The Study And Practice Of Social Annotation

Annotation is a greatly effective learning way to read books. Most Readers are accustomed to make notes about their understanding or comments in the margin of a book in order to facilitate remembering or understanding. Entering the information age, electronic document is widely employed and annotating electronic documents becomes more important than before. Then, foreign researches have developed a great deal of annotating softwares.In recent years, because of the rapid popularization of Internet and vigorous development of E-Learning, online reading becomes rather popular and annotating webpage tools are welcomed by readers. Accordingly, many studies and practices about annotating webpage have been implemented abroad since 1994. Kinds of annotating systems, such as CaMILE and CoNote, came out.Web2.0 is going to be one of the trends of Internet development in the future. Based on the analysis of four characters of Web2.0, this article puts forward the concept of Social Annotation (SA) according to existing achievements about webpage annotation overseas. The article defines SA as a web2.0-based and proxy-based webpage annotation. SA relates to several theories including Constructivist Learning Theory, Distributed Cognition and Social Interdependence Theory.For the sake of popularization of SA and deep study about the character of SA, the article designs and develops a SA prototype named Thinkmark. The article analyzes the implementation principle of SA system and proposes four modes of SA software. Then the article designs the system architecture, functions of server side and client side, and database table structure of Thinkmark.The server side of Thinkmark is based on three-tier architecture. The article introduces how Thinkmark develops database common access interface and database specific access interface, and how Thinkmark implements data presentation layer based on Smarty and picture checking code based on database.About the client side of Thinkmark, the article explains how Thinkmarklet loads toolbar, how an annotation anchor is located and annotation content is presented, as well as how a browser plug-in and an annotation autosaved function are developed.Eventually, the article makes clear the application of SA in education. It maintains that SA can be used as a personal knowledge management tool, a checking homework tool, an asynchronous contextualized communicative tool, a cooperative reading tool or an ontology annotation tool for educational semantic web.