Enhancing Users Collaboration By Vocal Annotations

Abstract

Several methods have been established to enhance users' discussions and collaboration over the Internet. Websites are considered good media for that, in which users attach their notes (annotations) to websites components (texts, images, and videos) as a method of conducting online discussions. Annotations have several formats: textual, vocal, drawings, and visual. However, although the textual annotations are very famous, creating vocal annotations (and other types) has become a widespread activity through which users add their own voice notes to the components of HTML web documents as a method of having different discussions and thoughts exchange. The work conducted here is related to implementing a collaboration technique by creating and submitting voice annotations (private, public, and custom) as well as the ability to support annotations with a set of textual tags to be used for annotations searching purposes. The work also contains an experimental test to measure the degree of enhancement of users' collaboration and thought exchange by moving from textual annotations to vocal ones where 20 participants are involved of which 88% are over 18 years old. 123 annotations were submitted of different types with an average of 3 tags per annotation. Promising results were collected in which most of the participants (65%) are with vocal annotations.