Interactive annotations in Web-based learning systems

Web-based knowledge-transfer environments aim towards self-directed and collaborative learning. They not only require enablers for personalizing content and context-sensitive interaction, but also for collaboration. In order to overcome deficiencies of current approaches with respect to contextual knowledge transfer, we consider concept building to link content to communication essential. Our technical enablers are tuned and enriched features for personalization and collaboration which we term interactive annotations. They have been implemented as overarching concept to hypermedia handling and peer-to-peer communication in the Web-based knowledge-transfer platform ScholionWB+ (Auinger and Stary, 2002, 2003). Our solution is highly flexible, coupling hypermedia content with common communication tools in traditional browsers settings.