Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
tions of shared annotations. For this purpose, the participant had the task to browse
through shared annotations of other users and to find specific annotations. These
shared annotations were made by other participants in the previous study during
their computer science lectures. Finally, in order to assess the ability of digital pa-
per bookmarks to support cross-media navigation, we displayed a random slide in
the software viewer and asked the student to find the corresponding page in the pa-
per stack using the bookmarks he or she had created before. After the experimental
session, feedback was gathered with a questionnaire containing 64 closed and open
questions. These covered general questions about the usability of CoScribe, more
specific questions on the visualization of shared annotations, on bookmarks, on the
paper layout, on the general behaviour in lectures and personal questions. Finally,
we conducted a semi-structured interview to gather further qualitative feedback. The
entire session was videotaped.
Results and Discussion
Participants reported that in their established practice without CoScribe, handwrit-
ten annotations are typically not shared with other students due to the large effort
that would be involved. We asked the participants for what purpose they would use
shared notes. Of the variety of answers provided, five users mentioned that they
would read the comments made by specific students known to take good notes. Two
users stated that notes of different users complement each other, since there is not
enough time during a lecture to note all information of importance. Two other users
stated to correct own notes with the help of others. In the questionnaire, all partic-
ipants judged CoScribe to be very helpful for collaboration (
M
=
4
.
9 on a 5-point
Likert scale,
SD
9).
We evaluated the novel multi-user visualization of handwritten annotations. For
displaying personal annotations, the multi-user view is equivalent to the single-user
view because the symbols for shared annotations can be easily hidden. Figure 5.12
shows results that compare the single-user view with the multi-user view concerning
shared annotations of other users. The participants judged the multi-user view as
morehelpfulwhenseekinganoverviewofthem(
M
=
.
3,
N
=
=
4
.
3,
SD
=
.
9vs.
M
=
2
.
1,
SD
001).
They judged this view to be roughly equally helpful for finding a specific shared
comment (Fig. 5.12). Participants also judged the multi-user view to be roughly
equally clear as separate views (
M
=
9,
N
=
9). This result is highly significant (
T
=
−
6
.
64,
df
=
10,
p
<.
=
.
=
.
=
.
=
.
=
9).
To compare the efficiency of both modes, we measured the time needed by the
participants to find an arbitrary question and a specific comment on a given slide for
each mode. Figure 5.13 shows that in both tasks, students found them much more
quickly using the multi-user view (
M
4
3,
SD
7vs.
M
4
6,
SD
5,
N
=
1
.
1s,
SD
=
.
4vs.
M
=
2
.
5s,
SD
=
0
.
5and
M
6 after having removed obvious
outliers). These data are thus in keeping with the subjective ratings, but can only be
considered a qualitative indication due to the small sample size. They support the
=
4
.
4s,
SD
=
1
.
6vs.
M
=
8
.
0s,
SD
=
4
.
8,
N
=
