Sparkfolio – DaraghByrne.me

Daragh Byrne Associate Teaching Professor
School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University. Core faculty for MSCD and PhD CD.
Courtesy appointments in the School of Design and the Human Computer Interaction Institute.
Afflilated facilty with the IDeATe network, Block Center for Technology and Society, and CyLab.
Co-Lead of the TRACES Lab. Co-founder and platform lead for a2ru's Ground Works.
Pronunciation: Dah-rah (silent ‘gh’) · Pronouns: he/him. · Google Scholar · ResearchGate · ORCID 0000-0001-7193-006X.

Sparkfolio

Sparkfolio allows you to plan and organize the story based on several curricular methods
This can be used to develop a story
Sparkfolio presents a deliberately constrained set of media to review
Home Page of Sparkfolio

Dates 2013 - 2015

Collaborators John Sadauskas

Online tool to support K12 creative writing through reuse and composition with social media

American teens continue to fall short of national writing standards, often claiming school writing is too challenging and that they have nothing interesting to say. However, teens constantly and enthusiastically immerse themselves in text-based digital communication via text messaging, email, and social media. While such activities are, in fact, writing, research indicates that teens instead view them as simply “communication” or “being social.” With this in mind, Sparfolio is an effort to create and implement technology that infuses school writing with the aspects of social media that teens find so appealing and engaging. The intent is to demystify writing by illuminating students’ natural storytelling abilities, ultimately improving the quality of their writing.

Current work includes user-centered inquiry through interviews, focus groups, workshops, and participatory design sessions with both teachers and students, aimed at exploring the design space and developing a rationale for Social Media Based Writing technology. This work will inform the development of an online environment to support K-12 student writing, which will aid students in generating personally relevant writing topic ideas and will allow students to share writing with a peer audience for feedback and discussion. Through iterative design and writing-performance-based evaluation, the objective was to develop a tool that is deployable in K-12 classrooms and embeddable in existing writing curricula.

The resulting tool, Sparkfolio, is was in deployment with ~90 K12 students to evaluate the approach of leveraging personal multimedia as a support for creative composition in curricular contexts

Find out more


Related Publications



Sadauskas, J., Byrne, D., Atkinson, B. Mining Memories: Designing a Platform to Support Social Media Based Writing. In Proceedings of the 2015 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA.