With a little help from my friends: examining the impact of social annotations in sensemaking tasks

In prior work we report on the design of a social annotation system, SparTag.us, for use in sensemaking activities such as work group reading and report writing. Other studies of note-taking systems find behavioral differences in social annotation practices, but are not clear in the actual performance gains provided by social features. This paper presents a laboratory study aimed at evaluating the learning effect of social features in SparTag.us. We found a significant effect in learning gains, and consider its implications for design and the underlying mechanisms in play in social annotation systems.

Citation

Nelson, L.; Held, C.; Pirolli, P. L.; Hong, L.; Schiano, D. J.; Chi, E. H. With a little help from my friends: examining the impact of social annotations in sensemaking tasks. 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009);2009 April 4-9; Boston, MA.