Context in Learning, Organizing and Sharing Information

In the digital era, users face a new challenge to study, organize and find the information they need in a time-efficient and effective manner. Recent studies have shown that success in doing such tasks depends more on human memory than semantically filtering and re-organizing digital information. As demonstrated by commercial and prototypical Web tools, context seems to play an important role in helping users memorize cues in various user scenarios. While these results are encouraging, there is not yet sufficient understanding of which type of context is useful for which situations. In this thesis, we explore the impact and the role context plays under three different perspectives. First, we examine how allowing users to add their impressions and interpretations of digital learning materials via multimedia annotations influences their learning. Secondly, we collect and analyze the types of context users add and use to organize and retrieve their personal bookmarks. Then lastly, we investigate how a customized set of user contextual tags can aid a targeted set of users to help search and find information easier and faster in a community.