GroupRead: Online Collaborative Reading Environment for Middle School Reading Comprehension
Graduate Master's Project / Stanford, CA / Class of 2011
The purpose of this project is to design a prototype of an online, digital reading environment that focuses on reading comprehension for middle school learners outside the classroom. GroupRead leverages the affordances of online social communication as a way to encourage dialogue and to create a community around reading.
GroupRead scaffolds the interactions between dialogue and reading, allowing learners to construct understanding collaboratively and build on each others’ ideas. Core functionalities include nonlinear visualizations of conversations, embedded dialogue-based comprehension strategies, and a variety of personal and group communication tools. GroupRead is an online social experience that strives to connect readers and engage them in constructive and collaborative understandings of text. (Created in collaboration with Angela Pan Wong).
Click to download Master's Project Proposal (18 pages).
A functioning pilot prototype was create for our Master's Project Submission by the end of Summer 2011. In 2012, Angela and I submitted a video to Fast Company's Innovation By Design Awards to illustrate our vision of this reading platform on the tablet.
Music Credit: Kevin MacLeod
pilot Prototype - Video Demo:
Pilot prototype wireframes:
design process
emphathize. define. ideate.
My role in the project is two-fold. On the learning side, I am involved with researching learning theories, interviewing experts in the field of reading and literacy, and co-authoring the written project proposal. On the design side, I have been developing the design framework, needfinding, rapid prototyping, and iterating the UI design after each round of user testing (wireframing and building the skeleton).
Our design principles are:
- Fosters an interpretive “Community of Learners” (Brown, 1994) around reading
- Encourages dialogue around the text and connects and situates dialogue in the text
- Enables collaborative interactions
- Scaffolds for dialogue-based reading comprehension strategies
- Supports multi-modal forms of communication and processing
