Amir Michail, the developer of a new service called Study Stickies, wrote an email asking me to look at and comment on his new service. Study Stickies is a ‘social’ note taking service for students. It allows them to enter info about textbooks, vodcasts, podcasts, PDFs and URLs and add study notes, linked to specific sections of these resources, which can also be tagged for finding and re-finding by others. It also seems to handle mathematical notations with ease.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea; indeed it reminded me of the “conversations” I’ve had with previous owners of second hand textbooks, evoked by their marginalia.

My issue, and what feels like it may be a challenge to adoption for a service like this, is around “where” the annotation takes place, “how” it occurs, both of which tie into the “why.” For instance, to annotate a textbook one needs to first enter in it’s ISBN number. But we already have a few places where students can find their textbooks online, either their library catalogues or amazon.com. A “web 2.0″ approach, that took seriously the value in leveraging existing services, would either offer a way (say a bookmarklet) for users to cite the thing they are commenting on *in context*, or, say like LibraryThing, at least tie into the APIs of Google and library catalogues everywhere to offer a query service. This is the kind of thing I often hear dismissed as an “implementation detail” (god how I hate that phrase) but it’s one of those small things that has lead to the uptake of countless web 2.0 sites that ‘get it’ and which is not done in countless web 1.0 sites that don’t. This is the “how” I refer to above.

The second piece is the “where” – the annotation systems that really excite me, for this is in essence what Study Stickies is, are the ones, like Trailfire, that reveal the annotations in context, while I am looking at the very thing that is annotated, especially for the “re-finders.” Think back to my above comment about marginalia in second hand books; this is how the experience should work like, instead of like finding someone’s notebook from last year’s class and then piece by piece connecting it back to the pieces of content on which it is commenting.

And both of these minor “implementation details” for me tie into the “why” people do (or do not) use services like this. If it allows me to easily add a note, while I am studying materials online, then I am motivated to use it for my own uses, and the network benefits from my personally motivated actions. People often point to “tags” as being the fundamental reason for del.icio.us success, but I would argue that the bookmarklets and toolbars that allow you to easily add to it were equally part of its success. And if, while looking at a resource, I am told that there are already notes from others which may be of relevance to me, I become motivated, again for selfish reasons, to take advantage of the network resource and increase its value.

Maybe these issues are not fatal flaws for Study Stickies. I can see ways in which they can address these as they move forward, and clearly it is a very young system. But I’d suggest that small “implementation details” like this are actually some of the things that lead to explosive growth for many of these new systems.

Yet there is an important thing Study Stickies has which the more “internet-wide” systems don’t, and that’s context. When you find an annotation in Study Stickies, by definition it’s a “study note,” something that a user in a likely not-too-dissimilar context to your own made, which offers a good chance of enhancing its value to you. In an internet-wide system like Trailfire, who knows who made the mark and whether it has any value to you. Sure, sometimes they’ll bear serendipity, but as many times, not, and worse, things that by right and by law we are often required to shield out. Or else, what is now more common with the current generation of social software systems, you can form a group, but its yet another ad hoc group built anew with each app that comes along.

—snip—

I have been trying for almost a week to finish this post. I wanted to talk about the critical need for not just open identification but, as importantly, open authorization. How their absence has allowed things like the Blackboard patent to flourish (read it, what do you think it’s about). And how these will provide the impetus for the next huge round of innovation, truely, social computing. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it in the time I have. So there. Rather than let this post go totally stale, click ‘Publish’ and be done with it. – SWL

So a little more on Trailfire – I mentioned in the first post that you can set it to see ‘marks’ on any page that others have added to their own trails. I have that setting turned on, and got this pleasant surprise while in Google Reader this morning – someone had added a mark to this page with all of the Google Reader hotkeys in it, so now with a simple mouse over I get annotated help on this page. While I am not totally thrilled with where Trailfire places the tiny icons on the page indicating that a mark already exists (they sometimes obscure the content) the potential for adding in-context help to any web page or application, unfacilitated by the page owner themselves, seems quite useful, and certainly makes my learning the Google Reader hotkeys all that easier. – SWL

P.S. – Alan, thanks again for the Muntandina tracks from Magnatune; bringing a huge ray of sunshine to a grey Wet Coast day.

Staying with the Sakai-theme for a bit (but in fact the more interesting theme emerging for me is “affable web-based tools for rich media manipulation,” more to come), in the Sakai wiki I came across Project Pad from Northwestern University. It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription. The suite includes two tools for searching and managing content stored in external digital media repositories such as Fedora systems, Z39.50 library catalogs, and Google and uses the Common Query Language. And it looks to be becoming integrated with Sakai. Not sure this is a flickr-killer (but who says it needed killing anyways) but maybe one alternative worth investigating for those attracted by some of that functionality (it is actually much broader) but uneasy with sending their faculty off to 3rd party commercially hosted services. – SWL

That edubloggers links feed has already paid off a number of times – this morning Alan furl’d this new site, in essence del.icio.us for academic citations.

So what not simply use del.icio.us instead. Well you probably could, but the advantages seem to be:
- the “most active” tags that have currently emerged come much more from the world of scholarly jargon (jargon’s not always a bad thing, you know)
- a nice feature specific to academics, the site allows you to export your collection to either BibTeX or Endnote to help build a bibliography.

Will it take off? Who knows. It does offer RSS feeds on keywords; for instance, here’s one on self organization. – SWL

Likely to be the only other post before the holidays; another Christmas present, this one from Alan Taylor’s Eintagsfliegen. A bookmarklet (I think now only for IE, but apparently could be done in Mozilla) that “converts all text hyperlinks into footnotes, and lists out their URLs at the bottom of the page.” I can see a number of places where this could come in handy. – SWL

And now I realize why – you ultimately need to see this in action in a multi-machine setting to really appreciate how powerful a digital tool to support classroom learning this could be. I think the folks at Silicon Chalk appreciate this and so are doing lots of demos, and are also creating more movies (cf.
http://www.silicon-chalk.com/tutorials.htm) to better illustrate what they are trying to do.

But still I’ll give it my own small stab:

• both students and instructors must have a client application installed on their machines. Whoever spawns the class session has instructor status by default and all other users by default are students. The system can allow the clients to communicate in a peer-to-peer fashion over an 801.11b wireless network, and there is also a server that makes it possible to work over a regular LAN/WAN/internet
• the software enables the instructor to share a bunch of things (powerpoint; regular screenshots of open apps, browsers, windows) with the students. This is all recorded on the client machine
• the software also records audio, presumably a mic attached to the instructor. This is also pushed to the client and in the case of students sitting in the same space can be ‘muted’ but is still recorded locally
• the software has a number of student-focused tools that allows the students to make notes etc on what is currently happening
• there are some other tools (questions, pace survey mechanism, comprehension survey mechanism, doc sharing and return) that are also enabled and recorded.
• The software records all of these events, and the student can then review the entirety of the class through the client. Much of the content is searchable, so an intelligent usage of the software by a student would have them making significant notes that they could search on and re-locate themselves at the point in the class when they occurred – and see the app being shared/the site being view and hear the commentary by the instructor.

If it’s not clear yet, the power seems to me that it creates an archive of the session with any of the student’s personal notes or other interactions set in context. Each student’s recording will be different as it will have some of the same core material, but they may have had their screen set up differently (it has a very cool interface to deal with multiple ‘windows’) and certainly their inputs will al be unique. And it’s digital and searchable.

Personally, I wasn’t one of the people who recorded lectures, and my note taking was always sporadic – I learned through engagement in dialogue and it was only by trying to re-phrase and wrestle with what I was being taught that I came to understand it. But had I had a tool like this, I think I could have still engaged in this form of learning AND ended up with a dynamic archive of the session to help me recall more specific details, never my strongest point.

I’m really interested to hear who Silicon Chalk think is in their market space. Certainly some of the synchronous tools and some of the groupware collab tools do pieces of what this does, but in my experience none of them do it with the intense focus and obvious experience in both the teaching and learning experience, and likely not in the $15-30/client range. That’s per client/year, not per client per class. There’s a free full-featured trial version that has a 4 month time limit. And they even have an option for 4 month licensing periods (they know how long a typical term is!)

This is likely only the start, but I really was excited to see this. IMHO, if you teach in a lab setting or in an institution that has a laptop program (as these are the places where this technology makes most sense to begin with) it behooves you to check out this software. – SWL