Review

      Undoubtedly, Tablet PC’s are a new and challenging technology which can provide multiple facilities. In the e-learning environment, PC tablets or other pen-based devices can offer great improvements through the development of active and collaborative learning systems like the one our project aims to develop.

      These kind of systems are considered to be effective and flexible from the teaching point of view and seem to encourage student involvement in class and interaction between students and instructors. From what I’ve read, most of the existing pen-based annotations systems, or other digital ink applications, were developed in C#, using the Microsoft .NET Framework which will give a plus of difficulty to our Java based project.

      While searching articles regarding our point of interest, amazingly, I didn’t find out any papers on pen-based annotations systems for web pages. I found several examples of textual and graphical annotations systems for web, but none of them had support for digital ink.

      In return, it seems that slide-based annotations systems are quite wide spread. Most of them were born from research projects at different universities cross over the world, and had the goal to integrate new digital ink technologies in systems that are used to deliver lectures. Two relevants examples, in this sense, are:

• Classroom Presenter, a system developed at the University of Washington and that can be freely (for educational use) downloaded from the Internet
  
  
• DyKnow, a project started at the DePauw University and which nowadays is a widespread commercial product, used in active and collaborative learning

      These systems, which run on a Tablet PC or a pen-based mobile computer allow the instructor to handwrite over computer-projected slides. The slides and ink are then multicast to other machines for students’ use. Students have the ability to take notes with the pen and to offer real-time anonymous feedback to the instructor. The ink annotated slides can be saved for review after lecture, or made available electronically to the students.

      Altough digital slide projection is controversial it has a number of advantages, including the ability to structure material in advance, prepare high quality examples and illustrations, easily share and reuse material and facilitates distance learning.

      These kind of systems seemed to be well received by the students. Their general opinion was that such systems can considerably increase spontaneity in lecture presentation. They also feel that are encouraged to engage in classroom activities and to work in teams. Exchanging ideas with their colleagues on a particular topic help them to construct new knowledge .

      If we decide to annotate slides in our project then, certainly Classroom Presenter and DyKnow will be two good systems to test and familiarize ourselves with. In this context Classroom Presenter has the advantage of being freely distributed for educational use, while DyKnow is a commercial product.

      Returning to the Web annotations systems subject, I must underline again that these systems seem to be less developed than the slide-based ones, from their capacity to accept pen-based technology. The best known tools for web annotation are listed in the following link: http://annotation.semanticweb.org/annotationtool_view. It seems that most of them accept textual not graphical annotations.

      By me, two representative examples of such web technologies are: Annotea and OntoMat. These are Sematic Web based projects which use RDF (Resource Description Framework) metadata and OWL(Web Ontoloy Language)-markups. One big benefit using Semantic Web technologies and metadata is that user generated metadata can be easily combined and reused in many other applications.

      The technologies mentioned above keep annotations and bookmarks in specialized objects which can be extended.These objects are web resources that have a URI (Uniform Resouce Identifier), contain some RDF metadata and normally include a property reffering to some other Web resource. Annotations are used for sharing comments, notes, questions, explanations, discussion threads and so on and provide better collaboration over the web. One main advantage provided by these systems is that all the data can be structured on topics and categories and therefore can be easy manipulated.

      As a conclusion I must remark that most of the existing pen-based software applications use Microsoft technologies. Even if is about licensed programs like OneNote or OfficeXP and 2003 (that enable ink annotations on presentation slides) or applications developed using the well known Tablet PC SDK it seems that Microsoft has gained a lot of popularity in the pen-based technology. This will increase the difficulty of our project because it is Java based. We’ll have to decide which framework to use and how we'll develop an API that will properly satisfy our needs.