[Xerte-dev] Re: Goal
Dave Burnett
d_b_burnett at hotmail.com
Thu Apr 26 11:33:36 BST 2012
I have a unique viewpoint because I've not actually looked at what's under discussion.
So I have to go by Johnathan's description:
""Display text" is the term I have used, as it made the most sense to me, for all the text contained in a page that does not need to change across multiple instances of that page type."
"does not need to change across multiple instances of that page"That sounds like something that is persistent to me.
At any rate, my original observation holds."Display" has too many disparate meanings to be intuitive.
Dave
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:25:56 +0200
From: reijnders at tor.nl
To: xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Goal
Persisted? I am either totally confused now, or my grasp of the
English language is failing me (I am still confused).
If I understand things correctly with the Display Text node you can
change the button labels used for example in the quiz. These used to
be hard coded in the model, and now can be changed by the user.
That, in my mind, bears no connection to 'Persist' where I would
expect the END user, the learner to change something and that is
remembered/persisted for the next time the LO is visited.
Tom
Op 26-4-2012 12:16, Dave Burnett schreef:
To me it would lack intuitiveness because "display" has so
many context sensitive meanings.
"Persisted" text would spell it out for me.
:-)
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:59:42 +0100
From: johnathan.kemp at ntlworld.com
To: xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Goal
The 'displaytext' child really
confused me: I had no idea what to do with it, and I know
that for some people, that will be very off putting, so
it's remembering the FWS mantra
I think that we are all working
towards the same end - that of enhancing XOT and Xerte
whilst keeping the users on board and happy.
Recent events, like Fay's comment
regarding some documentation for the Interactive Diagram
(customHotspot) page, Julian's experience with the "display
text" child, and my own experiences in coming to grips with
the Interactive Diagram page (if my memory is correct I
think Julian told me how to use it in a response to my
posting to the mail shortly after it first came out ) and
the Mapstraction and JMOL pages which I have never got to
work, have lead me to re-think the problem. I can't help
feeling that "keep it simple" is not the problem, but rather
an attempt at a solution to an unstated problem. I think the
underlying problem is about "keeping it intuitive".
In general something that is
simple ought also to result in it being intuitive. But the
Interactive Diagram page is demonstrably counter intuitive,
though very simple to use. This is not meant as a criticism.
The specific context of XOT, where there are multiple
examples of pages that work by adding elements to the page's
structure in the project tree e.g. adding a question to a
quiz; adding an option to a question; adding a hotspot in
the Hotspot Image page; creates for the user a model of how
things work. Intuition then expects other pages to work in a
similar way. It comes as a surprise then when a page that
clearly is about adding hotspots offers no feature in the
wizard to add a hotspot (it's all done by editing the
drawing). This does not make the page a bad, poor or
inappropriate page. It's a damn good page. It is also easy
to use, but only after you understand how it works.
The "display text" child is
simplicity itself. It is entirely consistent with other
Xerte pages in that it is presented in the wizard as a child
item and added just like any other child item. The problem
appears to be that for Julian it just did not make any sense
- "I had no idea what to do with it". Many other pages have
a new language check box in the wizard. No one has had a
problem yet with them, probably because they haven't noticed
it or have ignored it. But it is just another way of dealing
with the same issue.
"Display text" is the term I have
used, as it made the most sense to me, for all the text
contained in a page that does not need to change across
multiple instances of that page type. It is the label on a
button, the phrase "question 1 of 8" etc. All this text used
to reside in the code of the model file. But to enable XOT
to be translated into different languages it had to come out
of the model file. It could have been hidden inside the xwd
file with no option to edit it, but at the time of the
discussions around how internationalisation would be handled
Inge raised the idea that the ability to edit it could be
useful. You could change it to suit your audience or to
introduce a bit of variety. One quiz page might say "Well
done you have completed the quiz", whilst the next might say
"Good job!" for example.
So the current situation is that
many of the original XOT pages have some "display text". For
most pages it is hidden in the top level form under the
language check box. What concerned me about this approach
was if there was a lot of display text. Since the display
text will not be changed by most authors I wanted to keep it
separate, rather than to make the top level form excessively
long. For me it was a logical separation of different types
of data.
With the existing pages the
display text presented a problem of backward compatibility
with pre-existing XOT projects. The ultimate example of this
is the Quiz page. To ensure that the new model would work
with existing page data I had to keep a default set of
display text values in the model as existing pages would not
be able to automatically collect the new display text data
from the xwd file. To ensure that authors in languages other
than English did not see English values in their page I had
to add the display text values to the "new nodes" definition
for the page. To make the display text editable in the xwd
form without cluttering up the page's main form, I added a
"display text" child.
Since all the new pages - the
Connector pages and the Inventory page will have no issues
of legacy pages in existing projects I kept things simple
and just added the child element "Display text".
So what do we do about display
text?
We could
Remove the "display text" child elements and put the
display text fields in the top level form flagged as
"language" - people still won't know what to do with it,
but they will probably miss seeing it anyway.
Keep the "display text" child but add a hidden copy of
the same data in the page's new nodes entry, so that the
page works without adding the "display text" child.
Leave things as they are and let people know in the new
release that they now have access to the text that used to
be built into the model files, if they want to change it,
but otherwise they can leave it as it is. It is a feature
of the new release.
You know my preference as it is already implemented. For
me the issue of "display text" is an example of a wider
issue. There will be times when the purpose or usage of a
feature of a page, or even the whole page, will not
intuitive to some users. There is a way of adding a pdf file
to a project, resulting in a help button displaying on the
main navigation. If you had a new folder e.g. pageDocs, that
operated like the "thumbs" folder, you could add a pdf file
for a page that explained the purpose of the page, the
various elements and the fields in those elements to the
user. One entry in the xwd file could identify the form, in
the same way that the thumbs file is identified.
Different people have different understandings of how
things are, leading to different intuitions as to how
something should operate. By being able to provide an
explanation of how a page works we can keep people on board
even when the XOT reality is an imperfect match for their
expectations. It also opens up the opportunity to make more
complex pages FWS.
Kind regards
Johnathan
On 25 April 2012 17:38, Julian
Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:
OK, I think I'm being
persuaded.
We need to arrive at a consensus around the new stuff.
Maybe 'advanced' is a better section name for the
connectors than 'connectors', or maybe it's just a case
of think about automating some of the stuff that is
correctly configured by the form. The 'displaytext'
child really confused me: I had no idea what to do with
it, and I know that for some people, that will be very
off putting, so it's remembering the FWS mantra, and
trying to apply the predictable consistent usability
stuff to make it as simple and straightforward as
possible. Documentation and examples will be useful as
well.
-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk]
On Behalf Of Tom Reijnders
Sent: 25 April 2012 10:53
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Goal
Yes, I think we did. The only thing missing at the
moment, and I am
working on that is a button in the management.php of
XOT to
add/replace a page in one of the templates.
But, that was NOT the only reason to do this in my
opinion. Now all
the model files are the same whether they are used
in XOT or the Xerte
pagetemplates or as pageWizard, and we can translate
them and maintain
them....
Having done all this, we now have the OPTION (not
obligation) to add
the models Johnathan created to XOT (We don't have
to, and a user can
do that him/herself through the management page.)
Also we still can create an visual clue that some of
the pages require
a better understanding of the whol rpoject than just
fill in the blanks.
The users we spoke top so far are VERY enthousistic
by all the
possibillities they now get from XOT and had to do
in Xerte firts.
Also, and that was part of the goal as well, it is
now easier for a
person not in the core team to create models and be
able to
maintain/translate them without redoing all the
tedious editing/adding
them to the general xwd's etc....
Tom
Citeren Julian Tenney <Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk>:
> Have we achieved the goal we set out to of
making it easier to build
> / manage a collection of models for an
administrator wanting to
> adding his own models? This was one of Ron's
requests: has it been
> achieved?
>
> In other words, with the tools that Tom and
Jonathan have built, is
> it easier for you to create the xwd of your
choice, or was it easier
> when you just had to copy sections of an xwd in
a text editor?
>
> A serious question.
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