Adapt Learning Community: Adapt Framework and tool "Mental Map"

I'm just sitting here in the warm, it is 8 degrees C outside and I've quit my day job for the week and will give some time to Adapt.

I feel like I am in some sort of role play. There are little hidden clues about how Adapt works, but they are scattered through a large number of places often in code with hidden nuances. There are some poor souls walking around near you in their small pools of light (no pun intended). There are others who have scaled to great heights and their work is enviable.

I've just had a PM to say there is a Glitter chat, which I have tracked down. https://gitter.im/orgs/adaptlearning/rooms Maybe the missing people are there? This is the first time I have heard the word Glitter. A search of the forums turns up zitch.

There now seem to be 5 flavours of Adapt, according to my mental model:

Hosted Paid Builder
Hosted Free builder
Framework: Vagrant
Framework: non Vagrant
Self installed Builder

I suspect here have people often posting at cross purposes, and it is hard to know who you are talking to because there is no decent profile. which adds to the fragmentary nature of the whispers in the dark and talking in an echo chamber. it is hard sometimes to know who is on Adapt staff and who is not.

I do appreciate the honesty of the instructions ("it is hard to install properly without knowledge of the under the hood special arts")

In an open source world I am used to some sort of wiki where I can add my bits, and see what others are doing; here the knowledge map is a little more dispersed and has some ambiguities in it. Key information is scattered through the forums here.

Be that as it may: I hope to make progress on Project with Adapt numero uno; my mental map or Adapt and the flavours is building - I have a PM from Brian with a suggestion of how to solve my menu problem. YeaHHH!!

It's Friday afternoon here. In whatever time zone you are in, enjoy the last bit of work before the weekend.

-Derek

Hi Derek

8°C isn't exactly what I'd call 'warm' but each to their own!

I suspect you're not finding any references to 'glitter chat' in the forums because it's actually called 'gitter chat' ;-)

You don't need Vagrant for the Framework. Vagrant install is for the authoring tool.

There aren't really any 'Adapt staff' - to the best of my knowledge only one person works full time on the project. You can see a list of official collaborators on the project here. The people on that list do what they can around other work, which is why it can all be a bit stop-start - and why the documentation is a bit lacking ;-) Any help you can give on that front would be gratefully received I'm sure!

I do agree with your comment about the lack of into on the profiles here on the community site, I'll pass that on.

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Hi Derek,

Seeing as you mention the term mental map, I was reminded of some of the early vision work we did with the project team. This looked at breaking down the Framework and Authoring Tool functionality into its component parts. It's perhaps a little out of date now but still applies. Please see the links below for interest:

I hope these are of interest and helpful in building an overview of what Adapt is trying to achieve.

Thanks,
Sven

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Welcome to Adapt!

Have you had a look around the community site? There's quite a bit of info on there -- mostly geared towards introducing people to the project.

You can either go here: https://www.adaptlearning.org/

or alternatively, the nav bar at the top of this page is the same as that found on the community site, so you can get to al the same pages from right here.

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Thanks Tom and Matt. yes, Gitter it is, I think I had the wrong glasses on. I've been in and had a read in all the Gitter chats. Tom, yes, I think I have read everything. I may be wrong of course.

This post is a slightly different comment: workflows and using the tool. As has been said all over the place by those who have used the tool, very very nice.

I've now tried a few more components. Narrative, Accordian, Text and media etc. I've experimented with left, right and full blocks. (I think this is the correct word) Got video|youtube to work. In this respect, nice demo videos and courses here, and quite quick to learn.

Loving the drag and drop of the elements on the screen, the number of places to add text: titles, body etc. I went through a few pages initially and just duplicated the text in the descriptors so I could see what turned up where.

I have gone back and re-crafted a word document of content, and figured out about the right amount of text for the various chunks. I think I am sensitive to the balance between the amount of text in the headings and panes and the body etc in some of the examples I've seen. Some things look a little better than others, and tinkering with the amount of text seems to help. And it is really easy to do this; but if you don't, it seems really quite forgiving and looks pretty good anyways. I'm wondering if I can get a few styles for a Word document to lay it out there and at least vaguely reflect the area taken up on the screen in a component. Maybe I'll find using this on different devices means this is wasted effort, but I'm not really worried.

What I am looking for is a workflow to best plan and assemble material for deployment and how best to figure out what combination of components suit on a given page.

If someone is starting out I'd recommend the first four components to try would be narrative, accordion, text and media. Get your tagging sorted out in the assert manager right from the start. If you are impatient, try to resist this tendency and plan some text in chunks and get the assets uploaded first.

I have yet to dabble in the "Alternative" configurations seen in the video here: https://community.adaptlearning.org/demo2/index.html Tomorrow maybe.

Things seem pretty good in the preview, and this is all with no attention to CSS, theming, colours, or menus. It seems to have chosen some pretty nice colours all on it's own.

I have a friend who says 30 minutes to get up and running with Vagrant, and I may try this sometime. Although I do know this is not supposed to be for production use.

I have one tiny course I am doing this for. 2 Credits on the framework here in NZ, and we will offer it for free to help some of our students complete some quals in the volunteer sector.

That's it for now.

-Derek

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