Classroom Salon
Enhancing 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
Ananda Gunawardena,
Associate Teaching Professor
Computer science, CMU
David Kaufer,
Professor of English, former
head, CMU English
Alex Cheeks, Assistant
professor of
communication design,
CMU-Q
Raja Sooriyamoorti
Associate professor
Information
Systems, CMU
Jason Kuo, Adam Brooks, Immanuel Alam, and Aaron Tan
Original Salon Team, not shown Rupen Paul, Dev Doshi and 4 others
Joanna Wolfe,
associate professor
of English, Univ of
Louisville
Salon Strategy/Marketing/PR
team
Yitz Francus
Consultant
Babs Carryer
Project
Olympus
Ari Lightman
Consultant
Reed
McManigle
CMU Tech
Transfer
What is a Salon?
Salon is a gathering of stimulating and intellectual people
Salon Technology
Salon 2.0 Architecture
Administration
student
Professor
Annotation/Visualization
Clustering
student
Document upload
annotation
Markup Analysis
Algorithm
Classroom
Management
Docuscope
Visualization
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/disagree
Create 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
Hot spots shows the
student annotation
activity on the
document
View
annotations
specific to one
or more
students
View student responses to questions
Understanding emotions
What do students
think of the
document
Global Response Grids
users versus responses
Adopting Salon to your classroom
Create a Salon
Ask the students to join
Add individual Students or bulk add
Rate of Participation
monitor student activity
Learning is Social
Salon 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 Salon
a 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