Name of Excellence: SocialBook: The Book as a place where people meet
| Autors: | Assist. Prof. Kalin Georgiev, PhD, Computer Informatics Department, Room 536 |
| Assist. Prof. Trifon Trifonov, PhD, Computer Informatics Department, Room 536 |
Research domain: Education, Digital Publishing, Social Networking, Cloud Computing
| Kalin Georgiev is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Computer Informatics Department. He is involved in various Computer science courses, including a number of technological courses and several academic research projects. He is also involved in the management of several commercial projects applying modern mobile, web, and cloud development technologies. He has a PhD in Informatics from Sofia University. | |
| Kalin Georgiev, PhD | ||
| Trifon Trifonov is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Computer Informatics Department. He teaches core programming courses as well as several specialized theoretical courses. He participates in several research projects and is also involved in the management of commercial software development projects. He has a PhD in Mathematics from Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. | |
| Trifon Trifonov, PhD |
SocialBook is a privately funded initiative conceived, designed, and implemented by Robert E. Stein, Director of the Institute of the Future of the Book in a tight collaboration with students and professors from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University and Astea Solutions — a Bulgarian Software development company.
SocialBook is a new platform based on the idea that “a book is a place” where readers can congregate. It fosters communities around rich digital publications by allowing in-line annotations evolving into conversations in the margins. It is an example of an emerging class of applications that might be called “[collaborative] thinking processors”. SocialBook enables multiple perspectives to be brought to bear on a problem, providing a real-world proof of Alan Kay’s dictum that “a point of view is worth 80 IQ points”.
Early adopters include the Dalton School of New York, where SocialBook is applied extensively in the Spanish literature class: “Students were [...] creating amazingly interesting threads, quoting from different parts of the book and from their own comments [...] The quality of class discussions has ascended to a level that I had never experienced.” [Gaitán, Sol B.,“Children of the Screen”, INKE, Havana Gathering 2012]. Another example is a professor at New York University who has put the entire syllabus for her English Literature course into SocialBook. Reports of students starting to use the tool on their own volition or asking their teachers to start using it serves as a litmus test for its adoption
Even though the first trials are for educational usage, there are other experiments — with private reading groups and also at the enterprise level, which indicate that social reading is compelling across a wide spectrum of use.