Another Area For Document Development

[Wilhelm Sanke]

In reply to the post of Dave Calkins <davecalk at surfbest.net> on Mon, 7 
Apr 2003:

Hello Dave,

found your detailed replies to my lengthy post - if only under subject 
"use-revolution Digest" and quoting me as 
"use-revolution at lists.runrev.com". Although I sympathize with Revolution 
from a critical distance and defended the documentation as the better 
part of the IDE, I naturally still feel as a person as distinct from and 
surely not in total symbiosis with Revolution.

I had written in my post "This does not mean that I would not agree with 
you on some of your proposals."  and I had also expressed the 
expectation that the Rev team were in a state of mind to accept the 
direction of your proposals.

Part of the discussion following your first post dealt with sample 
stacks, an aspect I certainly had neglected in my reply.

Actually, we make ample use of tutorials and sample stacks in our 
courses, i.e. in our multimedia workshops at our university which are 
open for students from all departments, the majority of enrolling 
students coming from informatics/economy and social sciences. The 
tutorials and sample stacks are adapted to the presumed needs of these 
students, part of which have only the minimum requirement of feeling at 
least familiar with a text processing application, others may come with 
some knowledge of Powerpoint, Visual Basic, Javascript, HTML etc.

This means we need to design our own samples especially directed at this 
audience. There are three places in the course where sample stacks are 
used as additional material:

At the beginning we show sample stacks to motivate and give an idea of 
what can be achieved with Metacard/Revolution. Some of the stacks we use 
at this point are examples developed by students in earlier courses.

Then, accompanying the first assignments, a number of sample stacks are 
introduced (or made accessible for free use) that cover basic principles 
and illustrate simpler tasks - like modification of textchunks, changing 
object properties, animated icons, using backgrounds and menus, adding 
pop-up annotations with the help of a glossary card, developing a simple 
word (vocabulary) trainer, matching and drag-and-drop exercises, using 
polygons over images to create sensitive areas, using and combining 
visual effects, using modal dialogs, cursors and graphic buttons, read 
from and write to external files, connect to the net and download stacks 
etc.

The last category are sample stacks that are geared nearer to the field 
of study or interest of the individual student, as each student has to 
complete a project from his special field until the end of the semester 
or shortly after that. The students develop their specific ideas which 
are assessed in group or personal discussions about which seems feasible 
- according to the individual level of competence and the possibilities 
of the xtalk language. At this stage we offer proposals for design and 
algorithms, may produce sample scripts and small stacks showing a 
possible direction of development, snippets of code and stacks they can 
exploit and further develop or integrate into their final product.-

What you probably have in mind are sample stacks and tutorials from 
category two. As complements of the documentation they would indeed be 
helpful and they may be urgently needed by persons learning on their 
own. The task remains to determine which "basics" really need to be 
covered and how and by whom they could be collected or produced. I 
think, as a first basic collection we need about 30 sample stacks?

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke