Some Proposals of Notebook Improvements

[ndomes]

Since two years I use Sage teaching Mathematics at a German secondary
School (mainly advanced classes).
I run a Sage server in our local net at school, also accessible via
DynDNS (sometimes ;-) ) see: http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/

From my experience in teaching with Sage, some suggestions to improve
the Sage Notebook:

1.
It would be nice to have groups - the students of each class joined to
one particular group.
The teacher as group member as well. He or She acts as group owner or
group manager,
The manager should have the right to add a user to or remove a user
from the group and to reset a group members password.
(A hierarchy of Admin and Managers)

2.
As it is now, I can publish a worksheet to give it read-only to my
students.
Or I can share it with all students of the class, which gives all of
them the right to change it.
I would like to have a third option:
Share a worksheet with single users or with a group(!) in a read-only-
mode.

3.
If I want to edit a published Worksheet - I follow the link "Log in
to edit a copy".
Fine - but after logging in, I have to look up the published worksheet
once again.
It would be very helpful, to keep the link to the particular
worksheet, when logging in, so that it opens automatically without
further searching.

4.
The unstructured (long) listings of worksheets are an insufficiency of
the Sage Notebook.
The implemented Searching doesn't solve the problem really.
Last year I tried to implement virtual folders, but I had not enough
time to go on with this project.
May be we can improve the worksheet listings in a less ambitious way:
Let's assign worksheets to categories
(the list of categories set and maintained by admin).
Set the category, when creating a worksheet.
Additionally to searching by keywords we could now preselect the
worksheets to be listed by choosing a category from a drop down menu.
Improvement to a two stage system of sections and categories would be
fine.
Fore example: a section 'Calculus' with categories like 'Multivariable
Calculus' an so on.

That's enough for now.

Norbert

[kcrisman]

On Jun 11, 9:58 am, ndomes <n.do...@kahani.ks.shuttle.de> wrote:
> Since two years I use Sage teaching Mathematics at a German secondary
> School (mainly advanced classes).
> I run a Sage server in our local net at school, also accessible via
> DynDNS (sometimes ;-) )  see:http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/
>
> From my experience in teaching with Sage, some suggestions to improve
> the Sage Notebook:
>

> 2.
> As it is now, I can publish a worksheet to give it read-only to my
> students.
> Or I can share it with all students of the class, which gives all of
> them the right to change it.
> I would like to have a third option:
> Share a worksheet with single users or with a group(!) in a read-only-
> mode.

So you are saying you'd like an option to publish only to certain
people, essentially?

> 3.
> If I want to edit a published Worksheet -  I follow the link "Log in
> to edit a copy".
> Fine - but after logging in, I have to look up the published worksheet
> once again.
> It would be very helpful, to keep the link to the particular
> worksheet, when logging in, so that it opens automatically without
> further searching.

+1 - that's a great idea, has always annoyed me.

> 4.
> The unstructured (long) listings of worksheets are an insufficiency of
> the Sage Notebook.
> The implemented Searching doesn't solve the problem really.
> Last year I tried to implement virtual folders, but I had not enough
> time to go on with this project.

Probably the #1 requested feature in the notebook. I've heard talk
that some people might be working on that this summer...

[slelievre]

2011/6/11 ndomes <n.d...@kahani.ks.shuttle.de>:

>
> Since two years I use Sage teaching Mathematics at a German secondary
> School (mainly advanced classes).
> I run a Sage server in our local net at school, also accessible via
> DynDNS (sometimes ;-) )  see: http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/
>
> From my experience in teaching with Sage, some suggestions to improve
> the Sage Notebook:
>
> 1.
> It would be nice to have groups - the students of each class joined to
> one particular group.
> The teacher as group member as well. He or She acts as group owner or
> group manager,
> The manager should have the right to add a user to or remove a user
> from the group and to reset a group members password.
> (A hierarchy of Admin and Managers)

Sounds like a mix of Sage and wims.
http://wims.unice.fr/
I like the idea.

> 2.
> As it is now, I can publish a worksheet to give it read-only to my
> students.
> Or I can share it with all students of the class, which gives all of
> them the right to change it.
> I would like to have a third option:
> Share a worksheet with single users or with a group(!) in a read-only-
> mode.
>
> 3.
> If I want to edit a published Worksheet -  I follow the link "Log in
> to edit a copy".
> Fine - but after logging in, I have to look up the published worksheet
> once again.
> It would be very helpful, to keep the link to the particular
> worksheet, when logging in, so that it opens automatically without
> further searching.
>
> 4.
> The unstructured (long) listings of worksheets are an insufficiency of
> the Sage Notebook.

My workaround is to have tags for each project: at the top or
bottom of each worksheet I add a text field containing tags
such as
tag:abc, tag:xyz
where "abc" or "xyz" are the tags I want to give to my worksheet.

Then when you enter
tag:abc
in the search box you'll get all worksheets tagged "tag:abc".

The "tag:" part makes sure you don't get unrelated worksheets
that would just happen to have some text or command containing
the string "abc".

Samuel

[ndomes]

On 12 Jun., 04:59, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > 4.
> > The unstructured (long) listings of worksheets are an insufficiency of
> > the Sage Notebook.
> > The implemented Searching doesn't solve the problem really.
> > Last year I tried to implement virtual folders, but I had not enough
> > time to go on with this project.
>
> Probably the #1 requested feature in the notebook.  I've heard talk
> that some people might be working on that this summer...

I have worked on that feature the last few days with some success.
Please have a look at:

http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/pub/

Select a Category and click Search Worksheets

Norbert

[kcrisman]

Exactly what did you do to implement this? Just a text search for
specific words, but added to a drop-down list? That alone would be
useful...

Hopefully someone who actually is capable of helping with this will
chime in as well :) Especially someone at the Sage *Notebook* Days...

[William Stein]

Please post a patch. Thanks!

William

>
> Norbert

--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[ndomes]

>
> Exactly what did you do to implement this?  Just a text search for
> specific words, but added to a drop-down list?  That alone would be
> useful...
>
> Hopefully someone who actually is capable of helping with this will
> chime in as well :)  Especially someone at the Sage *Notebook* Days...

It is more than an additional text search. The drop-down list is part
of the search form - so long yoe are right, but it looks for an
additional tag, containing categories added to the configuration of
each worksheet.

More details later, it is midnight now in Germany;-)

I think this could be a way to implement paging when listing
worksheets. Elements of the search form setting the start index and
offset for that segment of the worksheet list to be shown.

And adding a drop-down list of user names with the signed in user as
default could solve the admins problem of 50,000 worksheets listed.

Norbert

[ndomes]

>
> Please post a patch.  Thanks!
>
> William
>

Still not finished,
but you can download a patch here:

http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/home/pub/96

Norbert

[William Stein]

Thanks!

--

[ndomes]

On 16 Jun., 00:33, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks!
>

> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 3:23 PM, ndomes <n.do...@kahani.ks.shuttle.de> wrote:
>
> >> Please post a patch.  Thanks!
>
> >> William
>
> > Still not finished,
> > but you can download a patch here:
>
> >http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/home/pub/96
>
> > Norbert
>
> --
> William Stein
> Professor of Mathematics
> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org

Now an updated version with paging(!):

http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/home/pub/96

(my server doesn't show the paging feature yet,
but it should work.)
And additionally you can select one particular users worksheets.

The patch has at least one considerable bug:
after a restart of the notebook server the category entries of the
worksheets are lost.
Its probably a question when and where to save the worksheet
configuration.

I don't look through all mysteries of the storage system

Norbert

[kcrisman]

> The patch has at least one considerable bug:
> after a restart of the notebook server the category entries of the
> worksheets are lost.
> Its probably a question when and where to save the worksheet
> configuration.
>
> I don't look through all mysteries of the storage system
>

Dear Norbert,

Can you create a *patch* or diff file for this? I think that you are
giving a link to the entire changed notebook. Thanks!

- kcrisman

[ndomes]

there are only three new and nine changed files.
later more

Norbert

[ndomes]

On 17 Jun., 02:15, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Norbert,
>
> Can you create a *patch* or diff file for this?  I think that you are
> giving a link to the entire changed notebook.  Thanks!
>
> - kcrisman

I uploaded a new version, the tar file contains the new and changed
files
and some additional information, see:

http://khsfz.dyndns.info:8000/home/pub/96/

You can view the diff file there.

Norbert