Social Annotation

Our next "Brain Gain" meeting of the Harvard Business School IT Group's Educational Technology & Multimedia team will focus on exploring Social Annotation and the trends and technologies surrounding it.  Our guest will be Robert Lucas.  I've cited many items on this blog from Rob in the past -- Rob is a Harvard University graduate and current master's student in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he has received a Reynolds Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship.  With interests lying at the interesection of education and social software, he has recently been researching social annotation and is working to start an online community for teacher collaboration.  You can view Rob's Teachers' Lounge blog for more info.

Here's how Wikipedia defines 'web annotation', which is the closest approximation to what we'll be discussing:

A Web annotation is an online-annotation associated with a web resource (typically a web page). By using a Web annotation system a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without actually modifying the resource itself.

The annotations can be thought of as being applied on a layer on top of the existing resource. Any particular annotation layer is visible to users who share the same annotation system and can remain transparent to all others.

We can review some of the existing social and web annotation systems currently available or in development:

• Annotea (and Annozilla, its implementation on Mozilla/Firefox).  This is an early version of this type of utility.
• HyLighter.  This is beta software that uses proprietary technology to create a simple and powerful annotation tool.
• The Processed Book Project (sometimes called PBOS, for Processed Book [Open Source] or [Operating System]). This is an open-source project initiated by Joseph Esposito, former CEO of Encylopedia Brittanica and founder of the internet's first online encyclopedia, Brittanica Online.  See the article in the online peer-review journal First Monday that announced the platform/project, and also see the software demo of Moby Dick online).  This is a good sample utility to review the range of tools available (excerpted from Wikipedia):
  • Annotation, which includes:
    • Text notes (which can also have their own annotations)
    • Outbound web links  that can be added to a document by someone other than the author or Webmaster
    • Inbound links from other Web sites or e-mail to specific points inside a document, which can be disconnected by the document author without deleting the page they connect to
    • BizVantage links to a proprietary dynamically updated Net "clipping service driven by user selected keywords, so that related, external content is discovered and connected to the Book
    • Bookmarks placed by the user for quickly returning to points in the document
  • Dissect text that "provides extraction, annotation and statistical reporting for both user supplied words/phrases, and for associated words/phrases found via an interface to the WordNet software's extensive catalog of connections among words/phrases.

As with all of the collaborative technologies we've discussed, the potential impact becomes magnified if you consider how these technologies spur or even just reflect changes in user patterns.  In other words, you can imagine how these utilities would be helpful under current paradigms such as disparate teams collaborating on documents, MBA class study groups wanting to annotate class review sessions, etc. But eventually we know that these technologies will change how new users (and open-minded existing users) approach, consider, and use these utilities.  From Wikipedia regarding the Processed Book Project:

The essay proposed that a "processed book" will become "a node in a network, with connections to other books, commentary, online library card catalogues, teachers' recommendations, and so forth"—connections linking both to and from the e-book. Esposito noted that this is very different from the "Romantic myth" of the "primal book...usually written by a single author, someone who has Something to Say."

The PBOS site goes on to say that "authors will begin to anticipate the processing of their books even as they write them, giving rise to new forms of expression." So they're not even talking about how this might affect content consumers, but content creators.  They go on to give insightful history about the concept itself:

The specific event that sparked the idea took place several years ago, when I happened to see for the first time the Bloomberg online financial-information service.  On the screen were various kinds of financial data, organized as tables and charts; the data could be presented in various ways.  If you could do this with data for Wall Street bond traders, I wondered, what could you do with newspapers, reference works, even novels?  Bloomberg made information seem so malleable.

Finally, we should recognize that this type of utility is going to be much more valuable and necessary as digital print becomes more of a norm.  When digital print readers and eBooks truly become more commonplace then these types of utilities will become expected value add-ons.  Those of us working in the education arena would do well to intuit that we'll be among the first dealing with this phenomenon and we have a chance to shape our future by exploring these technologies now.  The Microsoft Reader scales content to Pocket PCs and Adobe has a reader for Palm OS.  It is only a matter of time before early-adopter students on our campuses are carrying Sony eInk readers that one could envision hyping faster than iPods (see BBC story).

Comments

[Jonah]

Hi,

We've been thinking about this theme too ;-)

Here is an annotation tool that we have been working on:
http://plone.org/products/stickies

This one is designed to work w/in the plone content management system, and this problem takes a slightly different shape when you control both the client and the server... But the javascript is real clean and is fairly general purpose.

Also see:

http://www.mystickies.com/

best,
/Jonah

[Jonah]

(but just to clarify, we had nothing to do w/ mystickies.com and though it looks similar and has a very similar name, it is unrelated).

[Denis]

Notes from today's meeting:

Rob explained that he had started using a tablet PC and thus was using the various readers (Microsoft, Adobe) and marking up content, noticing that the marks he was making were personal only and could not be shared (like, say, bookmarks could be shared via Delicious). Advantages include:
Individual comments help you organize your thoughts
Commenting in threads on other people's comments -- helps put content in context for readers
Early test show that it increases the number of people doing the reading - the fact that it leaves a visible trail seems to spur participation by users.
Helps maintain focus of discussion on the text itself
The big readers (MS, Adobe) do not yet support this type of interaction. To be determined whether some of the emerging e-book readers will.

-----------------------------
Example: www.hylighter.com
In Beta state -- developed at Florida State by David Lebow.
Rob walked us through marking up a document -- can create:
* "local" markups (just for you)
* "global" markups (shared, can be compared)
* "embedded" -- become part of master document

Color scheme:
* Your hylights = yellow
* Others' hylights = blue (varying in intensity depending on how many comments are there)
* Overlap = green, etc.

According to David Lebow they use open source software to convert docs to XML (X-docs), while PDFs are more complicated -- contracted with MA-based Cambridge Docs to convert.

Professors can access table views to see comments of how many users have contributed.

The team is now working with Univ of Florida and hope to ramp up development/rollout.

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Example: PBOS -- The Processed Book Project

Talked a bit about the history (see main blog entry). Good place to investigate more "big think" aspects about where publishing is going, etc. This is an open-source initiative with grant funding -- after 3 years plan is to drop it and hope appropriate parties pick it up.

-----------------------------
Discussion

HBS is a very wired campus but cases are still distributed hard-copy -- students want that hard copy for portability, ability to mark up, etc. Would they embrace something like this? Could envision study groups wanting to use this to either distribute workload, review for exams, etc. Group discussed that students do this anyways and hand down notes in a "black market". Coudl bring this in-house, moderate access, ensure more full participation, and remove access at end of year.

Hal (Baker Library) pointed out that he took a distance learning course and much of what you did was type on discussion boards but first had to define what the content was that you were referring to. This social annotation idea could address that problem.

Larry (HBS ETMM) recounted that HBS did have an experiment in distance learning that contained some Hylighter-ish features. You could hi-lite links on a page that then would pop out a threaded discussion page where you could define groups that would have access to that discussion. It worked but technologies were more primitive at the time so there were some challenges.

Group discussed how tablet PCs could really make this idea more attractive. And next-gen of e-readers (see eInk on main entry) could really revolutionize the use of utilities like this.

Rob noted that there is one factor that could limit this. These utilities rely on separating content from annotations -- but the tablet PC w/ PDF writer allows you to literally draw in a manner that is a "picture" above and beyond what could be done with these social annotation utilities. Group then chatted about technical challenges associated with this.

Dave G. (HBS IT Group PM) talked about the differences between books and web pages. Book represent a much deeper read and may necessitate a different set of utilities than would be used for annotating web pages. This reminds Dave of "Stickies" applications (see earlier comment to this blog entry).

Peter L. (HBS IT Group PM) noted that this could be used for cross-course learning teams of students that are now being formed (with collaborative projects assigned) at HBS.

Dave H. (HBS Multimedia) noted that benefiting students should be primary driver -- then we will figure out controlling mechanisms, etc.

Group discussed how tablet PCs could lead to more advanced readers could then start to lead to even more benefits for utilities like this. Readers and software are getting more advanced. Perhaps we could work with student Tech Committee to pilot some ideas.

[Denis]

Here's an article on Digital books from Business Week Online: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973111.htm?link_position=link1&campaign_id=nws_tech_Feb21