New tool could revolutionize how we communicate our passions and expertise
I’ve been using the StackUp Chrome extension since February and have been impressed. StackUp is a tool that, once installed in your browser, follows you on the web and tracks your reading. While there are certainly some Big Brother concerns it forces you to confront, it also provides you with some impressive data that I believe could be used to powerfully impact teaching and learning.
There are two main data points that StackUp tracks that I envision being important to educators: how long (time) you spend reading and topics about which you read. For the topics, your reading is assigned to one of about 60 categories, from Education to Real Estate.
Users are given a dashboard from which to manage their collection. On this dashboard, you are assigned an overall composite score as well as a score within each topic. In addition to your score, you can see your total time tracked for all reading and the time you’ve spent reading content within each topic. An additional metric it provides is the number of sites you’ve used to access each topic.
Within the dashboard, you can build a report on your reading by dragging topic categories to the Build Report field, which you click on when you are ready to create your report. The report allows you to dive a bit deeper into your reading stats for the selected categories and provides the additional metric of comparing your topic score to the average score in that category across all StackUp users. Reports can be easily saved and shared.
In the six months that I have been using the (free) service, I have only received one email from the company. When I saw in that email that it is a Colorado-based startup, I reached out to CEO Nick Garvin to meet for lunch so I could learn more about the company. There were three things I wanted to know:
While StackUp is currently free, will that be changing anytime soon?
According to Nick, StackUp is and will continue to remain free for some time. While the service has multiple avenues that it can and will pursue to monetize, I’m confident that educators and students can use it without worry about this changing anytime soon, if ever for K-12 users. I left with a sense that this includes using StackUp worry-free of a shift to a freemium model in the near future for individual accounts.
How private is my information?
The company website has a statement about valuing user privacy:
“StackUp provides three levels of privacy and makes sure you are always in control. So you share only what you want, with who you want.”
While this sentiment is appreciated, it is a far cry from a published privacy policy. When I expressed this to Nick, he assured me that StackUp intends to be a responsible player and has no designs on storing or selling our individual, identifiable data. When I told him about the Student Privacy Pledge, he promised to look into it and (based on my limited explanation) said that he thought it was something StackUp would be willing to commit to. Unless and until StackUp joins the Pledge, concerned educators are justified to remain skeptical and I will update this post if I learn the company has done so. [Update: Stackup has updated the privacy policy and it has been vetted by several school districts that have pushed the extension to all students.]
Why StackUp? What’s the story?
Nick told me that he has always loved cars and knew when he was in college that he wanted to work for Tesla. When it came time for him to apply however, he found himself wondering, “What sets me apart from every other person that wants to work for Tesla?” In his mind, his passion for cars and the thousands of hours he had spent reading up on the industry are what might set him apart but he had no way to communicate that in verifiable ways to Tesla (or any employer for that matter). Recognizing this gap in providing a service for a clear need, he founded StackUp.
What I appreciated about this origin story is that it mirrors what I see as the benefit of this service for our students. Thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s writings about how long it takes to acquire expertise, StackUp might be a way for users of all ages to begin keeping score on this front so that when they are ready to apply for jobs they may share with potential employers their reports that quantify their passions through the amount of time they have spent reading up on it an acquiring expertise.
Ways I can see StackUp used in schools
Many Reading classes have a chart on the wall that lists all students on the Y axis and number of pages each has read on the X axis. Students self-report their reading and the teacher recognizes it on the chart with stickers or check marks. For schools in 1:1 environments, using StackUp could supplement or replace this system in meaningful ways. For one thing, StackUp claims that its technology knows whether or you are actually reading on the page, making it difficult to game the system. So the self-reporting might be more accurate. Another benefit is that the information lives on the cloud, so accessing it doesn’t require visiting the classroom. Students are empowered to control their information and share it anytime and anywhere with parents, teachers, colleges and potential employers.
I can also envision students building reports and using them in order to create presentations or portfolios in which they display their reading progress. Beyond sharing the topics about which they read and how much they read about them, they could also level up the task and synthesize what the data should mean to their audience. For SAMR fans, this could be a pathway to Modifying or Redefining the task of something like Free Voluntary Reading.
What ideas do YOU have for implementing StackUp with your students
[Disclosure: Nick did pay for our lunch. This was not pre-arranged and he was unaware that I already had most of this post sitting in my drafts folder prior to reaching out to him. I am receiving no compensation from StackUp.]
