenly disappear.

I can see the value in the connectors, but we need to make this easy.

Seriously, when we built toolkits the mantra in the office was (honestly) ‘f*ckwit simple’. It meant that we created tools that create relatively simple content. But it means people can use it. That guiding principle has got us a long way, and means that people can easily create content – that is what people like about toolkits. We need to sanity check all the new features against that mantra. If it isn’t ‘f*ckwit simple’ it may belong in another tool.

Even if people don’t use the more advanced features, seeing them, and realising they don’t know what to do with them undermines the simplicity and usability elsewhere – I think people should very quickly feel at home with all the functionality, and not feel that only a subset of it is appropriate for them: by implication those users feel, well, a bit like f*ckwits, and that’s not what we want to say. We want to say ‘this is easy’ and we want people to think ’this is brilliant, I can do this’. There are other tools for more advanced users.

What is display text? This is another one that we need to have a think about: I’m not sure what it does having just played around with it for a few minutes. If I don’t know what something does after playing around with it for a few minutes, neither will a great many other people. Remember the mantra.

Can everyone play around with the connectors and can we have some debate about this please?



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This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it.   Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment.  Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.

This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment
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