Talk:Bundle concepts

Mel's comments

disclaimer: I may be out of the loop on certain things, so please direct me towards old mailing list threads, wikipages, etc. if there's something I should be reading to get more context. Mchua 12:52, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

I like the first ideas, to explicitly share the activity sessions, and then (1) give the individual kids the option to store that session as part of their personal journal, along with their own copies of the files involved, and (2) have individual children be able to mark items in their Journals as publicly shareable/browsable, and "share bundles" entirely through collaborative Journal viewing, whatever that turns out to be like. Basically, the Journal entry is the bundle, no need to make a separate "bundle format." Reasons:

• It seems most analogous to what I'd do in a classroom without computers - sharing a file with someone is part of working with them; by giving you a picture I drew, I'm including you in my activity of Drawing. Don't want to create yet another abstraction layer of having to think about bundling.
• Preserve separation between the idea of webservers & sharing files (I have a file on my laptop, I want to share it with yours) and the idea of a collaborative Browse activity (the two of us are looking at a website - probably an external one hosted on neither of our laptops - together).
• Uses Journals (which, according to Journal are archived on the school server) as the only mechanism for sharing content created in the past (meaning that sharing content is still done by sharing an activity on the mesh - it's just that the activity is now the Journal rather than, say, Write.)
  • Would "XO webservers" appear as shared Journals on the mesh? (Presumably, putting something into your XO webserver would be an event that would trigger a Journal entry anyway, right?)
  • As a sidenote: the Journal page is pretty sparse on the topic of filesharing - (actually, the content consists of a bullet point with the word "Sharing?") - is there a place I can get more info on Journal status? I'd like to update the page.

Quasirelated sidenote: Flatland has interesting ideas about an interface kids could use to share things, although it's not about bundling per se.

C-Scott's comments

I agree with Mel, I think. Why do there need to be so many different ways to do the same things? In both your use cases, there's a way to do the thing without an explicit bundle. Let's keep it that way!

Bundling & Journal & library

Cscott's comment made me think of something - there should be a way to automatically and easily turn a Journal entry (or entries) into an .xol bundle (or basically, to include it in the library, if the file format is amenable to such). This would mean...

• Sharing in the short term between local users who are likely to keep creating stuff would be done via the Journal (shared Journal activity, or shared activities in general, over the mesh). Analogy: having a little scribble-pad notebook I carry around with me and get my buddies in town to help me draw things inside.
• Sharing in the long term, once something is no longer actively being worked on locally, and to kids and places beyond the mesh - for instance, pushing it out to the global library server & websites beyond, as opposed to sharing it with Maria across the hall - would take place via uploading/downloading library bundles. Analogy: publishing a polished book of my sketches, downloading nice sketchbooks that other artists have created.

Not sure what the interaction between the library and the journal is, in general. I think this is the most relevant area for the bundling discussion to focus on, as the library-journal interface is also the interface between "global" and "personal" content, and between "semi-static/completed" and "under construction/still-being-played-with" content. Trying to find trac tickets on this subject and coming up empty-handed... is this an area with work to be done?

I don't think I have specific tickets on this to move into Trac, yet, but I could probably make some up soon, after a little more discussion and figuring out what's happening on both the library side (Lauren?) and the journal side (Eben?).

Mchua 13:42, 21 August 2007 (EDT)