Annotation tool for enhancing e-learning courses

One of the most popular forms of learning is through reading and for years we have used hard copy documents as the main material to learn. With the advent of the Internet and the fast development of new technologies, new tools have been developed to assist the learning process. However, reading is still the main learning method that is an individual activity. In this paper we propose a highlighting tool that enables the reading and learning process to become a collaborative and shared activity. In other words, the highlighting tool supports the so-called active-reading, a well-known and efficient means of learning. The highlighting tool brings to the digital environment the same metaphor of the traditional highlight marker and puts it in a social context. It enables users to emphasize certain portions of digital learning objects. Furthermore, it provides students, tutors, course coordinators and educational institutions new possibilities in the teaching and learning process. In this work we expose the first quantitative and qualitative results regarding the use of the highlight tool by over 750 students through 8 weeks of courses. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33642-3_6.EC/ECP 2008 EDU 428016CAPE

Does Applying Screenshot Annotations Enhance Learning Effectiveness? The Moderating Role of Course Difficulty

The rapid growth of information technologies has given rise to a variety of e-learning platforms. However, simply providing multimedia instructional materials does not necessarily improve users’ understanding of the instructional content. The study makes use of Flickr annotations, including stickers, drawings, and texts, to improve users’ learning performance while learning computer software. All users are able to upload screenshots to Flickr to demonstrate computer software problems and troubleshooting software. To clarify what their screenshots mean, they can describe their problems or provide their opinions by attaching annotations to a specific screenshot. Through the use of annotations, Flickr provides the users with an easier way to describe or understand problems. This study comprised a three-course investigation. In addition to understand users’ learning effectiveness, two context-related factors, peer opinion and personal innovativeness, were chosen as the basis for the research model. Based on data collected from 281 students, the results indicated that peer opinion had a positive effect on intention, whereas the effect of personal innovativeness, surprisingly, was negative rather than positive. Besides, the results based on the three computer software courses with different levels of difficulty confirmed the moderating effect of course difficulty

Dissertation by portfolio : an alternative to the traditional thesis

Both the absolute numbers and proportion of international students in the student cohorts of postgradute computing and engineering courses rose dramatically between 2005 and 2009. One of the hardest tasks these students have to perform is the production of a dissertation in English. This paper will concentrate on experiences with students studying computing masters level courses. This paper asks the question whether we are assessing a student's skills with academic English or their ability to meet the learning outcomes of the dissertation module. It will present an alternative to the traditional written dissertation in the form of a portfolio model which is applicable in highly technical research projects. The lessons learned from a pilot project which introduced portfolio dissertations to the Department of Computing at Sheffield Hallam University will be presented along with plans for the next stage of implementation

Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

Requirements for an Adaptive Multimedia Presentation System with Contextual Supplemental Support Media

Investigations into the requirements for a practical adaptive multimedia presentation system have led the writers to propose the use of a video segmentation process that provides contextual supplementary updates produced by users. Supplements consisting of tailored segments are dynamically inserted into previously stored material in response to questions from users. A proposal for the use of this technique is presented in the context of personalisation within a Virtual Learning Environment. During the investigation, a brief survey of advanced adaptive approaches revealed that adaptation may be enhanced by use of manually generated metadata, automated or semi-automated use of metadata by stored context dependent ontology hierarchies that describe the semantics of the learning domain. The use of neural networks or fuzzy logic filtering is a technique for future investigation. A prototype demonstrator is under construction

The Learning Dialogue of University Language Students in a Digital Environment for Online Text Annotation

The article discusses how an open access tool for collaborative online interaction (Hypothes.is) can be used to enhance collaborative and individual actions of language awareness and critical multimodal awareness for groups of undergraduate and postgraduate university students of English as a foreign language. The research questions focus on how student online collaboration can contribute to (or hinder) the process of critical analysis of multimodal texts, and to what extent collaboration through a digital environment can promote learner autonomy and peer learning through shared discourse and online/offline actions. The digital environment which is the main digital context of interaction for the study is LearnWeb/CELL: CELL (Communicating in English for Language Learning) is a community hosted within the LearnWeb digital environment developed by the L3S Research Center at Leibniz University (Hanover, Germany) (Marenzi 2014) and it is customized as a collaborative environment for undergraduate and postgraduate language courses at the University of Udine (Italy). The LearnWeb developers have embedded an open access application for website annotation (Hypothes.is) in the LearnWeb/CELL digital environment, so that it can be accessed and used by students and teachers. In the study we focus on the reflective learning dialogue that takes place between students when they analyze texts collaboratively. In general terms, this learning dialogue is usually rather elusive and difficult to capture because it happens informally outside the classroom. Our starting hypothesis was that the digital functionalities and affordances of Hypothes.is in CELL would capture at least a part of that learning dialogue and, more specifically, they would record what the students decide to disclose and reveal through their online annotations. Within the limitations of a small-scale study, the paper discusses the students\u2019 individual and collective process of reflection on multimodal text analysis. This use of the digital environment allows teachers, researchers and the whole class to \u2018see\u2019 the powerful effect of learning with peers and from peers while developing learning autonomy and exploring learning strategies