The design of an interface for student note annotation in a networked electronic classroom

Groupware that supports shared work surfaces generally adheres to the WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) paradigm which means that each user has the same view of the shared work surface at all times. We present a variation of the standard WYSIWIS paradigm which we call WYSIWISOW (What You See Is What I See, One Way) which has been found to be more appropriate than WYSIWIS for certain applications. The paradigm is motivated by describing an application that helps students and teachers share written information during class sessions using an electronic whiteboard and pen-based computers that communicate through a network. We next present a problem, which we call the collision problem, which is inherent to the new paradigm but not to the standard WYSIWIS paradigm. Several solutions to the collision problem are proposed, and our implementation of one of these solutions is described. (C) 2000 Academic Press.