Instructional Technology
Conference 2007
Title: Social Annotation with the Explicator Firefox Extension
Name: Robert Fentress
Audience Level: beginner
Audience: faculty, librarians, instructional technology specialists, general
Length: 1 hour
Abstract:
This presentation will demonstrate how to create student-directed, distributed learning communities with the Explicator Firefox extension, currently in development at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Distance & Distributed Learning. Explicator allows any user with an account to embed annotations in any page on the web, share those annotations with user-defined groups, and comment on annotations left by others in a threaded discussion format. Such social annotation software allows students to share resources, questions, and insights in unprecedented ways.
Description:
The web has increasingly moved away from being a static presentation medium where users are simply consumers of information. Tools like threaded discussion forums, blogs, and wikis have made it possible for users to work together to produce and share information on the web. Unfortunately, not all sites include such user-input features, and those that do are usually based on communities that are limited to the site in question. User accounts and groups created on one system do not persist on other sites. Also, with threaded discussion forums and blog-feedback features, one’s comments or questions are placed at the end of the page or post, or on another page altogether, making it challenging to focus your discussion on just the relevant section of the content.
Learning management systems typically incorporate tools like discussion forums, but sharing information in this way is often cumbersome, decontextualized, and unidirectional. The professor might post a link in a discussion forum thread to a web page that she would like students to explore and comment on. Students must visit the page in question, read the material, jump back to the forum and post their responses. A student reading another user’s post to the forum, may need to jump to the web page in question to understand the context for the post, and then jump back to the forum to post his response. Perhaps a student thinks another site might be relevant to the discussion in question and so includes a URL in his post. Now there are three sites that a user may have to jump back and forth between, and users who haven’t read the post with the new link may lose this opportunity to learn from their fellow student’s explorations.
To deal with these difficulties, Virginia Tech’s Institute for Distance & Distributed Learning is developing a new extension to the Firefox web browser, called Explicator. It allows any user with an account to add annotations to selected text in any page on the web. When the Explicator extension is activated, links to the annotations are dynamically embedded at the appropriate points in the page and the annotations themselves are displayed in the browser’s sidebar. Any user can create a group and invite other Explicator users to join the group. Any member of a group can see the annotations left by all the members of that group and can comment on annotations left by others. This, in effect, provides the ability to have an embedded threaded discussion for any part of any page on the web, not just at the end of pages on sites that are running specific server-side software.
Explicator also functions as a simple social bookmarking tool. Every page that is annotated is automatically listed on that group’s page at the Explicator web site. The group page functions as a home base for this distributed learning community where the members can find links to pages their peers thought relevant to the group’s focus.
Session Type: Lecture/Presentation
Contact information/affiliation:
Robert Fentress
Senior Instructional Designer/Developer
Institute for Distance & Distributed Learning
Virginia Tech
3120 Torgersen Hall
Mailcode: 0445
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-1255
Equipment:
Internet enabled Windows PC with Firefox 1.5 or later at the instructor station with screen projector. Must have sufficient permissions on machine to install an extension to the Firefox browser.