Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Scenario 10 (Catching up on a Lecture)
Sally was ill for some days and missed
several lectures. She therefore carefully reads the annotations that her learning
partners have made during the lectures.
Scenario 11 (Collaborative Notetaking)
Sally attends a course in which the hand-
out is not very detailed. For this reason, the students take very extensive notes and
sometimes there is not sufficient time to note everything which is important. Hence,
Sally and two other students have agreed to jointly take notes. Each person is re-
sponsible for one particular aspect and notes everything which is related to this
aspect. After the course, each of them completes his or her own notes with the notes
of the two other students. This leads to more comprehensive notes.
In this section we discuss how to effectively visualize shared handwritten annota-
tions that multiple users have made on their personal copies of the same document.
An aggregate view that integrates handwritten annotation would quickly become
cluttered or even illegible when displaying a large number of possibly overlapping
annotations of different users directly on the document. We present a digital and
a paper-based visualization which integrate shared handwritten annotations more
effectively.
The CoScribe viewer provides digital access to both own and shared annota-
tions. It includes a
single-user view
for each member of the user's learning group.
This separates the annotations of different users into different views. While each
of these views in itself becomes easier to read, this implies the need to manually
switch between views of different users. This becomes particularly cumbersome in
larger communities. For this reason, CoScribe also features a
multi-user view
which
combine both one's own and shared annotations in an integrated visualization. We
examined three different approaches. First, overlapping annotations could be moved
to the margin of the documents. This implies the drawback of separating annotations
from their context. Annotations that visually refer to the context (e.g. underlinings,
arrows, captions for printed elements) can become illegible. As a second solution,
the white spaces within a document page could be stretched to provide enough space
for all annotations. However, this could result in very large document pages in cases
where are many annotations. Moreover, multiple annotations that refer to the same
element might loose their context.
We opted for a third technique which consists of varying the size of individual
annotations: collapsing annotations that are currently not relevant and expanding an-
notations that are in the user's focus. In the CoScribe viewer, one's own annotations
are visualized as they are written on paper (Fig. 5.7 (1)), whereas shared comments
of other users are displayed in a condensed form. Instead of the annotation itself,
a small icon is visualized at the position of the annotation (Fig. 5.7 (2)). This icon
corresponds to the annotation category and varies in size according to the size of
the annotation. When hovering with the mouse over the icon or tapping with the pen
on it, the annotation is expanded and displayed within its context and in its original
size (Fig. 5.7 (3), annotation with grey background). The user can copy shared an-
notations that are considered especially relevant to his or her own script. They are
then displayed in their decompressed form like one's own annotations. Moreover,
