Annotation system

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Introduction

There exist many kinds of annotation systems and therefore the term is quite ambiguous and context dependent. A general definition was given by Cousins et al. (2000):


Definition of annotation: An annotation is a commentary on an object that:

  • the annotator intends to be separable from the object itself
  • the reader interprets to be separable from the object itself
(Cousins, Baldonado and Paepcke, 2000).

Wikipedia defines an annotation as “a marked-up comment made to information in a book, document, online record, video, software code or other information.”, retrieved 18:22, 2 July 2009 (UTC).

Annotation systems in education

Used in education, annotation system can refer to a variety of technologies, e.g.:

  • text annotation systems (e.g. online word processors and web page annotation systems).
  • Anchored forums
  • Annotations of bibliographic entries or web pages, e.g. as in social bookmarking tools.
  • Tagging of various artifacts (articles, images, videos, genomes, etc.)
  • Adding controlled vocabulary to various artifacts (e.g. metadata
  • Note taking tools like Zotero that allow a a reader to add personal notes to a text or a web page
  • Educational classroom tools like Freestyler or Classroom Presenter, that allow participants to annotate slides, learner-built models and other artifacts.
  • Tools to annotate formal descriptions (e.g. genomes, visualizations, etc.)

Links

Bibliography

  • Cousins, Steve B.; Michelle Baldonado and Andreas Paepcke (2000). A Systems View of Annotations, Technical Report P9910022, Xerox PARC, PDF - PDF