Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/YupGrade
YupGrade For JetPack
The Development Team
James Levy (Developer) & Julia Schofield (Designer) http://jamtoday.org
About YupGrade
YupGrade is an educational web application that lets you earn real rewards for your web activity. You can raise pledges so that if you post good links to articles, videos, or blog posts about specified subject areas, you'll be awarded with ebooks, subscriptions, and other types of rewards.
An alpha version of the site will be available in January 2010.
Outline
Since creating the initial proposal, we've had several ideas about new ideas for features and a development road-map that should be better for the extension-creating learning curve.
Quiz Taking Component
File:Http://jamtodaycdn.appspot.com/i/img?id=agtqYW10b2RheWNkbnINCxIFSW1hZ2UYgfoBDA
The original goal for the JetPack For Learning Challenge was to integrate the quiz interface shown above into a browser extension that would automatically create quizzes for most sufficiently text-filled pages on the web by analyzing their content, and using Wikipedia pages in combination from outside data RDF-compatible datasets to create fill-in-the-blank quizzes.
This idea of creating quizzes from webpages is also found in Jetpack for Learning entries ClozeFox and Study Troll. The common assumption driving each of these projects is that by providing immediate ways to provide self-assessment, we can impact learning by creating new repeatable, integrated behaviors.
There are several noteworthy similarities and differences between approaches. The YupGrade Quiz UI currently renders in a lightbox dialog with a modal covering the document behind it. The ClozeFox interface uses dragdown input boxes and other HTML-based UI widgets to fashion a page simply be editing and augmenting the DOM of the page. There is certainly merit to this idea, especially to best take advantage of the APIs made available and the always improving performance of DOM manipulation.
We face a few major difficulties in the goal of automatically creating reliably high-quality assessments. Some of this is related to the way we grade a user's quiz results, and we've got some great ideas about how to handle these issues (see the grading specification for details). But there are plenty of pedagogical dilemmas and engineering hurdles that we're also facing.
This is precisely why we decided to go back to our roadmap and plan to approach the extension in layers, starting off with very simple functionality and iterating on more improvements. The quiz back-end will undergo development in parallel, so that the final portion of development can be devoted to porting the quiz interface to the extension.
Link Sharing Component
YupGrade visits and analyzes the pages you post about to figure out whether you are discussing any topics that can earn you unique rewards. These rewards are both freebies provided by YupGrade as well as paid rewards pledged by your personal sponsors.
While the original proposal was limited to the quiz interface described above, YupGrade's functionality at the time of its soft launch will be limited to linksharing. Since it's very trivial to code the functionality required to for facilitating sharing of the page you're on with a note, that's the first functionality we'll focus on.
File:Http://jamtodaycdn.appspot.com/i/img?id=agtqYW10b2RheWNkbnINCxIFSW1hZ2UY6YECDA
The pattern above is the simple and recognizable workflow of sharing the page you're on, with an optional note.
Some of these pages will have already been shared, and we'll already have information that can be easily retrieved about what topics the current page has been tagged with, and what rewards can be earned from sharing the page.
File:Http://jamtodaycdn.appspot.com/i/img?id=agtqYW10b2RheWNkbnINCxIFSW1hZ2UYgvoBDA
It'd also be possible for the extension to even more proactively analyze each page you're on and tell you what topics it recognizes, and what you can get for an update tagged with each topic. This would mean that YupGrade would have to process several orders of magnitude more pages, but we're at least considering the UI ramifications.
The pattern typically associated with any proactive extension (like the "check your inbox" variety) is that they have a quick visual cue (sometimes a glow) to indicate that your current website allows the extension to fulfill its purpose. We would use a variety of the glow pattern, and perhaps use text to show the names of topics or potential reward items associated with the current page.