A number of teachers have contacted me recently expressing concern about the Discussion and Private Message features. The recent poll also roused some complaints about the potential of a forum feature.

So I’d like to take a moment to discuss the general social atmosphere of Quizlet and how I envision it working best. The sentiment I’m hearing from teachers is:

Quizlet is impossible to use in a classroom setting because students get distracted by the Discussion and Private messages features.

I’m at a large-ish public high school myself, and I know first-hand how easy it is to get distracted online. I can easily imagine how Quizlet would become hard, if not impossible, to use in a classroom.

Quizlet was not built to be a classroom tool, per se. The teachers at my school have recommended/suggested to their students that Quizlet might come in handy as a supplement to their classes. And that’s what has worked best. It doesn’t take class time, and students use it at their own will. Quizlet is a tool for self-improvement. It is not meant to be used as a grading metric of any sort. It would be too easy to cheat anyway.

The key difference is that when students use Quizlet on their own, they’re doing it to help themselves. When they do it in the classroom, they’re doing it because the teacher told them to. I believe the first scenario works better in every way. People learn more that way too.

For teachers, I think recommending Quizlet to students is the right way to go. Even going down to the computer lab to introduce it and show people around is a great idea. But making it required curriculum is asking for trouble, it seems. I think it would be great if this scenario could change, and Quizlet could be used effectively in a classroom setting. Suggestions on how to make that happen are welcome.

Every feature I add to Quizlet is carefully considered and weighed for its costs and benefits. Me being in high school and having some puerile need to socialize has nothing to do with it. I am of the mind that the Discussion feature’s potential benefits outweigh any drawbacks. It can be used for reporting typos on a set, suggesting new terms to add, inquire about the day’s homework, and discussing tests. These are all good reasons to have the discussion feature, and these discussions have been happening on Quizlet.

However, I’m not blind to the fact that people have been using the discussion box for other things. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and free discussion is a good thing. It’s only when this discussion interferes with Quizlet’s purpose of learning vocabulary does it become a problem.

I’ve played with the idea of allowing set/group creators (in this case, teachers) to disable the Discussion features. That might stop some users from “messing around” in the classroom, but generally I think people are smarter than that. They’ll figure out that they can just create their own set and carry on their discussions there, or hijack someone else’s sets. So I think that option isn’t worthwhile.

I could also just do away with the discussion and private messages features, fullstop. I think that would ruin some of the great strengths that Quizlet has: being able to share your sets, to know what to study, and to interact with people learning the same material you are. The Japanese Learners Group is a great example of why this shouldn’t happen. With over 100 users and 40 sets, it’s one of the biggest groups on Quizlet. And it seems to be working out well, with users from all over the world helping each other learn Japanese. Removing the social features of Quizlet would harm this group and ones like it a great deal.

For a forums feature, the potential for unrelated discussion is very high. But then again, the potential for usefulness is very high. A lot of it depends on how it is implemented. If I were to add a forum feature, I would hope to channel some of the greatness of WordReference’s forums. Thousands of users exchange language expertise and word knowledge on them; Quizlet has a similar goal.

To put it plainly, the idea of Quizlet becoming like MySpace scares me a great deal. That’s not the direction I intend to steer Quizlet.

This post is intended to be taken with a grain of salt. I do not have any first-hand knowledge of Quizlet in classrooms, and I’m certainly not a teacher. I’m sure some teachers could add a lot of insight to my assessments. I know that it’s helped me a lot for all my classes though. I hope to see the comment section of this post filled with opposing opinions.

If you would like to get in contact with me directly, send your email to andrewatquizletdotcom or send me a private message. I’d prefer you broadcast your thoughts via the comments though, so everyone can join in the discussion. I’ll be on-hand to answer questions and discuss this post.

The Scatter release was rocky initially (sorry guys!), but it seems to have been a general success. Looking at my statistics, it looks like people are spending hours at a time on Scatter. Nice

Now that Scatter is done, I want to find out what I should work on next.

In the last poll, “Creating an API” won the most votes. It’s tough, but I’m working on it.

If you’d like to discuss something personally, I’m available through your Private Messages (see “Andrew” on the dropdown). Later!

Hi.

There was a bug in learn mode this morning that was causing it to fail terrifically . Sorry, it was completely my fault.

Not that it matters to anyone, but the problem was one character in my 30,000 lines of code. I found the right character to fix though

It’s fixed now. Thank you to the 17 people who reported it. Sorry again!
-Andrew

Update: it appears I had it programmed right on my local copy, but there was a bug in the code that synced the files from local copies of Quizlet to Quizlet.com. So um, I just reuploaded EVERYTHING in case the problem happened to more than just the Learn page. If you’re still having problems, you can email me at andrew at the domain that this website is, or AIM me (sn: Harc Serf).

Sorry again.

Because of the all the big changes listed below, many of the files on Quizlet have changed (71 of them, in fact). If you have any issues with Quizlet’s looks or functionality, you probably don’t have the right files. To make sure you have the latest copy of all the files, you’ll need to empty your brower’s cache. See this page for instructions for various browsers.

You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to post this:

Scatter is here!

Scatter is a game. It’s ridiculously addictive. Try it here, embedded in this blog:

Scatter shows you eight random terms from your set, scattered all over the page. You drag corresponding items onto each other. It doesn’t matter if you drag the term onto the definition, or the definition onto the term. When you make a correct match, the two items will disappear. Keep going until all of the items are gone. It then gives you your score, and compares it to your record high score.

Warning: Scatter is highly addictive!

Instead of releasing this update, for the last two days I’ve been wasting my time playing Scatter all day. Or rather, I’ve been hoarding it all to myself. Hey, it’s called testing!

It’s embeddable, as you see above. That means you can copy the HTML code and insert Scatter into your own page. The embedding code is at the top-right hand corner of the regular Scatter page. Should be cool to see what blogs it turns up in :cool:.

A few miscellaneous things about it:

1. When you drop one item onto another, it won’t catch the drop unless your mouse is hovering over the target term. So if you have a giant definition and a wee bit of it is overlapping the target term when you drop, it might not work.
2. Embedding will look best on pages with WHITE backgrounds. Sorry, people with other colors.
3. Dragging performance might not be optimal. It runs fine for me and my testers, but your results my vary. Let me know if it’s hard to use.
4. The “scattering” code randomly places the items all over the place. It finds random coordinates, checks to see if that space is free, and if it isn’t it will try 7 times more, then just give up and do the overlap. Think of it as overlap-resistant, as it won’t be perfect all the time.
5. It’s sort of easy to cheat. I”ll leave it up to you to figure out how. Except, when I was testing I was able to get faster times by actually knowing the stuff than cheating.
6. I may add High Scores so you can compare with other people. It’s hard to decide, because of how easy it is to cheat and manipulate any high scores board. And also, I’m unsure about encouraging competition on a self-improvement website. I’ll be listening for reactions on this subject.
7. It will show 8 terms everytime (or if your set is less than that, it will show all of them). In all my testing, that seemed like the perfect balance of numbers. Every new round of the game will show a random selection of the terms in the set.

The second-best new feature is the networking page, which lets you connect with friends by sending them email invites to your groups or finding your friends by username/email address. Very nice.

Other things that are new:

1. Overhauled the discussion box code so it’s less frenetic when it gets really long or when the page loads.
2. Changed “Saved Sets” to “Favorited Sets” - everything is the same except for the name.
3. Made the Getting Started page have bigger text, and more information.
4. Changed the top-right help logo from (?) to (help). I think it’s more direct that way.
5. The Print Flashcards page now tells you how many pages it will print for you. It’s still 5 terms per page.
6. When you add a term on the Create Set/Edit Set pages, it automatically scrolls to the bottom for you. I love this one.
7. If you aren’t a member of any groups, the My Groups page will show you the most recently created groups and links to see all groups.
8. Upgraded to Mootools 1.0.
9. Quizlet should now remember your Ignore and Prompt settings for the Learn and Test pages.
10. Export page now lets you recreate sets inside of Quizlet.
11. The home page is now more consistent on what sets it shows. All users will see the same list, when before they would see only sets they could access (private sets included). Now, a “Just Me” set will never be on the list. “Only Certain People” sets and “Everyone” sets will always show now (the former with a lock icon showing). Note: this does not change any privacy settings of your data, just what set titles will show in the “recent sets” list.

As always, let me know how she’s running.

Bugs are a fact of life for software programs, and Quizlet is no different. The extended 450-day testing cycle I put Quizlet through before it was launched to the public helped get rid of a vast majority of them, but there will always be those that get through. The feedback feature at the top-right corner of Quizlet has helped tremendously in rooting out some stragglers.

Someone recently sent me a bug report that said Quizlet wasn’t grading her answers on the Test page, and additionally opening the accents bar would make the page blank. Bizarre, no? So I investigated further…

In the feedback messages, I log what browser people use, so I determined right away that this bug was only affecting Internet Explorer users. So I launched IE and started working on recreating the problem. It certainly didn’t happen every time someone tried to grade their tests in IE. I was able to reproduce the bug when I explicitly had the ‘Matching’ section activated, and only when there were more than 25 questions in the pool, and only in Internet Explorer 6 (version 7 is fine). A pretty obscure scenario, but it was indeed causing problems.

So I rooted around the part of my javascript file that grades the Matching section, and it didn’t have any red flags. Then I looked at my HTML, and realized the problem. To help the grading system determine correct answers, each <li> containing the input boxes for answers had an id with the correct answer (ex. <li id="c">). Apparently a certain one-letter id, I didn’t bother to find out which, was causing IE to have problems. But not big obvious problems, only problems that show up when you open the accents bar or grade your test.

My solution was to change the ids to prepend “iesucks-” to each id (ex. <li id="iesucks-c">). That fixed both bugs, and everything is running silky smooth now. (Yes, this means you can View Source and find the correct answers - shock!) And yes, I realize this isn’t a very good data structure.

Isn’t HTML supposed to be a stable format? Has it not been around for fourteen years? The sad thing is, this is typical of Internet Explorer.

The funny thing is, I saw some form of this bug when I was originally building the matching feature. I made a little workaround, and thought I had it fixed, but I obviously hadn’t seen the whole problem.

Now, can I interest you in Firefox? It’s a rock-solid, free browser that doesn’t have any of IE’s weird problems. IE will always be supported by Quizlet, just because of its dominance, but you will always get the most stable experience with Firefox. And it has spellcheck! Safari will work too, if you’re on a Mac (I use Safari).

If you ever spot bugs in Quizlet, please send them my way. You’ll be doing everyone a big favor. Thanks!

Finally, what you really want to know. Where’s Scatter? It’s coming, along with a big update. I’ve been working hard the last two weeks, and I’ll be releasing a big update soon. I just have a lot of testing to do before then. It’s a good thing I have a week off from school now.

I was browsing the database statistics this evening and noticed that there are now more than 20,000 discussion messages logged in the database. That’s very surprising, considering there have only been 4,300 sets created. So I dug a little further and discovered 3 sets with over 3,000 messages each. Hubbaduhwah? That’s mindblowing. The current system places every message ever written onto set/group page, and with 3000 messages the page takes forever to load and everything gets a little balky. I haven’t decided whether I should leave this as punishment to the people who are turning Quizlet into their own chat room, or to make it only show a certain number of messages and then a link to an archive. We’ll see

Also, 2,200 private messages have been sent since their introduction 13 days ago. Yowsa.

I think I’m becoming a stats junkie. I also think that despite my best efforts, I’ve created a bonafide social network. Well, that probably isn’t so bad. Just don’t come asking me for profile pics. The answer is no!

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a screenshot of the new Scatter game, which I’ve managed to “widgetize”, and so it will be embeddable in your own blogs and whatnot. I have a whole bunch of tasty new features coming up on Quizlet in its next update, but I’ve decided I shouldn’t keep listing them all in case I don’t manage to make them all. Here she is, embedded in a local copy of a site I made once.