By Jason Held, Andy Hoffner, and Brian Sax

 

an•no•ta•tion - noun. A note of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram

 

Working demo

A working demo of a preliminary version of AddNotes is available at http://www.arcanerain.com/newtest/notes.php. Source-code is available upon request.

 

Abstract

Our project, entitled "Addnotes," is an teacher to student and student to student interactive note system.  When thinking of a project idea, we brainstormed what communication barriers were hindering our learning experience.  We all came to the conclusion that static nature of class notes did not allow for any sort of flexibility.  For example, in our Geology class our teacher often uses a rather complex vocabulary in his class notes.  This requires every student to separately look up words they don't understand.  With the aid of the AddNotes system, one student can look up a word in question, add an annotation and all students will be able to see their annotation, thus saving precious time that could otherwise be put towards studying.  Through Addnotes' collaborative nature, students are able to share their own knowledge with each other by adding additional information to their teacher's notes.

 

Statement of the Problem

When thinking of a project idea, we brainstormed what communication barriers were hindering our learning experience.  We all came to the conclusion that static nature of class notes did not allow for any sort of flexibility.  For example, in our Geology class our teacher often uses a rather complex vocabulary in his class notes.  This requires every student to separately look up words they don't understand. Furthermore, the class notes did not adequately represent what knowledge was being presented during class. We wanted to build a system that allowed students to collect their separate knowledge in a single place, by allowing them to view, add, and edit class notes together. In short, we wanted to make class notes far more Web 2.0, by allowing consumers to become contributors.

 

As we explored technologies that would allow us to build this web-based system we tested several different methods of contribution. Our initial idea was simple annotation of currently existing notes, but there was a variety of different input methods at our fingertips. The main problem became not how we would code the system, but how best to allow addition of dynamic content. While time only allowed us to finish the annotative aspects, we envision a much more expansive set of collaborative tools, which we will cover later.

 

Rationale

This system is an important step in providing students with a way to legitimately share information with one another without having to know all their classmates personally or meet with all of them regularly outside of class. It encourages students to come together to contribute and distribute their knowledge to a single source.

 

“Complex design situations can therefore be characterized by a “symmetry of ignorance’’ [Rittel, 1984 #243], and the knowledge needed to solve a design problem is distributed among designers and their clients [Rittel, 1984 #71].”-Fischer

 

As an individual a student cannot be expected to know everything about the subjects presented in classes. But each if student brings their own knowledge, either freshly learned or well engrained, to a single source, they can form a nearly complete picture of the topic at hand.

 

 

Implementation of Project

When thinking about what the best kind of input-system would be best for students in a classroom, the web browser is the obvious smart choice.  More and more students are utilizing labtops during lecture. The web-browser is secure, cross platform compatible and the next generation browsers will easily rival desktop application performance.

 

Technical approach

The AddNotes system can be divided technically into the following components:

1.     Mysql server back-end: MySQL server 8.2 used for the storage of notes and annotations

2.     Apache web server: The host for the mySQL server, html and php scripts

3.     PHP scripting: The "add article" and student interfaces were developed entirely in PHP 5.2.

4.     HTML & CSS: Custom web site template and logos created to make AddNotes visually appealing and user friendly.

5.     Javascript:  We implemented custom Javascript components to "pop up" the "add annotation" box and also to show current annotations at the correct mouse position when the user hovers over a tagged word

 

 

Description of the System

The AddNotes system is comprised of three components:

1.     A server back-end (invisible to users): This is responsible for the storage of the teacher's notes as well as student annotations

2.     The "add article" interface:  A tool used by the teacher to post new notes

3.     The student interface: The page the students see, also the interface that allows the students to add annotations

 

 

Description of the system behavior

A typical AddNotes session may go as follows:  The session begins with a teacher posting a general outline of notes for the current lecture.  This is done through the AddNotes "add article" interface. As the lecture progresses, students in the class are able to add annotations to the posted notes and collaborate with each other in real-time. These additions to the notes are immediately updated to everyone who has the notes open.  Students are able to add annotations to the teacher's notes at anytime, even after the lecture, such as when they are studying for the exam.  Through this system students are able to collaboratively work together to gain a more complete and accurate understanding of the material.

 

 

Evaluation of the program / system

Overall, our system works well.  It provides a basic example of what we set out to do. With the currently implemented system, students can add notes to certain words that are already part of a larger set of notes. The system set up for submitting notes into the system also works well, which makes it easy to show examples of the functionality of the system.  The only shortcoming of the project, is that it was not fully developed into a rounded system.  We stuck to the necessary components when developing, instead of focusing on the surrounding web pages.  That is why there are currently only a few different pages viewed when using the system.  Another part of the system that we did not fully develop is the ability to add to annotations that have already been added.  This is obviously something that would be necessary in a fully developed version of our system, but as of now it is still possible to delete the previous annotation and replace it with a new one. This version does not deal with certain issues, like people that added spam as annotations in an attempt to trash the page.  We were thinking that it might be a good idea to implement a feature that would allow people to revert to last revisions, which would also prevent data from being lost.  This system works well for Wikipedia, and we assumed that it would work well for this system as well.

 

In the amount of time that we have had to work on it, we are happy with the system's current state. We used the knowledge and abilities we have in web design to create this system, and from this point can only speculate on what we could add if we had the time.

 

 

Potential further developments of your program

The AddNotes system we have created is just scratching the surface of possibilities. There are a great number of things we would add to the system given a good year’s time.

 

To make the service easier for instructors to use, we would incorporate methods to directly upload their notes in a wide array of formats. Most instructors post notes in either PDF or PowerPoint slides, so we would program was to parse these documents into useable html behind the scenes. We can do things like watch instructor’s RSS feeds to monitor when changes to their class pages have occurred automatically. We could even provide instructors with web space on AddNotes to host their own webpage, allowing them to centralize their web documents, announcements, and email through AddNotes alone. We would also like to provide a way for instructors to post calendar events, like test days, assignment due dates, and other events so that students could be automatically notified when items were due. We would integrate these with the notes, allowing students to see which notes are relevant to which events, and easily find references to material their about to be tested on.

 

Ideally this could incorporate student contributions as well, taking the burden off the instructor entirely. Students could upload notes on behalf of or in addition to the teacher’s notes. An authorization system tied to official university email addresses would allow us to tag notes and documents as official or unofficial.

 

We would also like to keep track of classes by title and code, so we can tie students from classes together and allow them to post questions, comments, notes, and calendar items without having to locate their classmates manually.

 

We could also archive notes from previous years, and provide students as well as teachers mechanisms to search and tag relevant documents from the archives. This way the knowledgebase grows year after year. The database of notes could eventually become a useful research tool. We could make it possible for students to search for other instructors and students notes for information. We could provide users with methods to snippets of several instructors notes to create new pages on specific topics.

 

I think the final step, as the database of annotations increased, is to provide direct access to annotations in a searchable, dictionary or encyclopedia-like format. The data students tag words with can then become a resource all on it’s own, and allow students to lookup terms without having to find them in the notes. When a word is tagged in the notes, it also is added to the annotation dictionary, and can when someone later searches for the term, they can read the collection of everyone’s annotations.

 

This can also be used to auto-annotate some documents, when applicable, with terms already defined in the database, providing a wealth of information that grows the more people use the system.

 

References

We did not base this idea off any known system.  We came to the idea of AddNotes by reviewing Web 2.0 technologies and came to the conclusion that Web 2.0 technologies could be applied to increase student-student and student-teacher collaboration in classroom settings.

 

Referenced quote is from Embedding Critics in Design Environments, Fischer et al. Available from: http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/embedded-critics-98.pdf