Anchored discussions of multimedia lecture recordings

Lecture recording has become a widespread way of producing learning contents rapidly. However, the resulting documents have some disadvantages regarding learner interaction, in particular regarding collaborative learning based on such documents. This paper proposes a model for anchoring group discussions in learning contents in a fine-granular way. Artifact-centered discussion is regarded as collaborative annotation of documents, with an extended data model for annotations which is independent of document and media types. After outlining the generic framework and data model, we describe its application to the scenario of group discussions around lecture recordings. Notes can be anchored both spatially and temporally in the multimedia documents. The infrastructure for sharing notes has been implemented as an Annotation Web Service (AWS), and the player software for viewing recordings has been extended into a client providing thread-based as well as document-centered discussion features.