USING THE WORLD WIDE WEB
3. THE DHS IN BRIEF
Figure 2. The layout of the DHS in a Web browser’s window.
The DHS (see figure 2) is a Web-based tool that uses a standard browser and pre- sents a collection of Web documents to which users can attach comments. The comments and the documents are saved in a shared space that is call a domain. The DHS administrates this domain. Figure 2 shows the layout of the DHS in a Web browser in which we can see 1) the index-frame‚ which displays the list of docu- ments included in the domain in the form of hyperlinks; 2) the document-frame‚
showing the content of the document (original text); 3) the comment-frame‚ for add- ing comments (annotated text) to the document presented in the content-frame‚ that is‚ a screen-split interface; 4) the command-frame with the “Add comment” button that pops-up the Add Comment Window (ACW).
The ACW is divided into two vertical frames (see figure 3). The left frame con- tains a copy of the Web document. In the right frame are the name-input and the comment-input fields. In the latter‚ the annotation is written‚ that is‚ an aligned inter- face. There is also a “paste” button that attaches the text of the Web document into the comment-input field. This provides users with an editable copy of text to be commented and they can make interlinear annotations while the original text is also right aligned to it.
When a comment has been made and submitted‚ it is available immediately to- gether with the previous annotations attached to the document. The system sends the owner of the Web document an awareness email containing the message made by the user (Dourish and Bellotti‚ 1992). Another form of awareness is the “comment
counter tag” placed beside every item in the index-list that tells the users how many comments have been made on a document so far.
Figure 3. The add comment window with the paste button. Note that the reviewer makes a correction (sweden for Sweden) to the text directly.
The system supports independent reading and writing spaces. Both spaces can be accessed concurrently and they can be manipulated independently. Furthermore‚ it provides a minimal overlap of the writing space and the reading space. The DHS allows the support of a quick and effortless switch between these two spaces and navigation in them. The DHS has a logging function providing information about the users’ actions in the system‚ which documents they visited‚ how long they spent on each document‚ how long it took for a comment to be written‚ and the duration of each session. For a detailed description of the DHS‚ see Rodriguez‚ 1999.
4. METHOD
The DHS was used in three English academic writing courses given in a technical university in Sweden‚ in the period 1997-2000. The use of the DHS was not manda- tory; nevertheless‚ all the students used it to share their homework and to make an- notations on other students’ homework.
This environment was suitable for our study because corrective annotations were bound to be made by third party reviewers. In total‚ 276 annotations made by 40 Ph.D. students and two teachers were recorded by the DHS. HTML tags could also be part of the annotation but no support for editing them was given. In table 1‚ we
show the case studies in which the DHS was used and the number of comments and words produced in every case study by students and the teachers. At the end of the course‚ the students were asked to fill a Web-based survey. The aim of the survey was to evaluate the use of the system and to obtain relevant information about the participants‚ such as familiarity with the Web. The evaluation of the tool is not pre- sented here.
4.1 Participants
The students that participated‚ 13-16 for each group‚ were non-native English speak- ers. They were Ph.D. students that had different engineering and scientific back- grounds‚ e.g.‚ chemistry‚ metallurgy‚ and physics. All the participants had access to the Web and they reported that it was the first time they had taken a writing course.
The students had all used the Web for at least two years and had communicated with the teacher and‚ very infrequently‚ with classmates in other courses by email. The teacher of the course‚ who took part in the study and wrote several annotations‚ was also familiar with the Web. Apparatus
The DHS was the Web-based tool we used to collect the annotations made by reviewers. In our case studies (see figure 2)‚ the index-frame displays the student’s name and his/her assignments. Each assignment is a hypertext link. The version of the DHS used by A1997‚ A1998 did not have the “paste” function of the ACW.
4.2 Procedure
Each course took 10 weeks‚ with classroom sessions once a week. During each class‚ a new topic was discussed and homework was assigned to the students. The homework normally involved writing a short text‚ about one page long‚ using the techniques and writing styles that were discussed during the class. The class was divided into groups of three students‚ who reviewed each other’s texts‚ so that two others read each student’s work.
We included one document in the DHS describing some informally developed con- ventions that would serve as a model to help the students make interlinear corrective annotations using digital plain text. The convention proposed the use of the follow- ing symbols (‚)‚ ~‚ *‚ *= for adding‚ deleting‚ suggesting‚ changing. These conven- tions were mainly oriented towards distinguishing the annotation from the original text. This choice was made to prevent students spending an excessive amount of time figuring out how to make a corrective annotation‚ the danger being that they might perceive the DHS as an obstacle to accomplishing their homework.
We have analyzed all the annotations that were entered by the students in these three case studies. Additionally‚ we counted words and phrases in the text of the annotations recorded in the DHS.