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Activity for Oct 21: Collaboration and the Scratch website
Submitted by kbrennan on October 7, 2009 - 5:40pm.
For this week's activity, you were asked to find three examples of how the Scratch website is designed to support collaboration.
In class, we'll be discussing our experiences with this activity. For each example, we will discuss: (1) how it fosters and encourages collaborations, (2) what are the limitations, (3) how it could be extended or enhanced. What new features could further enhance collaboration on the Scratch website?
- Login to post comments
- Sign up as a team (like a Facebook group)
- Craigslist-like solicitation forum (I'm looking for animator to do...)
- Share units other than projects (a.k.a the "function logger", sharing code excerpts or sprites)
- Explicitly leverage adult or experienced Scratcher contributions (like through mentoring)
- Get Scratch out of Scratch (like having Scratch projects appear elsewhere)
- Real-time collaborative workspace with chat and history (text, video, audio)
- Tip of the week
- Who's currently online for real-time advice
- Chat
- Aardvark-like service where people sign up as knowing certain things (http://vark.com/)
- Restrict access to galleries (private to only a certain group of people while work is in progress), with recorded transcripts
- Code repositories to check work in and out (like svn)
- Color-coded comments to track who contributed what
- Different forms of attribution and credit (like being able to list more than one author)
Here are my notes:
1. How it fosters and encourages collaborations
2. What are the limitations
3. how could it be extended
1. The ability to upload a project, other can download it and
modify and then upload it to their gallery.
-- This encourages collaboration by allowing others to
learn, modify and build upon the work of others
-- It lacks version management, the ability to diff, and
the ability to merge.
-- It could be improved by mimicking the features of an
application like github which is designed to manage this
problem.
2. The messaging system allows you to track comments on your projects
-- It allows you to see what others are saying
-- It lacks the ability say X new messages
-- Once the user views the message set a flag to viewed
and only show when you have new messages
3. Forums
-- Allows people to help each other, plan, ask questions,
etc...
-- A little hard perahps to discuss projects -- they're
not easily available, you need to download the program
-- Perhaps, provide a live chat? Also make it easier to
discuss projects (show projects on the side of the forum,
allow one to view code and share it