Collaborative Project: Superimposed Tools for Active Arrangement and Elaboration of Educational Resources

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This award and Award No. 0435059 constitute a collaborative project.Education and scholarly research, by their very nature, involve scanning, reviewing, and sometimes intensely studying resources about a subject. Libraries, both conventional and digital, tend to provide services only at the level of complete documents and collections of complete documents. Students, instructors, and researchers rarely treat these "complete" resources in a uniform manner. Textbooks and published papers are not necessarily used in their entirety. Sections are not necessarily covered with equal emphasis or in the order in which they appear. Resource materials are not necessarily used verbatim."Superimposed tools," such as those built by the investigators, allow a user to easily select passages in a variety of base document types (e.g., MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, XML, PDF), place them on a scratchpad tool, label them, and arrange them into user-defined groupings and provide annotation. The key functionality in these tools is the ability to select an item (which includes a reference) and return to the original source using the original base application and see the selected passage highlighted. Separation of the notes from the source allows free recombination and reuse in innovative ways. The links are always there so that a user can return to the source context as needed, but the annotations and other marks are separate entities, independent of the source material, and can be combined in any way that supports the user's goals.This NSDL Targeted Research project is evaluating faculty and student use of superimposed tools in undergraduate and graduate computer science classes, including both traditional, textbook-based classes as well as research-oriented, paper-based classes. The tools are being used by the investigators, their colleagues, a high school teacher, and their students. The major goal of the project is to evaluate whether the use of superimposed information supports more effective teaching and learning. The investigators are also developing digital library services that allow superimposed artifacts to be deposited, indexed, searched, and used along with original library resources. Using and elaborating information at subdocument granularity should support reuse of educational materials by other instructors and students.Specific original contributions of this project include (1) extending the scope of digital library facilities to support user tasks beyond the point of simply locating and retrieving resources; (2) enabling the creation of digital library collections that are more precisely targeted at given educational needs by including subdocuments as well as complete documents; (3) supporting the capture of post-retrieval work with digital library resources (comparison charts, concept maps) as explicit, derived documents that can in turn be "value-added" resources in the digital library; (4) capturing elaborations that enhance the understanding of digital library resources in educational settings; and (5) supporting easy customization of such resources by other faculty, students, and researchers.