Activities/Info Slicer: Difference between revisions

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 as a Sugar library package (.xol file) which automatically gets picked up by the Browse activity on the same laptop and added to the offline content available. The .xol file is also available in the Journal so that the user can copy it to a USB stick for sharing on other laptops or uploading to a server.

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.