This dissertation is part of an Industrial PhD, which on behalf of an industry partner has explored an emerging educational technology as well as principles for designing and researching this technology. The study has focused on student’s use and understanding of a reading annotation tool implemented in a master’s course in technology-enhanced learning. For the present context, annotation can be defined broadly as adding some form of data (comments, categories, or various other expressions of meanings, feelings, attitudes etc.) to an existing source of data. Annotation can be perceived as both an ancient practice and as an emerging and underexplored medium as far as digital use and its role in education concern. The study took place in the context of research-based teaching, where the students not only participated in an annotation experiment, but also themselves investigated the tool and the pedagogic treatment as part of their semester project. The research-based teaching was associated with the industrial framing of my PhD. Hence, the study also involves exploring this framing.
My survey of the traditional studies on annotation technologies indicates a bias where the situated and mediated nature of the annotation tools tends to receive little attention. I explore this bias by comparing it with the results from three empirical studies that were informed by sociocultural theory and that applied design-based research, video observation and interaction analysis. The articles explore different aspects of the situated and mediated nature of the annotation tool. The first study sheds light on participants’ framing of the tool in the context of research-based teaching, and emphasises the relation between framing, double framing conflicts and students’ agency. The second study analyses the students’ use of the annotation tool with regard to the conjectures of the design experiment, the notion of scaffolding and the tool’s development. The third study examines the students’ use of the annotation tool with respect to different views on the structure of concepts. The traditional annotation studies are poorly designed to investigate the structures that sociocultural theories associate with use and learning of concepts. The main contribution of the dissertation is a better general understanding of annotation technologies, the particular contexts in which the tool was implemented and potentials and challenges regarding further use and research on these tools.