Providing social navigation within annotated examples

Abstract

Social navigation is a promising way to guide users in hypermedia environments. In this paper we present Social WebEx, a system that provides social navigation to line-by-line annotated code examples. Social WebEx is a version of "plain" WebEx that only provides access to annotations of lines of code. In social WebEx users are able to see their own code browsing traffic of examples as well as the traffic of their peers. The social version of the system has been used for over a year as an optional learning tool in both graduate and undergraduate programming coursers in a number of schools.