Activities/Info Slicer

InfoSlicer: an overview

InfoSlicer is a tool for aggregating content off the internet, rearranging and creating new content, and publishing this content. The basic element of InfoSlicer is an article. This can correspond to anything. A page from Wikipedia. A news article. A story taken off the web. Any content which can be displayed online could be represented as an article. The prototype version of InfoSlicer uses Wikipedia as its article source.

The tool gives users the option of downloading articles from Wikipedia. There are then a number of stages where users can slice content from these articles into their own articles. They can format the article and insert images. Articles can then be arranged into themes. A theme is a collection of articles all based around the same topic. For example, a theme entitled “Animals” could contain articles on “Lion”, “Tiger”, “Giraffe” etc.

Once the user has created their own content and arranged it into themes, they can publish this content. Depending on the platform, this has a different effect. The prototype version of InfoSlicer runs on three platforms; Windows, Linux and the Sugar interface.

In Windows and Linux, the user can publish articles to a zip file. The zip file contains a mini, self-contained encyclopaedia which can be viewed in any browser.

The Sugar interface is the GUI for the One-Laptop-Per-Child laptops. It has a very distinct look and feel, and some peculiar style guidelines. When the user is running the Sugar environment, publishing creates an entry in the sugar Journal, and adds a “Book” to the browser application.

You can download the current version (1) here.

A File:Infoslicer-tutorial.pdf is available here.

Future directions

Here are some of the ideas we had for features that would make InfoSlicer better.

Content sources

For testing purposes, we have been using MediaWiki-based websites as our primary data source. This has been useful because it reduces licencing issues and presents data in a uniform format. However, particularly in more developed countries, there are already established teaching resources websites which teachers would prefer to use as their primary data source. As such, the tool could be extended to take from these sources.

Similarly, teachers already possess and distribute materials in other data formats such as PDF and Word documents. The tool could also be extended to process these data formats.

If the generic HTML parser could be improved, it would be useful to provide browser integration whereby teachers could perform a 1-click download using a plug-in to their favourite browser. The plug-in would automatically process and store the data ready for off-line use in the application.

Adding images from the Journal

You can include any of the images in the downloaded Wikipedia pages in the articles you create. It would be handy to be able to pull in images from your own library (i.e. the Journal, in the Sugar environment).

Language

Given the variation in the number of articles available in the different language Wikipedia sites, providing automatic translation into the teacher's language would greatly increase the range of data available. For example, the Afrikaans Wikipedia has around 10,000 articles, whereas the English Wikipedia has around 2,500,000 articles.

Thesaurus and spell-check

It would also be useful to incorporate a thesaurus to make it easier for teachers to substitute complex language with words more suited to the children’s level. Spell-checking is also an obvious inclusion that would be welcomed.

Content distribution

At the moment, the tool does not utilise the mesh networking available on the One Laptop Per Child laptops. This would be an easy and effective way of distributing the teachers' content in a peer-to-peer fashion, without relying on other devices such as USB sticks, school servers, or web sites.

Collaboration

The application could be enhanced with the use of collaboration tools such as comment posting, in order to allow students to share their thoughts and views on the published material. This could also allow teachers to collaborate on content both on a local network and on the internet as a whole.

Deleting Files when no longer required by the user

Deleting downloaded image files presents a problem, as they may be referenced by several user-generated articles. As such it is not feasible in the current implementation to remove images and guarantee link integrity. In future versions of the application, this could be solved by implementing more advanced data tracking tools.

Attribution

Currently the article meta-model includes meta data about the source of the content that is used in an article, even as you cut-and-paste and chop and change. However, this attribution does not appear in the published articles. This would be an enhancement to the publishing part of the application, and could either be done as footnotes in the articles, or as a separate HTML page in the .xol, which would be distributed with the package and can be linked-to from the articles.

Interaction with the Library

The Library has no real precedent in the Sugar environment and feedback from users suggested that that part of the application would benefit from some re-design work to make it more intuitive.