Hi, My name is Susan Uskudarli. I work at Bogazici University as a faculty member in Computer Engineering dept (we don't really have CS dept in Turkey, it is more like a CS dept).
I teach the mandatory undergrad courses on software engineering (yep, students love me >:) ), also grad courses on coopreation technologies and social semantic web. I am highly interested in cooperative and collaborative technologies. I have been working with T B Dinesh, (who has been active and an advocate of annotations) for a long time on hobby projects. Hobbies meaning things I really care about, which I imagine is a shared experience by all. In the last couple of years I have had my students work on projects that included the Web Annotation Data Model (even way before it reached its RC level). They are to implement projects including annotations. They learn a lot. I enjoy exploring the creativity and utility of annotations with them. I wish some of their projects were up, but as with many projects, the DB vanishes and nothing works after they leave. This semester I have some students working on cultural heritage with annotations as well as a some other crowdsourcing projects that rely on annotations. I think annotations are fantastic for learning and exploring. By trying to design systems that use them, they can't prevent being exposed to its benefits. Although it takes them a really long time. You would think they would have better abstraction skills :) I will share any experience that results from there. I hope to find some time this summer to do a bit of prototyping myself. I am very interested in the community related applications of annotations as well as semantic annotations. Very best to you all. I look forward to all the good things that are going to emerge from here. I should say continue to emerge. --s
