Abstract
Information and communications technology and technology-enhanced learning have unquestionably transformed traditional teaching–learning processes and are positioned as key factors to promote quality education, one of the basic sustainable development goals of the 2030 agenda. Document annotation, which was traditionally carried out with pencil and paper and currently benefits from digital document annotation tools, is a representative example of this transformation. Using document annotation tools, students can enrich the documents with annotations that highlight the most relevant aspects of these documents. As the conceptual complexity of the learning domain increases, the annotation of the documents may require comprehensive domain knowledge and an expert analysis capability that students usually lack. Consequently, a proliferation of irrelevant, incorrect, and/or poorly decontextualized annotations may appear, while other relevant aspects are completely ignored by the students. The main hypothesis proposed by this paper is that the use of a guiding annotation ontology in the annotation activities is a keystone aspect to alleviate these shortcomings. Consequently, comprehension is improved, exhaustive content analysis is promoted, and meta-reflective thinking is developed. To test this hypothesis, we describe our own annotation tool, @note, which fully implements this ontology-enhanced annotation paradigm, and we provide experimental evidence about how @note can improve academic performance via a pilot study concerning critical literary annotation.
Highlights
The role of information and communication technology (ICT) and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) to achieve quality education, one of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) raised by the United Nations General Assembly 2030 Agenda [1] (SDG 4) aimed to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” has been widely acknowledged [2,3]
Concerning tools that are based on predefined repertories of semantic categories, the lists of tags provided by these repertories allow annotations to be classified according to certain semantic criteria, their pre-established nature produces generic classification systems, which typically consist of general purpose and reduced sets of universal categories (4 in PAMS 2.0 or in MyNote, 7 in CRAS-RAID, 9 in Tafannote or in MADCOW, etc.), which may not fit the specific characteristics of every annotation activity
We have described an ontology-driven approach to educational document annotation activities
Summary
The role of information and communication technology (ICT) and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) to achieve quality education, one of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) raised by the United Nations General Assembly 2030 Agenda [1] (SDG 4) aimed to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” has been widely acknowledged [2,3]. In addition to supporting reading, the true educational potential of digital annotation tools is achieved when students actively participate in the annotation process. In this regard, in [10] an experiment was conducted in which a group of students read a text, while another group read and annotated it. In [12] several experiments in the context of an English course were described that, in addition to focusing on analyzing the effects of annotation systems on reading comprehension, focused on the analysis of critical thinking and metacognitive competences For this purpose, a group of students annotated and read the texts proposed individually, while another group carried out the activity in a collaborative way.
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