The Role of Context for User Annotations in Searching Shared Materials

One of the greatest challenges of Web 2.0 is to find the most relevant information to users' needs with minimum effort and time. Though search engines have improved greatly in the recent years, search results heavily depend on the textual search query, which does not fully reflect users' search context. In particular, teachers find it difficult to retrieve suitable materials to be used in their specific learning/teaching scenario. Tags, namely free-form user annotations, are found to be beneficial for improving search and retrieval but there has been no in-depth understanding as to which type of tags are useful and should be encouraged when designing a resource-sharing system for teachers. In this paper, we present an empirical study on the types of contextual meta-data that play an important role when teachers search for new learning/teaching materials. Based on results we collected, we propose a prototypical interface that facilitates the searching of shared resources among a community of teachers.