Hi,
What is the purpose of help? In Windows, help is a method to find out
how to accomplish a particular task using an application. It is not a
means to learn how to use the computer or Windows.
The Help activity is a specialized reader for the Floss (pdf) manuals.
Unfortunately, the text in the Floss manuals was written for experienced
computer users who were new to the XO and the Sugar.
I believe we need a Sugar activity to introduce the XO and Sugar to
those who have no prior computing experience. Further, we need to use
the 'learn to learn' approach we advocate for the XO, i.e. these
materials should be designed for experimentation (trial and error) and
collaborative learning. The beauty of the computer is that it provides
instant feedback on whether you did something 'right' or not.
I also believe that use of screenshots, screencasts and icons can reduce
the dependency of these materials on text. Another underutilized tool is
audio. If the text instructions were spoken, any deployment would be
able to provide the same instructions in the native language (the skill
needed would be a speaker of the native language who also knows
English). Incidentally, in deployments where English is a medium of
instruction, using both versions can help children learn English.
Tony
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:05:08 -0300
> From: Gonzalo Odiard <gonz...@laptop.org>
> To: "S. Daniel Francis" <fran...@sugarlabs.org>
> Cc: Sugar-dev Devel <sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Purpose for Help Activity
> Message-ID:
> <caj+ipvrgke8qenkjc3dqv8dufybjczesdtg8qvrxv8hzfqv...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Help issues are known and we need solve it,
> but I don't agree with the proposed solution.
>
> The style can be changed with css, that is not a problem.
>
> The biggest problem we have today, is found people to write the help.
> If we impose to a potential writer the work of learn docbook,
> will be worst. And writing a docbook editor is not a trivial task.
>
> About having help content inside the activities,
> probably is a good idea. We need think about:
> * how enable the translation of that content (and how much disk space
> will use if we have all the translations inside the activity)
> * where put the content related to sugar (not activities)
>
> Gonzalo
>
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 10:03 PM, S. Daniel Francis
> <fran...@sugarlabs.org>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Looking at the Help activity, I see the following issues:
>> - It looks very orange. A more integrated style is needed.
>> - Activities should be documented independently of the help activity.
>>
>> (Not very related with my purpose but important for deploy a solution)
>> - The documentation needs to be updated and Gonzalo told me about
>> there were efforts to update it. ?Where are them?
>>
>> Now I purpose some solutions:
>> - Using docbook.
>> Docbook is used by the GNOME documentation team and can be styled
>> easily with CSS.
>> - Save the documentation in each activity.
>> With that way, Help could scan each activity for documentation, that
>> documentation could depend of the installed version of each activity.
>> And documentation for non-core activities could be seen from the Help
>> activity.
>>
>> Knowing that the Help isn't up to date, I only migrated the first
>> chapter for give you a preview of my purpose.
>>
>> A screenshot:
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Help-docbook-purpose.png
>>
>> On the git repository:
>> http://git.sugarlabs.org/~danielf/help/help-docbook
>>
>> For generate the HTML files I used the following command: (Already
>> generated in the repository)
>> $ yelp-build html -o ./help/ sources.xml
>>
>> Warm regards,
>> Daniel Francis.
>>
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