Classroom Salon: A Tool for Social Collaboration

Classroom Salon is an on-line social collaboration tool that allows instructors to create, manage, and analyze social networks (called Salons) to enhance student learning. Students in a Salon can cooperatively create, comment on, and modify documents. Classroom Salon provides tools that allow the instructor to monitor the social networks and gauge both student participation and individual effectiveness. This paper describes Classroom Salon, provides some use cases that we have developed for introductory computer science classes and presents some preliminary observations of using this tool in several computer science courses at Carnegie Mellon University.