Collective Intelligence with Classroom Salon

With the success of the ipad, tablets are so hot right now and more and more applications that are designed for web and mobile computers are coming out these days. One such application is a new CMU concept that is ideal for mobile web based tablet devices although it can also be used in a non-tablet web based environment.

If you don't want to read this blog, just check out the video on Classroom Salon, Carnegie Mellon's latest innovation for learning. http://www.classroomsalon.org/ The site describes Salon as "a new way to facilitate a community of readers around text. "

"Salon is a digital environment that translates individual work like annotations and comments into dynamic communities. It helps teachers, authors and group leaders to gauge perspectives and camps of opinion through aggregation and rich visualizations"

From the Documentation:
"One of the key problems educators face is that students often don’t do the assigned reading before class or forget much of what they have read even if they do read. Either situation means that the teacher must work hard during class time to get students to participate in discussion. One teacher described the process of getting students to talk in class as 'pulling teeth.' Classroom Salon addresses this problem because by annotating the readings before class, students are also building a class discussion. Once class begins, the teacher can use Salon to display the discussion. It's much more comfortable, we have found, for students to talk when elaborating on contributions to the discussion they have already made. "


"Salon enables publishers and content providers to create discussion communities around digital documents. The Salon system encourages communities of interest – from fan fiction enthusiast to mechanical engineers – not only to coalesce around, discuss and analyze web content, but to use the data generated by their contributions in dynamic ways. Salon enables digital commentary and annotations on every aspect of the publication. Salon collects and analyzes these annotations, and allows users to view the data through several analytical lenses, from simple statistical information (e.g. which passages attracted the most comments, which passages were liked or disliked) to a sensitive understanding of the range and nuance of opinion"
From: http://www.olympus.cs.cmu.edu/probes/salon.php

Anyone wishing to know more about CMU's Classroom Salon can contact tablettutor(at)sbcglobal(dot)net.