Carnegie Mellon University
March 08, 2011

CMU Interactive Reading Project Piloted at Ellis School

CMU Interactive Reading Project Piloted at Ellis School

Classroom Salon, which is a social network for interactive reading and was designed at CMU, is being piloted at Pittsburgh's Ellis School. Salon was designed through interdisciplinary collaboration between English Department professor David Kaufer, computer science professor Ananda Gunawardena, and design professor Alexander Cheek.

At Ellis, technology integration specialist Liz Perry is working with their English faculty to offer students a way to talk online about the texts they read. Students use Salon to analyze posted passages from their readings and to view observations from their classmates about these texts. In addition to discussing and analyzing others' texts, students can upload their own writing to receive comments from their peers and instructors.

CMU professors are working closely with the English department at Ellis to further develop the program based on student and teacher feedback. To learn more about Salon, visit www.classroomsalon.org

See also the article "Bringing Social Media to the Writing Classroom: Classroom Salon" by Kaufer et al., published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.