Sugar Network/Concept
Summary
The Sugar Network is an initiative to try to leverage collaborative, contributing, and learning behaviour in Sugar Learning Platform. It is started as the only possible option for connectivity-less Sugar deployments (but it is also being targeted to the Internet driven environments) and Peru in particular.
The intentions might be explained by the Needs that Sugar Network is trying to solve.
The particular implementation is tailored by the following points:
- Support Internet-less environments (but not only);
- Support decentralized collaboration model on social level, i.e., not only for low level technical implementation details;
- Not trying to reinvent the Internet by duplicating all services available there making them off-line;
- The list of provided, within the Sugar Network, services should be tough and minimal to make it useful after going on-line and reusing various Internet services.
Overview
The Sugar Network is all about:
Players
These are real people that take part in the Sugar Network.
Objects
The whole experience within the Sugar Network is about interacting with the following objects:
(?):
- generalize tracker to support Q&A workflowf
- groups of Players (friends zoom)
Players
Attributes: Actions: Events:
Projects
Attributes:
- Type:
- General,
- Activity,
- Wiki,
- Tracker.
- Discussion,
- Gallery
- Visibility:
- Everyone
- A group of Players
- Private
Actions: Events:
Wiki
A collection of Wiki pages that use MediaWiki markup language, wikitext. Pages might be represented by a tree of pages. There is all time the root page. The idea to have a root page is to let it possible to merge these wiki pages to the standalone MediaWiki server. It might provide similar functionality to Google Sites.
Attributes: Actions: Events:
Wiki page
Attributes:
- Visibility:
- Everyone
- A group of Players
- Private
Actions: Events:
Tracker
There are two types of entries:
Attributes: Actions: Events:
Requests
Attributes:
- Visibility:
- Everyone
- A group of Players
- Private
Actions: Events:
Tasks
Attributes:
- Visibility:
- Everyone
- A group of Players
- Private
Actions: Events:
Gallery
A collection of activity objects of types depended on Project type.
Attributes: Actions: Events:
Exhibit
Attributes:
- Visibility:
- Everyone
- A group of Players
- Private
Actions: Events:
Discussion
Experience
Players' experience might be represented by statistics that will be visible (maybe partially) for another Players and might be used by researchers.
Roles
These are roles, not the definition of particular people. Each person can play different roles in different time.
Student
Teacher
Project Contributor
Project Coordinator
Needs
The needs that Sugar Network is trying to solve. They might be explained by the following selection from the Fundamental human needs:
| Need | Being (qualities) |
Having (things) |
Doing (actions) |
Interacting (settings) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding | critical capacity, curiosity, intuition | literature, teachers, policies, educational | analyse, study, investigate, | schools, families, communities, |
| Participation | receptiveness, dedication, sense of humour | responsibilities, duties, work, rights | cooperate, dissent, express opinions | associations, parties, churches, neighbourhoods |
| Leisure | imagination, tranquillity, spontaneity | games, parties, peace of mind | day-dream, remember, relax, have fun | landscapes, intimate spaces, places to be alone |
| Creation | imagination, boldness, inventiveness, curiosity | abilities, skills, work, techniques | invent, build, design, work, compose, interpret | spaces for expression, workshops, audiences |
| Identity | sense of belonging, self-esteem, consistency | language, religions, work, customs, values, norms | get to know oneself, grow, commit oneself | places one belongs to, everyday settings |
| Freedom | autonomy, passion, self-esteem, open-mindedness | equal rights | dissent, choose, run risks, develop awareness | anywhere |
Identity
Each player should be able to create and manage a unique identity in the network. Every interaction of the player with the network should be accounted on the player's metrics, as eventually this may be part of the player dashboard. Each player may have an individual reputation, according to other players ratings made to his contributions.
Understanding
A player should be able to view all objects and apply the optional filters including the resource type, the visibility level, tags or the associated player/team. In this preview, we may be able to offer basic statistics of the object in order to give analytical perspective to the selection. The player should be able to select the object in order to participate in a deeper level where he should be able to explore the associated resources. As a player, I might receive events from the objects I'm subscribed to as well as personal events like invitations made by other players.
Participation
Any player might be able to comment any object, rate any contribution, edit any wiki, create any issue, attach any object to any gallery, become a follower of any object.
Creation
Any player might be able to create a new project by defining a name, the type of project and the project objective(s). A project creator may be able to invite other players to follow/contribute to his project.
Freedom
Once an object have been selected by the player, he should be able to filter any type of contributions according to its ratings.
Workflows
These are kinds of workflows that Roles can take part in. The particular activity might involve several Players and several Roles.
Users Interface
From users point of view, The Sugar Network is represented by several kinds views:
Browser
- A way to expose additional metadata about currently selected item.
Project home
- The top of participants
- View for particular Project resource, Wiki, Tracker, Gallery, etc.
Technical Overview
The Sugar Network consists of different types of parts:
- Client application that runs in Sugar learning environment on machines of people who take part in the Sugar Network;
- Server that runs either in the Internet (if connectivity is not a problem for clients) or on a school server (that is being synchronized with the Internet, thus, with the rest of school servers).
The Sugar Network supports Internet and Internet-less environments. In both cases, the participant's experience is the same. The only difference is the amount of time when all contributors will see the same picture, in case of the Internet, it will happen in live mode, for Internet-less cases, after synchronizing all school servers.
The particular technical implementation is tailored by the following decisions:
- Using Web technologies to implement the front end;
- Keep front end as a local Web application on a client side, it sounds converse regarding the #1 decision but this decision is based on #4 and #5;
- Front end is implemented as a Falsk application using WebSDK to accomplish the #4 and #5;
- Local Web application serve only one user and are much simpler than singular applications that are intended to serve thousands of users simultaneously;
- Having simple and clean designed (see the previous point), it will be easy for doers to learn, change, reimplement the front end;
- Implementation should be decentralized to support off-line workflow.
Todo
- Class type for projects to support regular class behaviour from teachers' pov.
- Support coding workflow for projects.