Changes

Recoverability is fundamental to encouraging exploration.  With creative exploration among OLPC's main goals, it therefore becomes an issue of high importance on the laptops.  When a child knows they have a fallback plan — a way back to the current state of things — she will much more frequently go beyond her comfortable boundaries and experiment with new tools and new creative means of expression.

Recoverability is fundamental to encouraging exploration.  With creative exploration among OLPC's main goals, it therefore becomes an issue of high importance on the laptops.  When a child knows they have a fallback plan — a way back to the current state of things — she will much more frequently go beyond her comfortable boundaries and experiment with new tools and new creative means of expression.

The [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience#The_Journal|journal]] provides a partial notion of recoverability, since its auto-journaling amounts to maintaining an automatic incremental backup. The ability for a child to choose to "keep" anything she's working on in its current state furthers this idea.

The [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The_Journal|journal]] provides a partial notion of recoverability, since its auto-journaling amounts to maintaining an automatic incremental backup. The ability for a child to choose to "keep" anything she's working on in its current state furthers this idea.

However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions.  Of course, the notion of undo/redo becomes complicated in the realm of collaborative editing, which imposes a limitation on the extent to which undos are possible, since collisions between the things one child wants to undo and the things another child has already changed since they were done occur often.  Nonetheless, we are dedicated to providing this functionality to every extent possible, and [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/Activities|activities]] should strive to support this to the best of their ability.

However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions.  Of course, the notion of undo/redo becomes complicated in the realm of collaborative editing, which imposes a limitation on the extent to which undos are possible, since collisions between the things one child wants to undo and the things another child has already changed since they were done occur often.  Nonetheless, we are dedicated to providing this functionality to every extent possible, and [[OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/Activities|activities]] should strive to support this to the best of their ability.