Classroom Salon: A Tool for Social Collaboration

Ananda Gunawardena∗

Carnegie Mellon University5000 Forbes Ave.

Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890Phone: (412) 268-1559guna@cs.cmu.edu

John Barr†

Ithaca College953 Danby Rd.

Ithaca, NY 14850-7000Phone: (607) 274-3579

barr@ithaca.edu

ABSTRACTClassroom Salon is an on-line social collaboration tool thatallows instructors to create, manage, and analyze social net-works (called Salons) to enhance student learning. Studentsin a Salon can cooperatively create, comment on, and modifydocuments. Classroom Salon provides tools that allow theinstructor to monitor the social networks and gauge bothstudent participation and individual effectiveness. This pa-per describes Classroom Salon, provides some use cases thatwe have developed for introductory computer science classesand presents some preliminary observations of using this toolin several computer science courses at Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.3.1 [Computers Uses in Education]: Collaborativelearning; K.3.2 [Computer and Information ScienceEducation]: Computer Science Education—complexity mea-sures, performance measures; J [Computer Applications]:Miscellaneous—Social Networks

General TermsManagement

KeywordsSocial Networking, Collaborative Documents, Assessment

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Social MediaSince the heydays of electronic bulletin boards (bbs) in

the late 1970’s, computer networks have been used for so-cial purposes. Today, with the rise of Facebook, twitter,

∗Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science†Associate Professor of Computer Science

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, torepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specificpermission and/or a fee.SIGCSE ’12, February 29-March 3, 2012, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1098-7/12/02 ...$10.00.

and YAHOO! Sites and with the introduction of Google+,social network/media systems (SNS) have become part ofthe fabric of student culture.

With student interest in computer science courses drop-ping and with challenges in engaging students in the class-room, it is tempting to use SNS to enhance instruction.There are many examples and projects that have incorpo-rated SNS in the classroom and many tools have been cre-ated or adapted to this purpose. Hardy et. al. [7] stud-ied the characteristics of Web 2.0 applications (and thusSNS) that students find appealing. Greenhow [5] investi-gated student use of social networks and concluded that suchnetworks provided significant support for creative endeavorsand school-related tasks. Other papers have examined SNSand related technology [3] and tools [6]. Though all of theseresearchers identify many diverse features that appeal tostudents, common characteristics include simplicity (in theuser interface), flexibility, the power to personalize their en-vironment (i.e., to form identity), and the establishment ofsocial connections.

Unfortunately, SNS in the wild are difficult to adapt forthe classroom. Many of the characteristics of SNS that makethem popular with students also make them hard to harnessproductively for education. For example, instructors needto organize and manage the educational process and to as-sess the effectiveness of the techniques used and the degree ofparticipation of students. As Egert et. al. note [3], it is diffi-cult to balance the usability and social needs of the studentswith the technical demands of the application or the educa-tional needs of the instructor. Even Google+’s introductionof circles, though a step in the direction of manageability,cannot provide the control over the learning process thatinstructors often need.

1.2 Classroom SalonClassroom Salon is a tool designed to meet the needs of

instructors while providing students with the usability andpower over social connections that they are use to in SNS.It arose out of earlier work by Adamchik et. al. [1] on acontent-delivery system for tablet computers called Adap-tive Book. Research on Adaptive Book led to insights intothe delivery, management, annotation, and presentation ofdocuments that form the basis of Classroom Salon. Class-room Salon is now used by over 8000 teachers and studentsin disciplines ranging from the humanities to the sciences asa collaborative annotation and analysis tool.

Classroom Salon is built around the concept of a Salon,an on-line area where students can interact with each otherand collaborate on documents. The name Salon was chosen

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Figure 1: Debugging Code

to reflect the ideals of the 18th Century French Salons wherepeople gathered to socialize and to learn. Our hope is thatstudents will find Classroom Salon an inviting setting toboth socialize and learn.Classroom Salon has three principal components: Sa-

lons, documents, and the Dashboard. Salons are onlinespaces where students can interact. Every registered userof Classroom Salon can create Salons. A Salon can beopen to anyone or it can be by invitation only. The goal isto give students the same usability and flexibility to createand maintain social relations as they find in an SNS. At thesame time, instructors are free to guide students into Salonsto leverage the student’s social inclinations for the purposeof learning. An instructor, then, can make a Salon that isopen to the entire class, to just a subset of the class, or tothe whole world. Instructors can also remove, either tem-porarily or permanently, students from a Salon. Similarly,students can choose to make Salons with just their friendsor unrestricted Salons where anyone can join and ask ques-tions.

Once a Salon has been formed, documents can be createdor uploaded and associated with the Salon. Documents arethe centerpiece around which students interact. A documentcan be a program, a piece of text such as a lab assignment,a textbook, or a series of questions. Questions can be em-bedded in the documents or they can be added separately.

The members of a Salon can interact over documents inmany ways. They can highlight text and comment on it orthey can view or reply to other people’s comments or edit anold comment they have made. If the document owner hasprovided tags, a student may ”tag”their response. Memberscan answer questions associated with the document and canlook at other students responses, if the instructor allows this.It’s also possible to look at just the answers that a singleperson or a set of people have posted. Students can replyto comments via an email and can vote on comments thatthey think were ”most helpful”,

One of the more useful features of a Salon is the analyt-ical tools that accompany documents. These tools exist ina feature called the dashboard. The dashboard allows theowner of a Salon to see all of the annotations on a doc-ument and to graph statistics related to the annotations.The Salon owner, for example, can view pie charts thatshow how much each Salon member contributed, percent-

ages of responses categorized by tag, or how many responsesindividual members made to questions.

We envision several different ways to use Salons. Forexample, programs with bugs can be placed into a Salon.Students in the Salon can be asked to find the bugs andcan comment on others’ suggestions. Questions about thecode can be associated with the program and the instructorcan choose to let students see other students’ responses andcomment on them. As students comment on the program(Figure 1), the answers begin to converge on a correct ex-planation of the bug. Other uses for Salons are detailed insection 4 below.

Our goal is to provide an environment in which studentscan collaborate on coursework in familiar ways. At the sametime, instructors can use these social interactions as a ped-agogical tool that enables and motivates student learning.Instructors can also use the analytical tools in Classroom

Salon to assess engagement and learning without living theirlives on the SNS.

2. BACKGROUND

2.1 Uses of Social Networks in LearningSeveral papers have suggested using social networks in

computer science classes. Alt et. al. [2], for example, ad-vocated for the inclusion of social networking modules intoCS0 classes, and Purewal [10] built a complete CS0 coursearound SNS. Both of these papers, however, used availableSNS and did not attempt to leverage the SNS as learningsystems.

Greenhow [5] performed a broader investigation of SNSuse among students from low-income families and concludedthat SNS have significant potential to enhance learning amongthese students. She is currently exploring an informal learn-ing environment , called Hot Dish, located within Facebook.Our work differs from this work in that we have created aSNS specifically designed for managing the learning process.

2.2 ToolsThere have been several surveys of tools available for on-

line collaborative learning. Hamer et. al. [6] performed asurvey of tools currently available (as of 2010) to support on-line collaborative learning in computer science. This studyidentified over 25 tools for collaborative activities such aspeer review, dialogue and discussion, annotation, and mak-ing links. Though many of these tools have social networkingcharacteristics, none are designed principally, as ClassroomSalon is, as a SNS.

Egert et. al. [3] performed an extensive comparison be-tween SNS and courseware/course management systems (C/CMS) to determine the degree of similarity between them.They charted the technical, social, and usability attributesof systems for enabling and supporting collaboration. Theyconcluded that there is no direct mapping between SNS andC/CMS and that it will be difficult to have prior solutions inSNS map onto C/CMS systems. This, however, is exactlywhat Classroom Salon is designed to do: provide a SNSsystem with the manageability of C/CMS systems.

In addition to these overviews, there has been researchinto using Web 2.0 technology to enhance collaboration inparticular areas. Ferretti et. al [4], for example, produceda system that focused on collaboration around media anno-tation and Hoffman et. al. [8] created a web-based system

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Figure 2: The opening screen of Classroom Salon

for encouraging active code reading skills. Neither of thesetools enabled the general SNS activities that are built intoClassroom Salon.

Ram et. al. [11] presented OpenStudy, a large-scale opensocial learning community. OpenStudy is a broad on-linesocial community based on Web 2.0 technologies that al-lows students to post questions and receive responses fromanyone in the world. It does not, however, provide for themanagement of these communities to the same degree asClassroom Salon.

Finally, the tool piazza (http://piazza.com/)has becomevery popular recently. Piazza is a web-based tool designedfor education that allows participants to ask and answerquestions in a social media context. Though powerful inmany respects, piazza does not offer the text annotation oranalytic tools that Classroom Salon offers and thus servesa different, though overlapping, purpose.

In conclusion, while there are many tools that enable on-line collaboration and many tools that provide for on-lineclassroom management, we have not found systems thatcarefully combine these capabilities as well as Classroom

Salon. Classroom Salon provides the possibility of trulyleveraging students’ social habits for pedagogical purposesin a unique way.

3. OVERVIEW OF CLASSROOM SALONIn this section we describe the capabilities of Classroom

Salon and demonstrate how social networks can be estab-lished and documents shared in this environment. We alsodescribe the Dashboard which provides access to the analytictools of Classroom Salon.

To become a member of Classroom Salon a student or in-structor must first register. Anyone can register by going tothe Classroom Salon web site at http://www. classroomsa-lon.org. Figure 2 shows the screen that a user will see whenthey log in. There are three main options for a user: theymay create or join a Salon, create a document, or edit theirprofile. The following sections will detail these options andwill also describe the Dashboard, the set of analytical toolsfor a document.

3.1 ProfilesEvery Classroom Salon member has a profile. Currently

the only information available in the profile is the the mem-ber’s name, email, password and an image. The image is

Figure 3: Creating a Salon

displayed beside the member’s responses and serves to per-sonalize the user’s experience. We plan to add other person-alization features to Classroom Salon in the future.

3.2 Creating SalonsSalons are created by clicking on the ”Start a Salon” link

in the left hand menu of the screen shown in Figure 2. Whenthis link is chosen, the creator is given the option to name theSalon and either open the Salon to everyone or to requireusers to request access to the Salon. See Figure 3.

In the main window of Classroom Salon you can chooseto view all of the Salons that you belong to by clickingon the My Salons link in the left hand menu. Choosing aSalon brings you to a configuration page where the Salon’smembers can be managed, email messages can be sent tomembers, and documents can be managed.

3.3 DocumentsOnce a Salon has been created, documents can be created

and associated with the Salon. On the main page there isa link Create a Document. Clicking on this link takes theuser to a document creation page. On this page you candirectly enter text or import it from a file on your computer,give the document a name, or require a password for thedocument. Text that is entered can be formatted and linkscan be embedded. Documents can be a set of questions, areading with questions embedded, or a piece of computercode that students have to understand and annotate. InClassroom Salon every conversation must be based on adocument, thereby creating a context for all conversations.This differentiates Classroom Salon from many of the otherdiscussion forums.

Once a document has been created, it will be accessiblefrom the main menu under the menu option My Documents.Clicking on this link shows a listing of all documents that theuser has created. The gear icon next to the document namein this listing gives the user access to a document configura-tion page (Figure 4). Here questions and tags may be addedto a document and the document may be associated with aSalon. If the document needs to be associated with severalSalons, it may be copied from this menu and each copy canbe associated with a separate Salon. The duplication func-tionality allows reuse of the same content from semester tosemester with or without annotations. Salon documents canalso carry hotspots of the document (based on user interac-tions) from semester to semester allowing users to benefitfrom collective intelligence of those who came before.

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Figure 4: Configuring Documents

Figure 5: Documents and Modes

Figure 6: Annotating

3.4 ModesOnce a Salon has been created and one or more docu-

ments associated with it, members of the Salon can access adocument and interact with it (Figure 5). Document pageshave three modes, view mode, participate mode, and dash-board mode. The view mode allows students to see otherstudent’s comments and reply to them. The panel on theleft of Figure 5 shows a document with several comments. Inthis figure, the user has single-clicked on a highlighted com-ment and is viewing comments that other users have made.If the current user had made one of the comments, an editbutton would be available. Right now, the user is able toreply to any of the comments.

In the right panel is a tabbed area that gives the usersome options for viewing responses. Currently, the Anno-

tations tab is clicked and the user can see images (if theywere uploaded) of all the people who have commented onthe document. By clicking in the checkbox in the upper leftcorner of each image, a user can choose whether to viewthat person’s comment. The tag tab allows a user to seeannotations based on their tag and the hotspots tab letsthe user see where she has commented and to identify whoelse has commented on those same places. The Responses

tab allows the user to see responses to questions associatedwith the document while the Preferences tab allows usersto determine which comments to show. amount of overlapin highlighted words or number of highlighted words.

In participate mode users can highlight text and anno-tate it and also answer questions associated with the docu-ment. In Figure 6, the user is annotating a section of high-lighted text.

3.5 DashboardOne of the most powerful features of Classroom Salon is

the ability to view statistics about document annotations.This is done through a mode called the dashboard. In dash-board mode you can view all annotations that have beenmade on a document in a Salon that you created or youcan view charts on the annotations grouped by membersof the Salon, by tags, or by density. Figure 7 shows twocharts that can be viewed in the dashboard. The first chartdisplays the percentage of comments made by each user inthe Salon. The Salon owner can choose which members toinclude in this chart. The chart on the right of Figure 7displays a graph of the number of helpfultags that membershave given to other members. The dashboard can also dis-play a chart that graphs who made responses to questions.The ashboard is a great way for an instructor to ”get toknow” the student.

A final feature is breadcrumbs. When a Salon memberresponds to a question, they can highlight text in the doc-ument to support their answer. Each piece of highlightedtext is called a breadcrumb. When viewing responses in thedashboard, Salon owners can also view the breadcrumbsthat a member used in forming their response.

4. TECHNIQUESThere are many different approaches to using that Class-

room Salon in a class. In the simplest approach it can beused for collaborative analysis of documents or code. For ex-ample, a Salon can be used as a depository of lab specifica-tions. Students can annotate the document with commentsor questions. Instructors, TAs or other students can address

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Figure 7: Dashboard charts

the questions and provide insight. Comments and questionsare made right on the specification and particularly usefulcomments can be tagged. We found in our studies, thathundreds of questions that are typically raised in discussionforums can be resolved with just a few clarifications in thecontext of the document with zero redundancy of threads.

Though this is a natural use for Salons, it is not muchdifferent than a wiki. More insightful applications of Salonswould encourage active participation of students in learning.In this section we describe three techniques that we havefound to be effective in engaging students, code analysis andcollaborative summaries.

4.1 Learning by debuggingDebugging programs individually, especially for beginning

students, can be a frustrating and time consuming task.Swigger et. al. [12] examined the possibility that studentsmight improve their assembly language programming abilitythrough repeated exposure to common programming errors.Their conclusion in their 1988 study was that students’ abil-ities were not appreciatively affected.

We have found in our preliminary studies, however, thatgroup debugging in a social context does mitigate much ofthe frustration of debugging while still enhancing learning.We hypothesize that contemporary students are more at-tuned to input from their social circle (as Greenhow [5] foundin her study) and thus will learn more effectively from de-bugging in a social context.

In this approach code with deliberate bugs is loaded into aSalon. Obviously students cannot run or compile the code,instead we ask them to walk through the code and try, asa group, to find the bugs in the program. Students are en-couraged to identify bugs by highlighting the problematicsections of code and adding an annotation describing theproblem. Other students comment on the annotation, ex-tending the explanation or disputing it. Students are givena period of time to converge on one correct explanation ofeach bug. If students are unable to reach a consensus, theinstructor will put the correct code into the Salon and addher annotations to the incorrect code.

4.2 Summary exampleWe have also successfully asked students to create docu-

ments summarizing a set of lectures. Each week one studentin a private Salon is responsible for adding the summarydocument with some related questions. Other students inthe Salon are required to annotate the summary by addingmissing material, correcting mistakes, and providing clari-fying comments. In our studies this approach seem to work

well with little overhead to instructor. However, being ableto monitor student activities through the dashboard allowsthe instructor to guarantee student engagement.

4.3 Learning through questionsA third technique that we have employed is to have stu-

dents in a Salon post a solution (either a program or analgorithm) to a programming problem. The student alsoprovides questions about the code. The other students inthe Salon provide responses to the questions and annotatethe code with suggestions and comments. This is an exam-ple of active code reading as advocated by Hoffman et. al.[8] and Kumar [9], but in a SNS context.

5. EXPERIENCE

5.1 The ExperimentIn this section we describe some preliminary observations

after using Classroom Salon in two CS2 classes in Springand Summer 2011. The goal of this experiement is to de-termine whether collective intelligence generated from col-laborative annotation visualization actually helps studentsreduce code errors and debugging time.

In the Spring 2011 semester, one lecture of CS2 at CarnegieMellon University (CMU) with 42 students was involved inthis project. In the experiment, students used Classroom

Salon in odd numbered assignments to discuss concepts andcommon errors in a social setting before attempting to com-plete the programming assignment individually. For evennumbered assignments we used the traditional approach ofcompleting the assignment after lectures covering the con-cepts. In all cases, we asked students to record the time todesign, program, and debug their code.

In Summer 2011, we used Classroom Salon in a CS2 classof 32 students at CMU with the same approach but alsoadded a discussion forum to see if we could improve on thequality of discussions as a result of using Classroom Salon.We found that Classroom Salon could replace traditionaldiscussion forums with hundreds of redundant discussionthreads with just a few clarifying comments on the docu-ment. This was the result of Classroom Salon’s novel abil-ity to clarify questions in the context of the document asshown in Figure 5.

5.2 DataWe collected the following data points at the end of sum-

mer 2011 for all odd numbered assignments with a Saloncomponent.

1. percentage of annotations generated by a student in aSalon.

2. Number of helpful votes received by a student for hiscomments.

3. Number of times a student change the response as aresult of seeing others responses.

4. Number of attempts at changing Salon responses be-fore reaching group consensus on the correct answer.

5. The amount of time spent on the assignment as re-ported by the student.

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On all even numbered assignments without a Salon com-ponent we collected the amount of time spent on the assign-ment as reported by the student.

Our data collection was completed at the end of Summer2011 and as of this writing we are analyzing the large amountof annotations, responses, student influences in Salons andhow they may or may not related to improved performancein assignments. We are currently gathering data in our Fall2011 CS2 classes at CMU. For Fall 2011, 180 students inone section of CS2 are using Classroom Salon to enhancetheir understanding of the class concepts. A second controlsection of CS2 with 120 students at the same institutionis using only traditional teaching methods. In addition, asecond institution, Ithaca College, is performing the sameexperiment using Classroom Salon in CS1 in Fall 2011 witha class of 23 students and a control group of 25 students. Wehope to present our analysis of spring, summer and fall datain early 2012.

6. FUTURE WORKMuch work remains to be done on Classroom Salon. We

are working on several enhancements to make the user inter-face more assessable and the assessment tools more effective.For example, we will be incorporating annotation feeds sothat a Salon’s members can easily see when new annotationsare made. We are also expanding profile options so that stu-dents can better personalize their presence in a Salon.

We are also making many enhancements to the assessmenttools including a time line tool. Instructors will be able tomove a slider across a time axis and see the amount andquality (as judged by ”helpful” tags) of annotations at dif-ferent points in time. This will enable instructors to gaugea student’s involvement over time instead of cumulatively.

7. CONCLUSIONSSNS have become an integral part of contemporary stu-

dent culture. Unfortunately, it is messy and time consum-ing to use public SNS like Facebook for educational pur-poses. This paper has described Classroom Salon, an SNSdesigned for education that provides students with a famil-iar and compelling social network and yet gives instructorsthe management and assessment tools needed to effectivelyuse SNS for teaching. Our experience so far indicates thatthis approach is effective and productive. We also believethat computer science, a discipline where students have tra-ditionally worked in isolation, can benefit from the collectiveintelligence of the group. Our approach encourages collabo-ration as a way to generate group intelligence that eventuallybenefits the individual student’s performance in computerscience classes.

8. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe would like to acknowledge the many people who made

Classroom Salon possible. In particular, we would like toacknowledge Dev Doshi, Aaron Tan and Rupen Paul whoprovided technical leadership for Classroom Salon. In ad-dition we would like to acknowledge Prof. David Kaufer, forhis vision of Classroom Salon. This work supported in partby NSF grant DUE-0942721.

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