Group Scribbles

Group Scribbles offers implementers, instructors and students a powerful metaphor for thinking about and realizing collaborative learning activities. This metaphor is based on common physical artifacts from the classroom or office: adhesive notes, bulletin boards, whiteboards, stickers, pens, and markers. The fundamental unit of expression in Group Scribbles is the Scribble Sheet, a small square of virtual paper just large enough to express a single thought or concept, whether via a quick sketch or a few words jotted down. Scribble Sheets can be posted to Public Boards, where many sheets can be arranged to express ensemble ideas, such as groupings, chronologies, or hierarchies.

An analogy to HyperCard [1] puts Group Scribbles in context. When Apple produced the MacOS in the 1980s, it had wonderful new educational capabilities, such as multimedia and hypertext. However, educators could not yet realize the potential because only programmers could access the capabilities. When HyperCard was released, educators responded with a surge of creativity. With HyperCard, educators were able to make everything from grade books to frog dissections without hiring a programmer. By analogy, today's classroom has new capabilities of wireless connectivity among handheld or tablet devices for every student. However, educators cannot tap these capabilities without a programmer and hence little innovation is occurring. With Group Scribbles, SRI introduces a way for educators to rapidly design new collaborative and group learning activities without the need for additional programming. The only limit is educator's creativity.

Group Scribbles is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants 0427783 and 0713711.