Welcome Advisor

The welcome page of a new site could reference an advisor that will coach a new site owner through setup and basic workflows in use on the site.

There is help waiting to guide you through your first hours here. Try here first when your having trouble.

The advisor could include robotic elements. The advisor could check for progress and suggest next steps. Steps could include links to new readings or exercises that might have their own advisors.

The robotic elements could be scripted in specialized markup that could be improved as educators learn more about mistakes and opportunities observed in practice.

# Logic

Given the multitude of things people can do how can we find something to suggest doing next? And how can we tell if people have done it?

We must describe a network of preconditions for every thing we might suggest. For each precondition we need some test to see if it has been met. Say we can only programmatically understand half of what people do then we must insist that they come half way and to the things we understand to satisfy the precondition.

In order to make a bio page you must have as origin a site that you own, and you must be logged in, and you must still have present on your page the Factory in which you will write your name, and you must write your name properly capitalized, and it must be inside double-square brackets.

We must select a goal, explain why that is important, and then work through the preconditions to make sure they are met. When they aren't, we must generate a clear explanation of what is required to meet the precondition.

It's possible that several goals are within reach. There must be some way to cycle through potential goals and choose one that would enable something that the reader wants to do.

This logic is short of that used in expert systems. It will prove valuable If people can find the advisor's logic understandable and make wise choices as to what is valuable user of their time.

GOAl a bio page that helps future readers understand how you think. It is less important that they know concrete demographics. PAGE a place where one authors content with respect to declared goal. Fail if page differs greatly with respect to specific fields FACTORY a place to write that includes specific instructions and surrounding text that makes clear what will be done with the answers provided.

More about satisfying predicates. One can answer in the affirmative by responding, matching a given format, or by making predicate evaluation.

discussion

Kate Bowles. This sounds very helpful to me. One relevant difficulty which I experienced early on is finding my way back to a starting place; I kept wanting the ruby slippers option. Secondly, I didn't understand the Welcome Visitors page because I didn't understand how it was talking to me. I see it now. Mike's videos were beyond helpful to me, so I wonder if it would be possible to add a help button to link to a small library of videos and perhaps a glossary. I'm so sorry if this is naive, but as a non-tech user I really do like plain language user guides.