A couple days ago we implemented a slightly different look and feel for Scriptovia.com. We decided to make things a bit lighter and cleaner than the old design. Now it’s time for you to tell us what you think. Do you like the new look and feel or should we go back to the old one?

See before and after screens below:

Before:

After:

As of a couple hours ago, the limited BETA of Scriptovia has been released. The reason I say “limited” BETA is because all of the BETA features are not yet available. These features including document viewing within the browser, rankings and awards, and badges will be available within the next couple of weeks.

I also can’t stress enough that this is still a work in progress. If you decide to use the site right now you might find many bugs, but most of them have a workaround. Please email me at aseem@scriptovia.com if you find any critical bugs. The reason we decided to release the site with so much missing functionality is because we want to make sure students can use the core components of Scriptovia before the end of the school year.

The data from ThinkEssay (essays, members, and comments) has not yet been migrated into the Scriptovia database. If you are a current member of ThinkEssay, I urge you to wait a couple of days until we get the data migrated before signing up for Scriptovia. This way you can just use your ThinkEssay account with all your old documents and settings.

Let us know what you think and bear with us while we work out the bugs!

Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately, we have been hard at work trying to get the site out the door.

FYI: we have changed the blog URL from blog.scriptovia.com to www.scriptoviablog.com; please change your RSS feeds and bookmarks.

So when can you expect to see the site? Well I can’t promise a date but we are on the home stretch of things. We are working out a few critical bugs and will launch a limited BETA version of the site as soon as the kinks are ironed out. Depending on how quick we work through these problems, we could have something live by the end of the week or three weeks from now. Unfortunately it is hard to tell how much time it will take to work out the bugs since the problems can seem relatively straight-forward on the service but are really deep and dirty bugs. It is just the nature of web development. Anyways I promise to keep you posted and I will try to get more posts on the blog.

ThinkEssay.com is basically the proof-of-concept for Scriptovia. Developed in early 2005, it aims to allow students to learn from each other’s essays in an online community atmosphere. The idea was to create a feature limited website with no marketing budget to see how users would interact with the concept. What we ended up with was a relatively active and excited community. Today ThinkEssay has over 5,100 members and 400 essays.

What have we learned from ThinkEssay?
Well so far we have not received any complaints from teachers or have heard of anybody using the website for plagiarism. Instead we have found that students are appreciative of the service and are excited to use it. See some of the comments below from real ThinkEssay members:

“Very informative, was able to use a few of these to springboard my own essay about the same topic. Great work!”
-giddyupzil
“This site has amazing potential. Im definitely going 2 refer all my friends”
-aussie-boy
“Thanks to the writer of this essay. It really helped clear up some of the questions I had about the book.”
-Chris

Along with the favorable feedback and comments from students, we received some kudos from third parties as well. In 2006, ThinkEssay was an Official Honoree of the famous Webby Awards.

What’s different about Scriptovia?
Scriptovia will be different from ThinkEssay in two ways. 1) Scriptovia will have a larger scope, instead of focusing only on essays we are focusing on all schoolwork, including lab reports, notes, vocabulary lists, study guides, presentations etc. 2) Scriptovia will have a more comprehensive feature set. ThinkEssay basically had three features: you could upload an essay, read an essay, and comment on an essay. Scriptovia will have many more features. Look for posts beginning with “feature” for more information on individual features.

What is going to happen to ThinkEssay?
After we launch Scriptovia into BETA ThinkEssay will no longer exist. When you go to www.thinkessay.com you will automatically be redirected to Scriptovia.com. All the essays on ThinkEssay will automatically be transferred to Scriptovia. Anybody that has a ThinkEssay membership will automatically have a Scriptovia membership with their respective essays already uploaded to Scriptovia. Just login to Scriptovia with your ThinkEssay username and password!

Find out more about the Webby Awards here: How the Webbys Work

Sorry for the delay in getting a post up on the blog. My computer decided to die on Tuesday morning and I just got things up and running. Thanks to Computer Stop and Computer & Applications in Bellevue for your help in getting my computer running in a timely matter with limited data loss.

Ok now down to business. In my “What is Scriptovia?” post I ended by saying I would post use cases that described to people how exactly Scriptovia could be used. This first post is on finding motivation to do schoolwork. For a lot of students writing an essay or doing a project is a big task. One of the biggest battles in getting that task done is getting started. I don’t know how many times I sat in front of a blank Word document at 11:30pm watching that little black cursor flash on and off, most of the time I just couldn’t figure out how to get started. Working in an isolated environment without the help of my peers or support from others in my situation made it even harder. All I needed was a little motivation from others who had done what I am about to do in order to get the ball rolling.

Scriptovia allows students to view other students’ schoolwork to find this motivation. After looking at the work of somebody else who was in a similar position, it is a lot easier to get started yourself. Say you are writing your first admissions essay for a university that you would like to attend. Having never written an admissions essay before the task seems a little daunting, but if you are able to look at other students admissions essays it becomes a bit easier to get started.

This concept has many other applications. When I was at Microsoft and was tasked with completing a functional specification, the first thing I would do is get on the intranet and take a look at other groups’ functional specs in order to get started. If you are planning on going bungee jumping or sky diving, you will most likely do it with a friend because you can offer each other motivation to take that leap of faith. Scriptovia takes this concept to the educational space where this type of support system doesn’t yet exist on a wide scale.

Well right now I am the only person working on this project full time. I, Aseem Badshah, am the Founder and President of Scriptovia.com and a freshman at the University of Washington. Two years ago I founded Scriptovia’s proof-of-concept ThinkEssay.com. In addition, I worked as a high school intern and consultant with the Microsoft Corporation for more than a year. At Microsoft, I was a program manager developing internal tools, as well as program manager and marketer for a project called Scenario Voting – a tool that allowed the Windows Vista test team to collect satisfaction data from the millions of beta testers. You can get in touch with me on Facebook , by emailing aseem@scriptovia.com, or by calling (425) 445-8731.

The reason I say “we” is because the organization is currently very horizontal. We have consultants all over the world working on various projects for Scriptovia. We also have a few students at the University of Washington who are helping out as well as mentors/advisors from all over the Puget Sound area. Without these people Scriptovia wouldn’t exist.

We are always hiring and looking for motivated and talented people to come on board and help out as founders, employees, interns, or consultants. We are especially looking for both web designers and web developers. Check out our careers page for our latest job postings.

This is the first question that comes up when talking about collaboration with respect to education. Scriptovia.com takes a strong stance against plagiarism and cheating. It is NOT an essay mill or a cheating site; it is a service that allows students to advance their own work through collaboration and the sharing of ideas. Content is on the internet and in libraries; Scriptovia is not doing anything different by putting student’s content in a centralized place.

Scriptovia.com goes to great lengths to educate its users about plagiarism – that it is ethically wrong and that users can incur serious penalties if they are caught plagiarizing. Some students may not understand what it means to plagiarize. Scriptovia.com explains what the difference is between collaborating and plagiarizing. It instructs them how to properly site references in their work and how to correctly use Scriptovia.com so that they don’t accidentally plagiarize someone else’s work.

In addition, documents on Scriptovia.com are presented in HTML form within the browser. This allows services like TurnItIn.com to crawl all of our documents and track plagiarism against them.

In the end the responsibility is on the student not to plagiarize.

Scriptovia.com is a new website that is dedicated to help students learn from each other through collaboration and sharing. Basically, Scriptovia is a Web 2.0 application that will allow students to share academic documents in an online community, much like YouTube to video or Flickr to photos. Students will be able to look at other students’ schoolwork in order to use an example to do their own assignments. For example, a student can look at another student’s essay to see how it was structured, what resources were used, and get topic ideas, or students who are in similar classes can share notes. Students will also be able to post their own documents in order to get a constant flow of feedback from fellow students in the community. The site will give students an opportunity to work in a collaborative environment much like adults in the 21st century workplace, while helping them to identify where the line is between collaboration and plagiarism.

Our Mission is to increase students’ productivity and depth of learning by providing them with a means to learn, share, and collaborate with fellow students in a virtual environment. We would like to see Scriptovia become the number one online education portal, the website that every student comes to before they start their schoolwork for the night.

One of the great aspects of Scriptovia is that it has so many different uses. Every student will have a different experience and different way to take advantage of all the features. To that end, I will be posting detailed use cases of how the website can be used. Look for posts that begin with “Use Case.”

Welcome to the official Scritovia blog. We have been hard at work for about 5 months now working on Scriptovia.com. It has been an incredible experience and I expect the story to continue to amaze and entertain for years to come. So what’s the point of this blog? To tell that story and create a two way conversation with our customers and the rest of the blogosphere. I hope YOU will become an active part in this conversation and help with our venture into the online “web 2.0” space. Check back for more and I would love to hear from you in a comment or email: aseem@scriptovia.com.