A Comparison Of Paper-Based And Online Annotations In The Workplace

A Comparison of Paper-Based and Online Annotations
in the Workplace
Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, Wolfgang Nejdl,
L3S Research Center, Leibniz Universität Hannover
Appelstr. 4, 30167 Hannover, Germany
{Kawase, Herder, Nejdl}@L3S.de
Abstract. While reading documents, people commonly make annotations: they
underline or highlight text and write comments in the margin. Making
annotations during reading activities has been shown to be an efficient method
for aiding understanding and interpretation. In this paper we present a
comparison of paper-based and online annotations in the workplace. Online
annotations were collected in a laboratory study, making use of the Web-based
annotation tool SpreadCrumbs. A field study was out to gather paper-based
annotations. The results validate the benefits of Web annotations. A comparison
of the online annotations with paper-based annotations provides several insights
in user needs for enhanced online annotation tools, from which design
guidelines can be drawn.
Keywords: Web Annotation, Online Collaboration, e-Learning, User’s
Behavior, SpreadCrumbs.
1 Introduction
Learning has become an integral part of many people’s everyday working life. Due
to a more knowledge-based society and rapid changes in technology, one often has to
search for and read information in order to keep up-to-date. Each individual presents a
set of cognitive strategies that involve the learning process: each person learns in her
own way, style and pace. At the same time, the character of learning at the workplace
has shifted from a solitary, paper-based activity to a Web-based activity, making use
of various resources, including discussion forums and social networking sites [1]. As
a result, one ends up with a large collection of scattered digital resources; due to
limitations of the Web, annotations – if any – are typically made separately (in a word
processor or on a paper sheet). By contrast, annotating paper documents is a natural
activity that involves direct interaction with the document and that is known to
support understanding and memorization [2].
The term annotation comprises several methods, including underlining and
highlighting text and writing additional comments in the margin. These activities are
shown to stimulate critical thinking in a process that can be called active reading [3].
All additional writing done by the reader can be considered a variety of annotation,
irrespective of its form - formal or informal, implicit or explicit, permanent or

transient - or its function - signaling for future attention, memory aiding,
interpretation, memory aiding or even reflections out of the subject.
In order to understand how to better support active reading and annotations in the
digital context, we carried out a study to compare how people annotate online with
how people create paper-based annotations. Specific attention is given to the type of
annotations, their function and perceived difficulties in creating and using these
annotations. Before presenting the comparative study, we present some theoretical
underpinnings. In section 2 we describe background research on annotations in the
learning process – including a categorization of annotation types and a comparison of
screen-based reading with paper-based reading. Specifics of annotation in the e-
learning context are discussed in section 3. We continue with our comparative study,
which consisted of a laboratory study making use of an online annotation tool –
SpreadCrumbs – and a field study in which we investigated common annotation
habits in the paper-based context. We end this paper with a discussion of the results
and their implications.
2 Annotations in Learning
In this section we provide an overview on the role of annotations in learning. First
we discuss a classification of different forms of annotation. We continue with a
categorization of reasons why people annotate while learning. At the end of this
section we explore various impediments for the take-up of annotation in the online
context.
Based on an extensive field research on textbooks, Marshall [4] categorized the
different kinds of annotations by forms and its functions. Below, we will discuss the
forms of annotation that are relevant for learning proposes and their functions during
the learning process:
- underlining or highlighting titles and section headings: this kind of
annotation serves as signaling for future attention. Drawing an asterisk near a
heading or highlighting it will remind the reader that there is something
special about that topic, something to be considered or explored in more
detail.
- highlighting and marking words or phrases and within-text markings: similar
to above, the main goal is signaling for future attention – from themselves or
from collaborators. The annotated pieces of text typically carry important
and valuable observations. The act of highlighting text also helps in
memorizing it.
- notation in margins or near figures: any kind of diagrams, formulas and
calculations that structure and elaborate the document contents. This type of
annotation is specifically meant to serve comprehension. An example is a
calculation near an equation or theorem presented in a text, to quickly check
its meaning and correctness.
- notes in the margins or between lines of text: these descriptive annotations
are usually interpretations of the document’s contents. These can be phrases
in the margin that summarize or comment upon a section or a page. Single

words are typically general terms, keywords and classification of a section.
Such annotations help the interpretation of the whole text where the reader
better establish the topic of the content of each part of the text creating his
own mental structure and decreasing the overall cognitive load.
In all of these cases the value of annotations are for both annotators and future
readers. Memory adding, signaling attention, problem working and interpretation
annotations definitely benefit the annotator but may also benefit other readers –
provided that the annotations are explicit, readable and understandable.
In collaborative group work, students typically work on the same content, but this
content is extracted from different resources: for example, they all have their own
copies of the obligatory textbook. This is a limitation inherent to paper-based
annotations. Even though the annotations are still useful for personal use, they fail to
play a role in the communicative and collaborative learning processes, which is a
barrier for the leverage of learning by social constructivism [5]. Web 2.0 technologies
explicitly facilitate these processes and their benefits on knowledge gathering and
construction have been lately discussed [6]. Moreover, by exchange of documents,
including annotations, remarks and insights, does not only serve the direct, content-
related goals, but also contributes to motivation and enjoyable professional
relationships [7].
Despite the many potential benefits of online collaborative environments in
comparison with traditional paper-based annotation, there are quite some issues
related to migrating reading and annotation to the computer. There is a vast body of
research [8, 9, 10, and 11] that discuss the many issues when moving from paper-
based reading to screen display reading:
- tangibility: in contrast to a text displayed on a computer screen, paper offers
physical tangibility. Readers can hold the paper as they like, they can move it
around to adjust their perspective and distance [9] – in order to improve
legibility [8] and even to facilitate handwriting [12]. Paper is also superior to
electronic devices in terms of legibility. Further, while reading one page,
readers can use another page for writing notes.
- orientation: paper documents give readers a better sense of location within
the text, by physical cues, such as the thickness on the sides of a book or
different paper materials in a magazine [10]. These cues support text
skimming and cross-reading and they are instrumental when trying to
relocate some text [13, 14]. Digital documents do not hold these
characteristics [8, 10], an issue that needs to be overcome by increased
attention for usability in device design and interface design.
- multiple displays: paper provides a single canvas for each page of text [15].
Each one holds unique properties of physical tangibility, text content,
modifications and additions from the readers. The virtual pages simulate this
on the single device screen, but in some cases supporting concurrence
reading from several documents turns to be an unwieldy task [10].
- cooperative interaction: by circulating a piece of paper, more than one
person can interact with the content and build upon each others’ annotations
[11]. Whereas groupware facilitates simultaneous revisions, versioning and
collaboration, it does not yet reach the intuitive interaction as provided by
circulating paper-based documents [16].

In addition to these usability issues, there are several technical issues that have been
examined [14] to understand the challenge of digital reading. In the context of this
paper, we are mainly concerned with the implications for annotations. A major
question is whether – given the required progress in terms of technology and interface
design – electronic annotations will be used in the same manner as the traditional
paper-based annotations. From the above there is evidence that due to inherent
differences when moving from the paper-based world to electronic devices, the
character of annotations will necessarily change.
Paper-based annotations have been used for centuries and can therefore be
considered a highly developed activity, one that represents an important part of
reading, writing, and scholarship. Annotation occurs in a wide variety of forms and it
is applied for many different purposes. Annotations not only add substance to the text
but also implicitly may reveal the reader’s engagement with the material [4]. Previous
research has verified that no matter the form or purposes of the annotations, the
benefits are immediately clear to the future reader [17]. Further, some researchers
state that people’s needs for making annotations in the Web environment do not differ
significantly from their needs in the paper environment [18]. In section 4 we shed
some more light on this discrepancy by empirically comparing these situations.
Before we continue to this section, we shortly discuss the role of annotations in Web-
based interaction and e-learning.
3 Web Annotations in e-Learning
The benefits and opportunities of electronic and automatic annotations, elaborating
on their paper-based counterparts, have long long ago envisioned by Vanevar Bush in
the Memex [19]. Bush envisaged that by relating all documents that users have read
and attaching their annotations to these documents, individuals could organize and re-
find information resources in an associative manner, together with any earlier
annotations. Whereas the original rich forms of annotations in Hypertext systems –
with different categories, directions and even multi-links – allowed for these
associative trails, in the Web as it is today this functionality is not totally fulfilled, as
readers have limited possibilities for sharing comments or questions by writing back
to the pages. As a result, users spend a lot of effort trying to comprehend the different
formats of how people comment on-line resources using coping strategies such as
sending comments via e-mail [20].
Recent Web 2.0 technologies provide an open resource environment where
individuals can freely collaborate. Nevertheless, these technologies typically only
cover just a slight portion of the Web or one specific kind of annotation. These
technologies are typically implemented as Web servers or browser enhancements.
The basic idea of a Web annotation system is that the user has the ability to
change, add or attach any type of content to any online resource, similar as she would
do it with a paper document. An application (usually a browser plug-in) enables the
user to modify the Web pages, highlight parts of it and add tags or comments, while
the back-end of the system just need to check these annotations and associate them
with the specific user and the specific URL.

As discussed in the previous section, by actively being involved with the text, users
can better memorize and understand it. By contrast, annotating on a computer-screen
is an activity that competes with the reading itself, due to the lack of direct
manipulation. However, users will do so when the benefits are higher than the costs in
terms of effort. These benefits may include the saving of time needed for re-finding,
summarizing, organizing, sharing and contributing online annotations. A rather
economical view on the balance between the drawbacks and benefits has been given
by [21]’s information foraging theory, in which he described the above activities as
information enrichment.
Today, both companies and academia institutions train learners to complete tasks
and solve problems through project-centered learning. Since it may not be feasible for
all participants involved in the projects to meet on a regular basis, they must be
assisted by information and communication technology. To support this collaboration
there are specific methods for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)
provided by learning environments and other platforms can be adapted to fit this need.
For the best results of the learning process, the methods should help each learner to
act individually to reach her own goals and to cooperate by sharing and discussing
ideas to accomplish an assignment.
As discussed in the previous section, in the same way annotations contribute for
memory aiding, text interpretation and information re-finding, Web annotations
provide the same functionality in the online environment. Web annotations are
accessible anytime and anywhere, with diverse sharing possibilities, clearly enhancing
workgroup collaboration [22] for cooperative tasks and learning processes. However
it is important to remark that the full richness of paper annotations will only be
achieved if the digital annotations hold the same beneficial feature of being ‘in-
context’. ‘In-context’ annotations are visible within the original resource, enhancing it
with the observations and remarks of the annotator, which are likely to help in
individual tasks in similar ways as is the case with paper documents [10].
Despite the limitations in terms of usability and tangibility, advantages of Web
annotation tools go far beyond the advantages of regular paper annotations. In
addition to the sharing capabilities within online communities, digital annotations can
be indexed, ordered, rated and searched. These benefits are confirmed by several
studies on annotations tools [e.g. 18], in which participants have remarked that search
the annotations is a very desirable feature.
Even though there are currently systems that support annotations, studies have
shown that users often resort to different strategies for simulating annotation tools,
making use of e-mails and messages to self and separated text documents. The main
reason for this phenomenon lies mainly in the necessary effort required for creating
and organizing annotations: “If it takes three clicks to get it down, it's easier to e-
mail” [2]. As users will inevitably resort to other strategies if annotation tools require
too much effort, it is necessary to have a lightweight capture tool, with flexible
organizational capacity, visibility and practical reminding. In particular if one takes
into account that many annotations are primarily meant as temporary storage, or a
means for cognitive support or as reminders, it becomes clear that these factors need

to be better taken into account in annotation tools for personal information
management and learning systems.
4 A Comparative Study on Paper-Based and Online Annotations
In order to better understand the real use of annotations and Web annotations, we
have implemented a straightforward online annotation system, SpreadCrumbs.
SpreadCrumbs provides a minimalistic interface for adding post-its notes, crumbs, to
any point within a Web page. Crumbs are used as personal reminders, for information
re-finding and for collaboration and social navigation support [26]. With
SpreadCrumbs, users can add annotations to any Web resource creating a collection
of bookmarks, add comments to the resources, visualize the annotations on the page
(in-context) and share these annotations. The post-it note contains the author, the
other users that can see this annotation, the topic and the comments – as shown in Fig.
1. To add a annotation, the user just has to select the option “Add Crumb” from the
right-click context menu. This action will pop-up a window where the user just need
to fill the topic and comments. Further, the user can choose some friends from her
social network to share this annotation with.
Fig. 1. Annotation with SpreadCrumbs on EC-TEL 2009 Webpage.
Using SpreadCrumbs, we have conducted a number of experiments. In the next
section we report a selection of the results, which provide insight in how users create
annotations for their personal use and for sharing. This laboratory study is
complemented by a field study in which we investigated in which situations users
chose to print documents, how they annotate them and whether and how they share

these annotated documents. The main goal of this research is to investigate the types
of annotations encountered online and on paper, and to find differences between these
two situations. The results of this study are expected to provide insight in differences
between these two situations and to provide design guidelines for the design of
annotation tools and the way they are used.
4.1 First Study: Annotation on the Web
The experiments with our annotation tool were conducted with 18 participants,
who all stated to be very proficient working with computer and internet technology.
From those, 16 are working in the field of computer science.
At the beginning of each session, in which only the participant and the
experimenter were present, the tool was introduced to the participant by giving a brief
overview of the usage of it. Following the introduction, we asked the participants to
answer a set of 10 questions by writing down the answer and annotating the resource.
These questions were specific information finding tasks that could be solved by a
brief internet search with any popular search engine. We ensured that most of the
questions were very specific domain questions or numerical in nature to reduce the
possibility of the participants to know the answers – an example: “What is the
estimate percentage of Chinese among the population of Brunei?”. The experiment
setup enforced the participant to annotate useful but hard to memorize information for
future reference – in fact, in a second round, we will ask the same participants to
actually re-find the information by making use of the annotations provided in the first
round.
During the experiment, the participants created a total of 207 annotations, covering
81 different Web resources. The average number of words per annotation was 4.1. An
important observation was that the participants in general carefully positioned the
annotations in the context of the Web page: from the 18 participants using
SpreadCrumbs, 16 placed the annotations of each question near the text, table, or
paragraph where they found the answers. This type of behavior is not supported by
the simple bookmarking functionality of regular browsers.
We noticed that out of the 18 participants who used SpreadCrumbs, only six of
them included the answers in the annotations while the majority opted for using
keywords of the respective question. Just one participant typed explicit full sentences
when annotating the pages: “There seem to be different walks - I'm not sure whether
the 9.4km walk brings us to the top, but I think so.” ; “.. made 35 homeruns in 2005.
Yes, I think this should be the right answer.”
Although the participants were very proficient with the computer, all of them
stated that they regularly print digital documents for reading, even when these
documents are relatively short (up to 8 pages). All of them confirmed that they
usually annotate those printed documents in one way or another, by means of
highlighting text and adding their own comments or insights in the margin.
This somehow contradicts a very interesting observation during the experiment.
One of the answers consisted of a short passage from a book (2 sentences with less
than 40 words). However, all of the participants demonstrated laziness when having
to write down the quote on paper. All of them asked the same question: “Do I have to

write the whole sentence?”. We allowed them to write down only the reference for the
passage (page and paragraph), a suggestion that was followed by all of the
participants. The contradiction arises since the participants do not desire to write if
they have the option of typing (or copy and paste) still they keep annotating with the
pen even though several means of digital annotation exist.
None of the users demonstrated problems regarding the usage of the tool. After the
short introduction, all of them performed the tasks of annotating and consulting
annotated resources without any effort or mistake. The participants demonstrated
enjoyment with the tool interface and functionalities. The direct manipulation and the
‘in-context’ features were the most appreciated. After having conducted the tasks, the
participants were handed over a questionnaire in which they had to choose terms from
a list of adjectives gave us a data set of the user perspective over the tool. This
questionnaire1
measures usability and satisfaction with a list of 118 adjectives,
positives and negatives. This methodology gives the participants more confidence to
be critical to the system choosing negative terms. The top 10 terms chosen were: Easy
to use, Usable, Useful, Collaborative, Helpful, Convenient, Connected, Friendly,
Innovative, Straight Forward. These results show us that the participants would be
willing to use such tool on a more regular basis.
Regular use of SpreadCrumbs. In addition to the laboratory study, we collected and
analyzed log files from users that were not involved in the experiments. The results
show some interesting differences that distinguish two behaviors when annotating.
Examining 177 shared annotations, we identified an average length of 10.35 words
per annotation, whereas from 371 personal annotations we found an average of 4.56
words per annotation. With the permission of the users we extracted some examples
of annotations that illustrate these numbers and the difference between the linguistic
structures of the notes – see Table 1.
The examples of personal notes show that these private annotations in many cases
contain a rather short, cryptic message. These annotations typically just consist of
keywords or some sort of reminders for the authors, of which the purpose often is
only understandable by the users themselves. It should be noted that these keywords
should not be mistaken for tags. While tags have a descriptive nature, these keyword-
based annotations carry additional (sometimes implicit) information. By contrast,
shared annotations are very explicit and well-described with full meaningful
sentences, in form similar to chat or text messages.
Table 1. Example of personal and shared Web annotations.
Personal Shared
“Conference Deadline: October 29” “All artists are from Sweden, I think, and do
Jazz music (quite soft) but nice...”
“Flat 64m 2 rooms windthorststr. 8” “Let me know if there's anything else to be
done.”
“TO DO!”
1
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/satisfaction.html

4.2 Second Study: How People Annotate on Paper
To compare annotations in the online context with paper-based annotations, we
visited the working place of 22 PhDs students and pos-Docs. We asked each one of
them to take a look at the last 3 research papers or articles that they have printed and
read. In total we have collected 66 articles, covering a total of 591 pages of text.
We found 1778 annotations and an average of 3.08 annotations per page. The table
below shows the average of each type of annotation per page.
Table 2. Annotations found by type.
Annotation types
Highlighting/Mark sections headings 153 8.6%
Highlighting/Mark text 1297 73%
Problem solving 2 0.1%
General notes (Notes in the margins) 326 18.3%
The far majority of the annotations (73%) involved the highlighting and marking of
text. Some participants had the tendency to only highlight main words within a
sentence or paragraph. In these cases we counted the collection of highlighted words
belonging to a continuous block of text as one piece of annotation.
9% of the documents discussed with the participants turned out to be part of
collaborative work in which two or more people were involved. All except two
participants reported that they shared their comments via email or some online
communication tool; only two participants shared the same sheet of paper, which
contained annotations from both parties.
Another valuable observation is that all of the participants who share annotations
said that they do annotate in a different (more careful) way when they annotate
concerning another reader.

Fig. 2. Examples of annotated papers examined during the field research.
To examine in more detail the annotation strategies, we asked our participants to
classify the goal of reading the paper. We distinguished between the following
categories: reading for writing, reading for learning, reviewing and other. Reading

for writing is the common activity of reading related articles to extract ideas and
references specifically for propose of writing. Reading for learning includes the act of
getting updated in some particular field, read about new publications or learning some
new approaches to apply in some other activity, such as solving math problems or
implementing algorithms. Reviewing consist exclusively of reading papers to give
feedback to the author. Finally, any other type of reading was categorized as other.
The table below shows some numbers of the field research by the type of reading
activity.
Table 3. Results by reading goal.
Writing Learning Review Other
Articles 31 23 9 3
Articles annotated 28 16 7 3
Annotations/Page 2.36 4.7 1.11 6.3
Annotation types
Highlighting/Mark sections headings 10.5% 7.5% 9.4% 4.8%
Highlighting/Mark text 66.0% 82.9% 40.6% 72.2%
Problem solving 0.1% - 0.9% -
General notes (Notes in the margins) 23.3% 9.6% 49.1% 23.0%
In addition to comments directly put on paper, three participants also used the
technique of attaching annotations to the original document with post-its that were
attached to the paper. From the 66 articles analyzed, 10 (15%) did not contain any
annotation. One participant that did not have any annotation in any printed paper said
that she keeps her annotations in a separated file in her computer for each digital
article. Two other participants said that they first do a very quick reading on the
computer to check the relevance of the text, and if it is relevant than they print it. In
their own words: “First I read on the computer to see if I really need to print”. We
have noticed that in many cases participants also used different marking colors for
highlighting with the purpose of attributing different levels of importance. From the
annotations we identified many different ways of signaling important parts on the
text. As an example, one participant created her own symbology for annotating:
squares around the terms means new terminology, underline means definitions and
circles means open question or issues over some topic. Those annotations symbols
were used combined with highlighting (importance) and many times they even
overlapped. One last interesting observation was the behavior of one of the
participants who keeps two printed versions of every paper: one with annotations and
one clean print. As stated, the clean print is for a future reading when she may want to
get the idea without influence of her previous readings. Although the vast number of
highlighting annotations on the papers, none of the participants use such mechanisms
that allow persistent highlighting on digital documents or web resources.
In summary of the observations we identified two main clusters of annotations:
relevance adjustment annotations where implicit highlight and signaling indicate

different levels of importance in the text and contributive annotations where explicit
readable remarks are added attached to the text.
As a last part of our interviews we asked the subjects to describe how they arrange
their papers that lay on their desktops. The relevant categories described were topic,
quality, importance, date of reading and task. This simple observation may guide us to
design better metaphors of the possible dimensions when trailing online resources.
5 Discussion
From the results presented above we can sketch some impressions on some user’s
behaviors. Apparently, the high amount of highlighting/marking signifies “laziness”
of the annotators. This laziness is in fact a way to reduce cognitive overload (because
of switching between tasks) and to keep focused on the main task (the reading itself)
while still providing meaningful cues.
The higher amount of annotations per page for the “learning” papers shows that
these annotations have a clear function for memorizing certain parts of the text (by
actively doing something with it).
The category of “review” papers shows a higher frequency of notes in the margin
comparing to the other categories. These are almost certainly comments to be
included in the review. Additionally, the low number of highlights clearly shows that
the readers are not concerned about signaling for future attention. Out of this we draw
the conclusion that there is indeed a significant difference between the goals and
behaviors of papers based and digital online annotations. The papers that had higher
amount of notes and the lower number of highlight (as explained before an action that
means signaling for future attention) indicate a non-concern of the reader about a
future reading. In the other hand, online annotations (notes in the margin as used in
the experiment) are mostly used on resources that are meant to be reused and found in
a future work session. We conclude that, although online annotations are similar in its
structure to margin notes, its scope is more comparable to highlighting where the real
main goal remains in signaling for future attention and facilitation for re-finding.
Within the collected data of online annotations, the average number of words
(4.56) in private annotations does not cover the average length of short sentences
while the shared annotations (average of 10.35 words per annotations) fit the average
of short and medium sentences statistically measured in plain text documents [27].
We deduce that private annotations, in general, don’t contain full sentences and as in
the paper based texts they are just a perspective over the topic context or keywords
and classification of a section (or resource) – in the digital environment mostly used
for re-finding. The shared online annotations clearly hold more explicit meanings
where the authors tend to be clearer when sharing their thoughts. This evidently
shows the different behavior and concerns of the individual when writing personal or
shared annotations. Although differences have been found between paper and digital
annotations, if we use the same reading goals classification for online readings and
translate the annotations meanings, we find out that in-context notes annotations are
the optimized form for attention signaling, summarization, interpretation and
improving bookmarks search, in both personal and shared environments.

The sum of our two studies suggests some design implications for annotation
systems. First of all the annotation action must be effortless in all senses – easy to
access and visualize, as few interactions as possible and in-context interactions to
minimize the lose focus. Online resources can be used for all sorts of reading tasks,
thus annotation systems must supply all forms of annotations, not by similar
representations but by providing the means to achieve the same goals. The necessary
effort still requires some engagement from the user, however the benefits discussed
should overcome and become in hand to the users: re-finding tools, easy manipulation
and organization of the annotations and resources and sharing capabilities.
6 Conclusions
In this paper we discussed the role of annotation in learning in general and in e-
learning in particular. From the background research it has become clear that the act
of annotating supports the learning process in paper-based situation. However, when
it comes to online learning, annotation becomes an additional cognitive burden, due to
the lack of suitable tools and intrinsic problems related to reading from a screen and
interacting via keyboard and mouse.
From the comparison of online annotation with paper-based annotation it becomes
clear that there is a difference between both types. Online annotations were typically
short and had a certain purpose in terms of re-finding, sharing or commenting. The
high amount of highlighting in paper-based annotations has an intrinsic value. Based
on the results we conclude that emphasis in the development of annotation tools
should be put on added value by better exploiting the annotations (for example for
enhanced re-finding tools, visual overviews, grouping, sharing, collaborating) rather
than to try and mimic the ‘old-fashioned’ paper-based annotation. At the same time,
writing an annotation should cost as little effort as possible, as otherwise people will
inevitably resort to other ways of getting their things done [2].
This poses a design challenge for the development of annotation systems and
provides an explanation why these kinds of systems have not found an audience yet.
Furthermore, we think that the development of added value for annotations will
provide many more opportunities for personalizing the learning environment and for
facilitating communication and collaboration between learners.
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