With a little help from my friends

In prior work we reported on the design of a social annotation system, SparTag.us, for use in sensemaking activities such as work-group reading and report writing. Previous studies of note-taking systems have demonstrated behavioral differences in social annotation practices, but are not clear in the actual performance gains provided by social features. This paper presents a laboratory study aimed at evaluating the learning effect of social features in SparTag.us. We found significant learning gains, and consider implications for design and for understanding the underlying mechanisms in play when people use social annotation systems.