Personalized Annotation Management: A Web 2.0 Social Software for Enhancing Knowledge Sharing in Communities of Practice

Knowledge sharing in communities of practice requires intensive social interactions among community participants, such as articulating knowledge into written forms, posting messages to community´s discussion forum, responding comments to the messages posted by others; namely annotation. Annotation is an explicit expression of knowledge in the form of comments which reveal conceptual meanings of annotators´ implicit thought. This paper presents a personalized annotation management system (PAMS) and demonstrates how PAMS enhances knowledge sharing in communities of practice. An experiment has been conducted to evaluate how PAMS enhances knowledge sharing in students´ online group reading activity. The result of the experiment has demonstrated that PAMS-enabled knowledge sharing do improve students´ reading comprehension.