Classroom Salon – A 21st Century Meeting of the Minds David Kaufer, English Ananda Gunawardena, CSD

How can Social Learning enhance Learning 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 Users Who are Part of the hotspot Darker Shades Indicate more User Activity They monitor activity in their community

Take a Document with Thirty Five Users Salon finds the buzz…. Take a Document with Thirty Five Users Where are the Hotspots?

Commented in the Highlighted Areas 11 Users Commented in the Highlighted Areas

As we relax the requirements for a hotspot we see more hotspots

10 or more

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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%.

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 Media and 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? CMU Global Campuses Allegheny Intermediate Unit University of Pittsburgh Law School South Fayette Public Schools Qatar Academy Grove City College And many others that we’d list except that you then wouldn’t be able to read the slide.

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 …..