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12.15.2004
Educators Applaud Grokker E.D.U. for Dramatically
Improving Web-Based Research in an Easy-to-Navigate Visual Environment
Stanford University Announces Campus-Wide Implementation
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 15 — Groxis, the leader in visual
search software, today announced the launch of Grokker E.D.U., a search-and-research
software platform for the education market. It also announced implementations
at a number of school districts and universities, including Stanford
University. The platform provides an optimized version of Grokker
2.2, the company's award-winning visual search-and-research application
that captures content from multiple data sources and presents results
in an easy-to-navigate visual map. The platform has been designed
to incorporate many different data and information resources relevant
to educational settings.
Leaders in education have applauded Grokker E.D.U. (“explore,
discover, understand”) for its ability to improve Web-based
research. The platform provides a single point of access to multiple
information sources — including the leading search engines —
in an easy-to-navigate visual map.
Leading Educators Contribute to the Development of Grokker E.D.U.
The Grokker E.D.U. release comes after an intensive phase of collaboration
and dialog with leading educators. Stanford University, one of Groxis’s
first customers in the education market, contributed significantly
to the development of Grokker E.D.U., which now serves as a single
access point for many information sources that are available to the
Stanford community.
“For years, we have been seeking
a means by which students and faculty can be more efficient in their
research and navigation among the myriad sources of digital information
we provide at Stanford,” said Michael Keller, the Ida M. Green
University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources.
“Grokker E.D.U. is a most significant step toward what many
people in education and the information sciences have been exploring
for years — a way to provide broadcast or targeted returns on
the search in a single, easy-to-navigate, and modifiable environment.
In educational research — or any research for that matter —
the world is much larger than just MSN, Yahoo, and Google. Certainly,
it is inclusive of all the major search engines, but the information
universe goes beyond the publicly accessible Web to proprietary, controlled
access data environments. Grokker offers a way to bring both information
from the public and the proprietary information environments together
in a single, comprehensible screen that helps people, ordinary people
who are not necessarily experienced, professional searchers, make
sense of it all.”
“Grokker E.D.U. provides tremendous
value to the world of education by solving one of the biggest and
most persistent problems in student research: the deluge of information
on the Internet that has made good research extremely difficult,”
said Dr. David Thornburg, founder and Director of Global Operations
for the Thornburg Center and a leader in the education community.
“Grokker enables students to harness the power of the Internet
and other data sources in unique ways and makes the world of information
more manageable. Students who Grok have a great advantage over their
peers — they are quicker at sorting the wheat from the chaff,
and are better at finding the quality needles in the haystack of overwhelming
numbers of web sites that often impede, rather than assist students
in their research.”
More than 70,000 students have adopted the platform at both the university
level and grades 6-12. Grokker is generating great interest from educators
looking for a way to provide students with a better way to navigate
through vast amounts of data using a simple, student-friendly approach.
Educators have also responded enthusiastically to Grokker’s
collaborative features that allow students to save and share research
results in graphical maps or other file formats, thus extending the
value of their research and enhancing knowledge sharing and collaborative
learning.
Schools districts that have already adopted the platform include the
Manatee Unified School District, Florida; the Brownsburg County Schools
in Brownsburg, Indiana; the Las Cruces Unified School District in
Las Cruces, New Mexico; and the Ramapo Unified School District in
Hillburn, NY.
“Working with Stanford, school districts, and leading educators
has given us tremendous insight into the needs of the education market
at every level,” said R.J. Pittman, co-founder and CEO of Groxis.
“What we’re hearing is that the time has come for a tool
that integrates all the knowledge that exists viathe Web and presents
it in a way that enables people to do more than just search —
to think, analyze and discover.”
New Features
Grokker E.D.U. has been designed to support many new research databases,
such as WorldCat, Library of Congress, HighWire Press, and others.
Groxis plans to release these research-ready plug-ins for Grokker
E.D.U. soon after the launch, and continuing throughout the upcoming
year. Grokker E.D.U. also provides customized features, such as a
bibliography generator, a list maker, and map and text exporting capabilities.
The Stanford implementation provides the Grokker platform to all students,
faculty and staff, giving them a single point of access to Socrates,
the Stanford Library information system; HighWire Press; Academic
Search Premier; Expanded Academic; the Library of Congress; and seven
internet search engines. The platform’s cross search feature
allows users to create a single query from any combination of these
information sources and returns a visual map containing results from
all selected sources.
“Grokker E.D.U. is adaptable
to fit the specific needs of the educational institution and the student,”
said Pittman. “Our approach is to deliver what is needed, how
it is needed, and as we continue gaining momentum in the education
market, we will be delivering a growing library of information sources
to meet the needs of educators and students worldwide.”
About Groxis
Groxis is a pioneer in visual information software technology and
the creator of the first breed of Graphical Information Interface
(GII) software called Grokker™. The Grokker software makes information
research easy, intuitive, and sensible. One software platform for
every person, profession, and pursuit. Grokker information maps are
an innovative information currency that radically improves the way
people, groups, and organizations discover, organize, and convey large
amounts of information. A privately held company backed by leading
venture investors, Groxis is based in San Francisco’s financial
district.
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