Classroom Salon – A 21st Century Meeting of the Minds

David Kaufer, English Ananda Gunawardena, CSD

How can Social Learning enhanceLearning outcomes for Students?

Salon started in 2007 when we were Musing about Two Ancient Conundra:

• Can we motivate students to read?• Can we monitor their reading?

We turned these ancient questions into modern ones:• Can we enhance student understanding of texts

through social networking?

• Can we make these social networks contagious?

And We Built Salon:

A technology that transparently links

• annotation• data analysis • visualization

Leading To:

• Deeper Student Engagement• Social learning •Efficient and Effective Class Prep• Real Time Formative Assessment

And all you need to do is to upload or type a document into a Salon

Users Annotate by

Selecting

They Respond to Questions and can

Cite Textual Support.

They Build a Community with their Peers

Darker Shades Indicate more User Activity

UsersWho arePart of the hotspot

They monitor activity in their

community

Salon finds the buzz….

Take a Document with Thirty Five Users

Where are the Hotspots?

11 UsersCommented in the Highlighted

Areas

As we relax the requirements for a hotspotwe see more hotspots

10 or more

9 or more

8 or more

7 or more

6 or more

5 or more

4 or more

3 or more

2 or more

Here are all the

annotations

Collective attention is rare

All 35 users annotated over 60% of the text; But no 6 users annotated even the same 5%.

1+ 2+ 3+ 4+ 5+ 6+ 7+ 8+ 9+ 10+ 11+ 12+0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

Users

Perc

enta

ge o

f Hig

hlig

hted

Tex

t

Salon Supports Perspectives of Reading

• Students can select roles– moralists or pragmatists.

• Salon can filter annotations made from these different perspectives

Students identifying as

moralists had one pattern of

annotations

Students identifying as pragmatists had

another

Moralists and pragmatists cited

different regions of text to make their case

Social Mediaand

Knowledge Assets

Salon Can Form Communities of Readers of Popular Media

Salon Combines Social Media and Social Learning

Salon Enables Real Time Tracking of Knowledge Assets

So much knowledge from user annotations…

Salon is funded by

• National Science Foundation• Innovation Works• Heinz Foundation (through CTTEC) • And Lots of Talented People who Donated their Time

Who Uses Salon?

And many others that we’d list except that you then wouldn’t be able to read the slide.

• CMU Global Campuses• Allegheny Intermediate

Unit• University of Pittsburgh

Law School

• South Fayette Public Schools

• Qatar Academy• Grove City College

Salon is growing

And we invite you to

request an account @

http://classroomsalon.org

Thank you Salon Team• Yitz Francus• Reed McManigle• Ari Lightman• Babs Carrier• Aaron Tan• Dev Doshi• And many many others …..