Re: [Webreports-developers] Re: Webreports technical implementation subgroup

[Ken K. <ke...@to...>]

First I think it seems like too much time is spent on the aesthetics of
their reports because we are expecting them to generate the report in a
very short amount of time. I think it is important for children to have
pride in their documents - both content and form. When we write papers
we pay attention to aesthetics - the only reason for discouraging
children from doing the same is that they have so little time to work on
generating reports.

I can imagine an even more minimal WYSIWYG editor than Yishay suggested.
How important are headings and tables? Maybe even lists aren't so
important. Headings, tables, lists, etc. are semantic categories and
they overlap heavily with font size, bold/italic, and position. If you
want a header then just center some text and use big and bold. If you
want a table then just use space or tabs - who needs those lines? My
minimal editor would support links, inserting objects (pictures,
applets, etc), and font control. Not much more. I think the editor
Julian showed wasn't much more than this - was it?

On the other hand if the kids really have so little time then maybe
Jakob is right and they should just fill in some form to get a web
report.

Best,

-ken

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yishay Mor" <y....@io...>
To: "Jakob Tholander" <ja...@ds...>
Cc: <web...@li...>;
<web...@li...>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 12:00 PM
Subject: [Webreports-developers] Re: Webreports technical implementation
subgroup


> I absolutely agree. (both with the content, and with the
classification,
> which is why I added the design group to the addressies)
>
> On our 1st attempt at having kids write a report we used MS word.
Kids
> spent most of the time selecting background colours, fonts, etc. Not
> that styling and personalization is not important, but it should go
only
> so far as it is not counter-productive.  I don't know where that point
> is, but IMHO the basic wikimarkup options are more or less what we
> want.  If we had a WYSIWYG editor, it should only go as far as that.
> i.e., 3-4 levels of headings, lists, links tables and embedding media.
>
> - Yishay
>
> Jakob Tholander wrote:
>
> > Actually I think that a WISYWIG editor could have the same effects
as
> > a script-like editing, i.e. spending too much time on the actual
> > editing (how to  make their reports look nice) rather than
supporting
> > the kids in thinking about the content of what they are reporting.
> > What I believe the kids will need is some kind of structured support
> > (in the form of dialogues or templates) for creating their reports
> > and  we really should draw on the quite extensive CSCL research from
> > CSILE/Knowledge Forum people on this kind of scaffolding.
> >
> > Of course this is primarily an issue for the "design group" but I
will
> > definitely not be able to stay out of the discussion ;-)
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Jakob
> >
> >
> > At 15:48 2003-09-17 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> >> What R & C wanted was a WYSIWYG editor, which could be overlaid on
> >> top of the Wiki.  I think it was agreed that anything other than
> >> developing on top of JSPWiki would be too resource demanding.
You'd
> >> have to build all the engines from scratch, which are 10 times more
> >> complicated than the interface.
> >
> **********************************************************************
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