A synchronous multimedia annotation system for secure collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies

Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?

Educators have been quick to spot the enormous potential afforded by virtual worlds for situated and authentic learning, practising tasks with potentially serious consequences in the real world and for bringing geographically dispersed faculty and students together in the same space (Gee, 2007; Johnson and Levine, 2008). Though this potential has largely been realised, it generally isn’t without cost in terms of lack of institutional buy-in, steep learning curves for all participants, and lack of a sound theoretical framework to support learning activities (Campbell, 2009; Cheal, 2007; Kluge & Riley, 2008). This symposium will explore the affordances and issues associated with teaching and learning in virtual worlds, all the time considering the question: is it worth the effort

Transforming pre-service teacher curriculum: observation through a TPACK lens

This paper will discuss an international online collaborative learning experience through the lens of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. The teacher knowledge required to effectively provide transformative learning experiences for 21st century learners in a digital world is complex, situated and changing. The discussion looks beyond the opportunity for knowledge development of content, pedagogy and technology as components of TPACK towards the interaction between those three components. Implications for practice are also discussed. In today’s technology infused classrooms it is within the realms of teacher educators, practising teaching and pre-service teachers explore and address effective practices using technology to enhance learning

'mat': A new media annotation tool with an interactive learning cycle for application in tertiary education

This paper provides an overview of the design process of a new online media annotation tool. This work-in-progress report will step through some design decisions as aided by reviewing learning theory and related experiences outlined in the literature; design principles from a user interface perspective; and user testing of the first design iteration. The first of a three stage development of the media annotation tool, 'mat' (MAT), is designed for learning from video, with later stages enabling other media (audio, image, other) plus assignment building with media inserts. User testing reinforced several design decisions plus initiated some change

Symmetric Synchronous Collaborative Navigation

Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to a problem-solving-oriented e-learning system

Video annotation tools

This research deals with annotations in scholarly work. Annotations have been studied by many people. A significant amount of research has shown that instead of implementing domain specific annotation applications a better approach is to develop general purpose annotation toolkits that can be used to create domain specific applications. A video annotation toolkit along with toolkits for searching, retrieving, analyzing and presenting videos can help achieve the broader goal of creating integrated work spaces for scholarly work in humanities research similar to existing environments in such fields as mathematics, engineering, statistics, software development and bioinformatics. This research implements a video annotation toolkit and evaluates it by looking at its usefulness in creating applications for different areas. It was found that many areas of study in the arts and sciences can benefit from a video annotation application tailored to their specific needs and that an annotation toolkit can significantly reduce the time for developing such applications. The toolkit was engineered through successive refinements of prototype applications developed for different application areas. The toolkit design was also guided by a set of features identified by the research community for an ideal general purpose annotation toolkit. This research contributes by combining these two different approaches to toolkit design and construction into a hybrid approach. This approach could be useful for similar or related efforts

USING SOCIAL ANNOTATIONS TO IMPROVE WEB SEARCH

Web-based tagging systems, which include social bookmarking systems such as Delicious, have become increasingly popular. These systems allow participants to annotate or tag web resources. This research examined the use of social annotations to improve the quality of web searches. The research involved three components. First, social annotations were used to index resources. Two annotation-based indexing methods were proposed: annotation based indexing and full text with annotation indexing. Second, social annotations were used to improve search result ranking. Six annotation based ranking methods were proposed: Popularity Count, Propagate Popularity Count, Query Weighted Popularity Count, Query Weighted Propagate Popularity Count, Match Tag Count and Normalized Match Tag Count. Third, social annotations were used to both index and rank resources. The result from the first experiment suggested that both static feature and similarity feature should be considered when using social annotations to re-rank search result. The result of the second experiment showed that using only annotation as an index of resources may not be a good idea. Since social Annotations could be viewed as a high level concept of the content, combining them to the content of resource could add some more important concepts to the resources. Last but not least, the result from the third experiment confirmed that the combination of using social annotations to rank the search result and using social annotations as resource index augmentation provided a promising rank of search results. It showed that social annotations could benefit web search

Tools and collaborative environments for bioinformatics research

Advanced research requires intensive interaction among a multitude of actors, often possessing different expertise and usually working at a distance from each other. The field of collaborative research aims to establish suitable models and technologies to properly support these interactions. In this article, we first present the reasons for an interest of Bioinformatics in this context by also suggesting some research domains that could benefit from collaborative research. We then review the principles and some of the most relevant applications of social networking, with a special attention to networks supporting scientific collaboration, by also highlighting some critical issues, such as identification of users and standardization of formats. We then introduce some systems for collaborative document creation, including wiki systems and tools for ontology development, and review some of the most interesting biological wikis. We also review the principles of Collaborative Development Environments for software and show some examples in Bioinformatics. Finally, we present the principles and some examples of Learning Management Systems. In conclusion, we try to devise some of the goals to be achieved in the short term for the exploitation of these technologies

Location-based and contextual mobile learning. A STELLAR Small-Scale Study

This study starts from several inputs that the partners have collected from previous and current running research projects and a workshop organised at the STELLAR Alpine Rendevous 2010. In the study, several steps have been taken, firstly a literature review and analysis of existing systems; secondly, mobile learning experts have been involved in a concept mapping study to identify the main challenges that can be solved via mobile learning; and thirdly, an identification of educational patterns based on these examples has been done. Out of this study the partners aim to develop an educational framework for contextual learning as a unifying approach in the field. Therefore one of our central research questions is: how can we investigate, theorise, model and support contextual learning

BioMeRSA: The Biology media repository with semantic augmentation

With computers now capable of easily handling all kinds of multimedia files in vast quantity, and with the Internet now well-suited to exchange these files, we are faced with the challenge of organizing this data in such a way so as to make the information most useful and accessible. This holds true as well for media pertaining to the field of biology, where multimedia is particularly useful in education, as well as in research. To help address this, a software system with a Web-based interface has been developed for improving the accuracy and specificity of multimedia searching and browsing by integrating semantic data pertaining to the field of biology from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Using the Biology Media Repository with Semantic Augmentation (BioMeRSA) system, users who are considered to be `experts\u27 can associate concepts from UMLS with multimedia files submitted by other users to provide semantic context for the files. These annotations are used to retrieve relevant files in the searching and browsing interfaces. A wide variety of image files are currently supported, with some limited support for video and audio files