Demo for McMillan Publishing

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?

Our core team is Supported by a solid technical team

consisting of

• computer scientists• information system designers• cognitive scientists• Human computer interaction experts• Data mining experts

And We Built Salon:

A technology that transparently links

• annotation• data analysis • visualization

Leading To:

• Community building• Collective Intelligence • Deeper Student Engagement• Social learning • Efficient and Effective Class Prep• Real Time Formative Assessment• Instructor Support

And all you need to do is to select a book chapter from a repository, upload a document or type a document into a Salon

Setting up a course document or book chapter

Can import a document from

desktop or book repository

Set chapter access rights based on

authentication orInstructor preferences

Documents imported from repository in a personal library with

options to add tags and questions

Add associated questions

Add tags to mark highlighted

sections

Set time for participation and

time to view community annotations

Assign same document to

multiple groupsSalon collects

macro annotations summaries from

Small salons

Annotating a course document or book chapter

pick the tone as you comment. Salon clusters

users based on tone

Students and teachers use tags to label

content

Students respond to Questions

Cite textual support Textual support

are the breadcrumbs

A Community of Peers

Community of annotators who

formed a group based on their interest in

the text

Darker Shades Indicate more User Activity

Choose the specific users

to see common

annotations

Users and their anchored

annotations

Visualizing all annotations

Salon finds the buzz….

How do you find the places of most concentrated annotation activity

11 out of 35 UsersCommented in the Highlighted Areas

11 out of 35 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

Salon detects collective attentionwhich 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

moralists had one pattern of

annotations

Students identifying as pragmatists had

another

Students identifying as pragmatists had

another

Salon intelligently cluster all users who provided

“similar” commentsto “me”

Moralists and pragmatists cited

different regions of text to make their case

Moralists and pragmatists cited

different regions of text to make their case

All responses to questions are

organized and users select influential

comments

All responses to questions are

organized and users select influential

comments

Social Mediaand

Knowledge Assets

Salon Can Form Communities of Readers of Popular Media

Students are clustered into groups based on content or tone similarityGet to know the others thru their

comments

Get to know

others

Salon Combines Social Media and Social Learning

Keep track of activities of friends and

acquaintances

Salon Enables Real Time Tracking of Knowledge Assets Discussions

get build on documents

Knowledge assets are

generated by user assets

So much knowledge from user annotations…