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
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0.50
0.60
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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…