Annotation system

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
• On-screen annotation (annotate a screen that is on display)
• 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

• Annotation (Wikipedia)

Bibliography

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