Add mode for presenters to lernid

[Markus Korn]

It would be cool if one can also use lernid to give a session, I thing lernid needs a presenter mode for this.

 * Only people who have voice (or similar) in the classroom-channel can enter this mode
 * they are allowed to write text to the classroom-channel
 * the slides widget gets navigation buttons in this mode, actions on this buttons automatically appears as commands in the classroom session
 * there is an additional notebook tab which can show a script for the session
 * there is an additional notebook tab with a ListView widget which shows all pending questions. It is possible to drag&drop this questions into the classroom-channel, double-clicking on a question opens a priv-chat with the questioner (to clarify the questions etc.)

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

It would sure be a great thing and I'm sure that it would help a lot of presenters.
I created a Blueprint a while ago to track all bugs and things that have to do with this at <https://blueprints.launchpad.net/lernid/+spec/session-leader-interface>.

The biggest problem would be how to authenticate people. Giving people the right to present by checking if they have a voice could indeed be the right solution, but Lernid would have to support NickServ authentication to make that reliable.

In the Blueprint I suggest to add the nicknames to the session metadata, but that would be very unreliable as it would provide loads of Lernid clients to have a connection with a bot and the permissions to voice people. Silly me! That would never be safe. Using voice makes much more sense and is a clean solution that wouldn't add clutter and bloat to the application.

The session leader interface would work even better if Lernid would support dual screen setups and the d-n-d-ing of tabs and notebooks.

[Nathan Handler (nhandler)]

I'm not sure if this is still needed. Most of the instructor features have been added to ClassBot to allow instructors to use any client they wish. There are several traditional IRC features still lacking from lernid (i.e. Private Messages). This would make using lernid rather difficult for instructors, as ClassBot and members of the classroom team frequently use PMs to communicate with the instructor without interrupting the session.

[Elizabeth K. Joseph (lyz)]

Agreed, even if the time were invested to add everything instructors need and I highly doubt many instructors would use it. I'd rather see the effort be put into maintaining core functionality.

It would also make the interface that much more complex (even at the very least it would require adding selections for being instructor or student upon start-up) which I think we want to avoid that at all costs.

[John S. Gruber (jsjgruber)]

I can think of things a gui program could do to help a presenter, and if someone wanted to add that and coordinate that completely with classbot I think that could work out well. Perhaps such a program could reuse some of Lernid's widget--some of the advantages of python and of object oriented programming.

Other than that, though, I agree with the above to comments and I'm going to consider this "out-of-scope" for lernid itself and mark this bug as "won't fix". Lernid must concentrate on getting the basics done reliably, in my humble opinion.

Thanks, Markus, and for contributing the bug report to Lernid and for prompting the discussion. Thanks to everyone commenting as well.