| Classtalk |
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| Written by arash sanieyan | |
| Monday, 04 February 2008 02:49 | |
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Classtalk is an online learning environment built on facebook platform by peerglobe. It is an add-on to Facebook social interaction by providing students a new tool to interact with their classmates online.
HistoryThis project started right after the release of oycas in May 2007. That was the time when Facebook Social Community announced the release of their Social Platform. Being on the leading edge of technology, Peerglobe jumped to the opportunity to release a Facebook version of oycas. Because of the strong background in developing online learning environments, the design and development time spanned less than 4 months and Peerglobe released classtalk in September 2007.\ You can checkout classtalk at http://apps.facebook.com/classtalk/?i=1 Please note that to see the full functionality of Classtalk you need to be a member of a valid facebook school network. Below we will explain some neat features of Classtalk.
School Specific Courses and SemestersOne of the problems with non-school-affiliated online learning environments is that the system has to trust the students to input correct course and semester information. These online learning environments are not to blame as this is the only choice they have. However for each supported school, Classtalk has imported the school specific course and semester information, hence creating a more realistic environment for the students.
Class Network PageJust as Facebook has a network page for each of the supported school, Each class has a network page of its own as well. This is common portal for the registered students of a class where they can get an instant glimpse of the class students, the class statistics, the current class projects and documents and more.
 Document ManagementThe document management in Classtalk lets students and faculties to share their school documents. Students can share documents with others who are currently taking the same class. And the instructor of a class can share documents with that are currently enrolled to his/her class.
 Project Group ManagementThe group management is designed to help the students to manage their school group projects on facebook in a very efficient way. Students can create project groups for each of the class they are currently enrolled in and collaborate with their group members through group discussion forum, group wall and group file sharing tool.
Technical InformationClasstalk is built using ruby on rails development framework backed by MYSQL database in RedHat Linux environment. For this project we have devised Facebook rails helper libraries that will be releasing shortly under GPL to public.
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