Table of Contents Using Lexinomicon Introduction Using Lexinomicon Typing Special Characters		Quick Start Exercises Workbooks Preferences Creating New Lessons Quick Start Lexinomicon is an application for the creation and presentation of educational lessons. Individual lessons ("Exercises") can be grouped together into Sections, and Sections and Exercises may be grouped with into other Sections and Workbooks. When you launch Lexinomicon it will ask you to log in to one of a list of profiles: select a profile from the list on the log-in screen, provide a password in the password field, and click the OK button. Click the Create Profile button if you do not have a profile in the list, or if there are no profiles to select from. You can also click the Import Profile button if you have a personal profile on the hard drive but not in Lexinomicon's profiles directory. Once you are logged in, you can begin a session of lessons by making a choice from the Workbooks menu. The Workbooks menu shows all the Workbooks you have imported in the past. If you are using Lexinomicon for the first time your Workbooks menu will be empty and you will need to import a Workbook before beginning a session. To load a Workbook, choose Open... from the File menu and select the file you wish to open. If the file contains a valid Workbook and the lessons for that Workbook, then the Workbook will be added to your Workbooks menu, opened and added to the Navigation Sidebar (see next paragraph) and the first item for that Workbook will be displayed. There is also a sidebar (choose Show Sidebar from the View menu) where you can see all the currently open Workbooks and can choose from them individually or navigate using the continue or next and previous buttons. Exercises As stated, individual lessons are called "Exercises". Exercises can be grouped together into Sections, and may be grouped along with Sections into other Sections and finally into a Workbook. Exercises and Sections work just the same way that documents and folders work in the common desktop metaphors. Exercises come in different types, and there is one "plugin" to handle each type. Presently, Lexinomicon has plugins to support three different types of Exercises: Transformation, Fill-In-The-Blank, and Multiple Choice. A Transformation displays query text and an optional image or video, and is answered by entering in answer text. For example, a transformation lesson may show a picture of a red couch and ask the question "What color is the couch?" Traditional vocabulary lessons are a simplified form of transformation, too: an item could show a picture of a couch and ask for the word "couch" in the native language, or could display no picture and could contain the word "couch" as query text. A transformation may also have the user translate whole sentences, or provide Full Text responses. Fill-In-The-Blank is similar to Transformation except that the user enters answers into a number of blanks (following the common fill-in-the-blanks paradigm). The blanks are displayed right in the query, for example "The quick _____ fox jumped over the ____ dog." Again, an optional image or video clip may be presented along with the query text. Multipl Choice works as one would expect a multiple choice exercise would. During a session, Exercises are presented one after another, either in random or in linear order, until all the Exercises have been completed. The session begins at the beginning of a Workbook and proceeds through the end of the Workbook. If the starting Workbook (or subsequent Section) contains Sections, each of the Exercises in each of the Sections is presented in turn. A user completes an Exercise by providing a correct answer to the query, at which point Lexinomicon advances to the next Exercise or Section. workbooks Lexinomicon keeps track of items by using the familiar metaphor of a Workbook. A Lexinomicon Workbook can be exported to a file, and Lexinomicon can bundle all the items contained in the Workbook to the same file. In that way, a Workbook can be downloaded to a user's hard drive from the web, or can be sent in an email, bundled up with all the Exercises needed to view the workbook. If a workbook is opened without its contents bundled with it, Lexinomicon will attempt to find the lessons in its internal cache, or may even search for them on the internet. If Lexinomicon can not find an item to be displayed, the user will see a message stating that the item could not be found. Lexinomicon remembers your workbooks and stores them in your profile for ease of access on return sessions. Preferences A user may set his preferences in the Preferences panel, available from the Lexinomicon menu in Mac OS X, or other wise from the Edit menu. Currently, the Preferences panel may be used to change passwords or to set the default asset data for the profile. If values are entered for the asset data, any assets created with the profile will automatically use the default values. For instance, if you know that all assets you create should have some special characters not found in the normal special characters sets, you can enter them in your profile's defaults and all the items you create will have those special characters. Creating New Exercises Lexinomicon not only displays Exercises, it creates them. You may create new Sessions and new Exercises, rearrange them as you like, then Workbook the top most collection and save all of your creations to a nice tidy Workbook and send the file to your friends or your students. To create an Exercise, Enter editor mode by setting that preference in the preferences dialog and entering editor mode via the View menu. Then choose Then choose New Exercise (Command-N) from the File menu; to create a Section, choose New Section. If a Section is selected when you create the new object, the newly created Exercise or Section will be added the selected section; if an item is selected, or if nothing is selected, the  newly created Exercise or Section will be created in a new tree all by itself. When you create a new Exercise, it is untyped and you must set what type of Exercise it is before editing any of its data. You set its type by selecting from the Plugin Type menu, and as soon as you make a selection the view will change to show you that the Exercise now has a specific type and you will be placed in the editor for that Exercise type. As you enter in the information for the new item, you will likely want to test the item to make sure your query and answers work the way you expect them to. Choose 'Switch To Browser' or 'Switch To Editor' from the View menu to switch between browser mode and editor mode. Enter in the correct and incorrect answers you have defined to make sure that you do not have any typos and that your answers are all edited correctly. When you create a new Section, you will see the editor panel for the Section. There you can indicate whether the items should be presented in linear order or in random order. You can also set the number of contained Exercises and Sections which should display before moving out of the collection and on to other items. For instance, if the Section contains fifty items but you only want ten of them to display before moving on, enter 10. This is particularly useful in random mode, so that the Section will be "different" each time it is loaded -- a different ten items displayed in a different order each time. You may have noticed by this point that you do not need to explicitly save anything other than workbooks you wish to share. All changes are stored and updated dynamically. You then are free to concentrate on the process of creating learning material and not worrying if the changes are being saved. It is recommended that you do Save your workbooks as editable workbooks shoudl you lose your password or otherwise not be able to access your installation of Lexinomicon.