Expanding Viral Education

[maxbbender]

Maybe a text can be marked as read after the reader scrolls to the bottom and a button pops up that is clicked that says something like. “I’ve read it! View Reading Stats”. It could work in a similar way to User Agreements to assure that I’ve “read” it. This would make sense too as it would create motivation to read it and bring the reader right to their stats for reinforcement. Then it would naturally lead to point #2 here.

What if we used the “create text” box with a Word List from a text so that learners can easily write a summary of what they read using the words in the list they looked up. They could then allow an instructor to see the text they wrote. This would reinforce the use of the vocabulary. The instructor could then see responses/reactions to the text with the use of that vocabulary. Maybe there could be a private, share with instructor setting and then we think about the ability to push it to Facebook, Twitter, email, etc... This becomes the viral part.

Use the words in a word list to conduct a google news search or Wikipedia search or google google scholar search or the like to suggest other readings that use those words.

Create a system so that the second time the reader reads the text it blanks out the words they clicked on and provides a list of the words on the left and shuffles the list. They then have to fill in the blank with the words. The third time they read the text it blanks out the words they clicked on the first time and provides only the translation, definition or image and they have to write in the correct words in the blank. It’s all about contextualization and not about learning words in a set of flashcards devoid of a context. Always include the word in it’s context. Stats could then show if they read it 1, 2, and 3 times and their progress in learning the words in context. If we add this feature maybe the reflect on the reading only after having done this exercise three times. The leader of a reading group might even be able to create a prompt for the reflection: a question, an image or something along those lines.

More on contextualization, in the word list it would be helpful to hover over the word and get the sentence in which the word appeared in the text so the reader can instantly see the context in which the word appeared.

Create a heat map of the text with the most frequent words appearing in one “hot” color and then cooler colors for words not clicked on so much in the group. This would be a great visual in class to show the hottest words. Then the hotest 10 or 20 words could have a definition featured more prominently or maybe it creates a kind of slide presentation of the top 20 words with the sentence in which it appeared, a definition of the word and an image associated with that word. Then those “slides” could become a kind of “flashcard”. Again, the more the word is associated with a context the more likely one will be to remember and acquire that vocabulary. This is to say the more likely one is to make that word part of their working vocabulary.