Collaborative Annotation / Social Reading

1 Requirements

1.1 General Idea

Up to this point ILIAS supports a number of funcitonalities that focus on creating texts collaboratively, commenting on  whole texts (files, etc.) or on discussing things in a forum. However, learning in a social (read: cooperative / collaborative / collective)  manner comprises more aspects than just producing texts together. A great deal of student's study time is devoted to reading texts and scientific articles. This is still a very lonesome task to fulfill on ILIAS.
 
Thus we propose the development of functionality taht makes it possible to activate students when they have to deal with reading / consuming learning material in general by implementing an annotation funtionality. In a nutshell, students should be able to interact collectively through textual material with each other by highlighting, marking, commenting and possibly sharing passages of this material within the respective material.

The following points have been derived in several phone calls and a joined online meeting with members of the University Gießen, Univerity of Stuttgart, Univerity of Freiburg, FH Dortmund, U.Kohnle and the University of Berne. It should be seen as the starting point to evolve into a real implementation process, but dearly needs input from the JF as to what is feasible and what is, in this universe, definitely not possible.

1.2 General feature spectrum for annotations / our definition of annotations:

• all actions that we propose should be done and made visible close to the content they relate to, i.e. next to the marked text passage, on the same screen, wihtin the same file, learning module, ...
• two different modi of annotations should be considered: private and "public", similar to the way this is handled in learning modules already
• highlighting / marking passages
  • it should be possible to highlight passages of text ranging from single words/characters to entire paragraphs and pages
  • highlighting should be done using user specific colours (similar to the authorship colours of an etherpad) or colours that have been deliberatly selected by the users to represent a certain meaning (depending on the scenario, for example, "mark all passages taht you agree to with green, all passages that you disagree with yellow") [configurable]
  • authorship colours should be decipherable, users should be able to see who highlighted what [configurable]
• "inline" commenting and responses
  • it should be possible to "glue" comments to highlighted passages, paragraphs, pages
  • a comment should appear next to the text it belongs to, i.e. on the margin
  • a comment should contain the "identifier" (name / username / ...) of the author
  • it should be possible to respond / reply on a comment. the response should then be "attached" visually to its "parent" comment
  • anonymous (pseudonym) commenting should also be made possible, similar to the way this is handled in a discussion forum [configurable]

• marker flags / labels / tags
  • it should be possible to mark passages / paragraphs with labels, markes or flags (e.g. "socialist ideology", "capitalist thinking", "anarchist structure")
  • this could be done as a collaborative,  "inline" version of the ILIAS tagging functionality
• owner of a annotatable object should be able to enable disabled this feature for the object (similar to public commenting and rating for objects)
• export annotation data (in some cases and in some way)
  • comments and highlightings could / would have to be saved within the object they belong to
  • whether this should be done with personalised data or anonymously has to be discussed
  • importing annotation data should be possible, e.g. from PDFs
  • flags / labels should be exported along with the content (even in learning modules) [configurable]

What should be annotatable?
We have not come to a definite conclusion on this point, but we see several areas in ILIAS that would profit from such a feature.

• PDF files which already have inbuilt standards for comments, highlightings, ...
• ILIAS page editor content, e.g. in learning modules, wikis (in presentation view, annotators doesn't have to have the right to edit the page content)
• images both as files and as ILIAS page editor elements (passages of an image would then have ot be areas marked specified by image maps, hotspots, ...)

1.3 Potential Development Vectors

We realise that the requirements above are a) very detailed, b) complex and c) raise a lot of questions. We also realise taht there are several, possibly independent, scenarios and development vectors in which our annotational dreams could become true.
 

• Vector 1 "focus on PDF annotation": this might lead to something very similar to the "social reader" that has already been realised in un.iversity.de. It is basically an online version (and subset) of the standard PDF annotations functions that PDF reading software already manages in a single user mode. This could be realised as a new repository object or as an extension of the file object.
  • xAPI might be another way to tackle this issue by "integrating" an external tool to accomplish our goals. In terms of privacy protection regulations simply connectiong to external (commercial) services / service providers is hardly / not an option. There might be no problems if a xAPI Learning Record Store is integrated in ILIAS because external tools are not necessary.
  • have a look at the iversity feature here: http://un.iversity.org/downloads/iversity_overview_de.pdf (page 6)
• Vector 2 "focus on ILIAS page editor" (ie. annotation in wikis, leaning modules etc.—annotatiting users should not necessarily need the right to edit page content per se): the might go into the direction of implementing "inline commenting" and highlighting for the ILIAS page editor. There are already some conceptual pages relating to this issue in the feature wiki, for example:
  • Add comments to single text-/media elements
• Vector 3 "mix and match": this would be the biggest shot being something like (Vector 1 + Vector 2) - "the limitiations of reality".

1.4 Technological Approaches

The open source project documentcloud could be worthwhile to have a look at, since it can be self-hosted and it has an annotation functionality already built in.
https://www.documentcloud.org
 

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Not scheduled yet (will be set by Jour Fixe)
• Funding: Required / Interest in funding: (please indicate if you are interested to fund this feature)
• Maintainer: (will be set by Jour Fixe)
• Implementation of the feature is done by (company, developer)
• Contract settled: No | Fill in "Yes" if a contract is already settled and add Institution / Organisation in "Funding" row
  
• Tested by / status: (name, e-mail), (status information set after implementation)

3 Additional Information

Contact the following persons if you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding:

• Information about concept: Marko Glaubitz, marko.glaubitz@rz.uni-freiburg.de
  
• Information about funding: Crowdfunding - Join us!
  
• Information about implementation: (name, e-mail)

4 Discussion

AT 2015-02-18: If you consider the annotation of PDFs please consider 'Nota bene': https://github.com/nbproject
It is really nice and could be integrated with ILIAS via LTI.

5 Implementation

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