Classroom SalonEnhancing Learning

through Annotation Visualization

Classroom Salon Team

Copyright @ 2010, Carnegie Mellon University. No part of this presentation may be copied, reproduced or disclosed without written permission.

Salon Research/Development Team

David Kaufer,Professor of English, former head, CMU English

Joanna Wolfe, associate professor of English, Univ of Louisville

Alex Cheeks, Assistant professor of communication design, CMU-Q

Raja SooriyamoortiAssociate professor

Information Systems, CMU

Jason Kuo, Adam Brooks, Immanuel Alam, and Aaron TanOriginal Salon Team, not shown Rupen Paul, Dev Doshi and 4 others

Ananda Gunawardena,Associate Teaching ProfessorComputer science, CMU

Salon Strategy/Marketing/PR team

Yitz FrancusConsultant Ari Lightman

Consultant

Reed McManigleCMU Tech Transfer

Babs CarryerProject

Olympus

What is a Salon?

Salon is a gathering of stimulating and intellectual people

Salon Technology

Salon 2.0 Architecture

Administration Annotation/Visualization Clustering

student Professor student

ClassroomManagement

Document upload annotation

Visualization

Markup Analysis Algorithm

Docuscope

Salon Technology• Distributed web Servers– Hosting regions/groups– Localized/globalized annotation management

• Scalability– 100+ concurrent users per session per

document– number of sessions, documents, users

• No major limits• Major Technology Platforms– Uses .Net , flash, HTML5, JavaScript– no open source software, proprietary system

Classroom Salon in Education

The Purpose of Salon• Bridging the gap between Learning Sciences

Research and Classroom Teaching• Good Teaching Requires the understanding of

how students learn• Classroom Salon enables teachers to develop

content and techniques to understand how students learn

• Learning Sciences can help…

7 Principles of Learning Sciences that can improve Teaching

• How does students prior knowledge affect their learning?• How does the way students organize knowledge affect

their learning?• What factors motivate students to learn?• How do students develop mastery?• What kinds of practice and feedback enhance learning?• Why do student development and course climate matter

for student learning?• How do students become self directed learners?

• Source: Eberly Center for Learning, CMU

It is possible to develop good projects around salon to support one or more of these principles

You can be as creative as possible with Classroom Salon

Here is one approach…

Prepare and Upload a document to Salon

• add tags and questions, make the document available to a salon, privacy and access settings

Get Students to Annotate and respond to questions with a highly interactive tool

Respond to questions and provide associated locations in the text

Salon Aggregates all student comments to show “hot spots” in the document

Show all students who annotated a

section

Show groups of students who agree/disagreeCreate communities of likes

If a document is marked with tags show how students selected tags associated with a spot

List all students who annotated the text

View annotations

specific to one or more students

Hot spots shows the student annotation

activity on the document

View student responses to questions

Understanding emotions

What do students think of the document

Global Response Gridsusers versus responses

Adopting Salon to your classroom

Create a SalonAsk the students to join

Add individual Students or bulk add

Rate of Participationmonitor student activity

Learning is SocialSalon Enables Social Interactions

What is happening?

Live feeds from fellow students

Personalization

interaction

Content and Emotion Mappings

Personalized Clustering

Salon encourages mobile communication

Salon on iPad

Get Salon comments on your Mobile Phone

Conclusion

Why did we create classroom Salon?• Getting students to read is hard• Even if they read we do not know what they

are reading• Now we have a way to aggregate all student

comments into visualization objects• We can find out which part of the document is

most interesting.. most controversial…• Where do students agree or disagree or like or

dislike?

Why Classroom Salon motivates writing students?

• Writing is an essential component of learning• Imagine a student uploads a writing to salon• Now all friends, family, teachers, anyone can

comment on student writing• Comments are aggregated and shown so student

can quickly focus on places of interest, places that needs improvement etc..

• No other platform is technically and algorithmically superior to classroom salon in annotation aggregation and visualization

Classroom Salon helps scale classes

• Creating small groups (within a large class setting) is one advantage of salon

• Small groups discuss and critique documents• Documents can be their own writings or

external reading assignments• Aggregation of comments show places of

interest

Data Mining and Classroom Salon• A strength of classroom Salon is its ability to use novel

techniques to understand– Content matching's

• How does your comments compare to an expert?– Emotion Mappings

• Who else is agreeing with the specific content of this document?

• Each highlighted section or comment student writes, explains what students know and don’t know

• Our goal is to mine this data to help the teacher and the student

Enjoy Classroom Salona gift from

Carnegie Mellon University

We are only supporting a limited number of pilot projects at this point. If you are interested contact

guna@cs.cmu.edu