The Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International is pleased to announce the beta release of Group Scribbles, a new cross-platform collaborative tool that enables educators to rapidly design new group learning activities without the need for programming.

In the workplace and in the classroom, there is an increasing need for harnessing the collective intelligence of groups to learn faster, envision new possibilities, and reveal latent knowledge. Technological supports for such real-time, face-to-face processes have fallen far behind the expanding need. Group Scribbles introduces a networked representational paradigm that enables collaborative improvement of ideas based upon individual efforts and social sharing of notes in graphical and textual form ("scribbles"). With Group Scribbles, users mark up "scribble sheets" in their personal work area, or "private board," and share their ideas by dragging their sheets to a "public board" that is synchronized to all devices. Users can arbitrarily rearrange sheets and stick them strategically to a background image or to other sheets. Such simple actions support emergent collaborative activity across multiple connected machines in a lightweight, flexible manner.

The Group Scribbles application runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and mobile devices. It is optimized for stylus-based devices such as Tablet PCs or Pocket PCs. Note that in this beta release of the software, some advanced features are turned off by default. There are also known issues on Mac OS, so for now, the developers highly recommend using the Windows or mobile version if you have an option.

A Group Scribbles User and Developer Community wiki space is also available to allow Group Scribbles users to share their experiences and contribute their ideas for the development and use of Group Scribbles in the future. For more information on developing for Group Scribbles or to request a login account for the wiki space, see the Developer Info section of the Group Scribbles web site.

Group Scribbles was created by the Tuple Spaces Project at SRI International, with support from the National Science Foundation. The developers are currently refining Group Scribbles software and activities for use in classroom collaborative learning experiences.

The Group Scribbles Team  welcomes any suggestions or feedback on the software, web site, or wiki. You can reach them at
http://tuples.sri.com/contact.html.