System and method for taggable digital portfolio creation and report generation

• US 6,405,226 B1
• Filed: 09/30/1999
• Issued: 06/11/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 03/05/1997
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Alpert, Sherman Robert, Lam, Richard Bruce, Cooper, James William, Fairweather, Peter Gustav
• Primary Examiner(s): Hong, Stephen S.
• Application Number:
  US09/410,352
• Time in Patent Office: 985 Days
• Field of Search: 707/500, 707/501.1, 707/512, 707/530
• US Class Current: 715/206
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/94 Hypermedia Hyperlinking G06F40/134
• CPC Class Codes: G09B 5/14 with provision for individual teacher-student communication
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99948 Application of database or data structure, e.g. distributed, multimedia, or image

Abstract

A visual metaphor is provided on a computer and/or network environment for tagging documents with various types of (education) commentary to an author'"'"'s (student'"'"'s) work and indications of (educational) goals that have been or are to be achieved. One or more of the comments and goals are based on predetermined standards. The goals or comments are optionally weighted. Summaries of these goals can be generated to assist evaluators (teachers and administrators) in evaluating both the work of the authors (students) and the success of evaluator in managing (teaching the authors (students).

Claims

1. A multimedia computer system for storing and accessing information about a digital portfolio of projects, comprising:

a memory for storing one or more digital portfolios generated by one or more authors, each digital portfolio having one or more projects, each project having one or more project elements, wherein a project element is selected from the group consisting of textual, graphical, audio, and another digitally storable multimedia format;

a graphical user interface on a computer display for displaying in a first window a digital portfolio project and in a second window a tag list of tags with a predetermined set of tags from which an evaluator can choose; and

a tagging process that tags one or more project elements with a tag to produce tagged project elements, each of the tagged project elements being associated with the respective tag, one or more of the tags being selected by the evaluator from the tag list with a predetermined set of tags, the tags being stored separately from the original tagged project elements to maintain integrity of the original project elements, and tagged project elements being stored in said memory as a database of annotated author documents, wherein the database is relational.

2. A system as in claim 1, where one or more of the project elements is associated with the respective tag with a link in the project containing the project element, the link created by an evaluator and stored in a file separate from the project element, the link being visible only to authorized users.

3. A system as in claim 2, wherein the link is a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) link.

4. A system as in claim 1, where one or more of the tagged components is tagged by selecting the tag with a pointing device and selecting the tagged component with the pointing device, the tag being stored in a file separate from the tagged component.

5. A system, as in claim 1, where the tag list with a predetermined set of tags is a standardized set of evaluator comments and the tagged project element is annotated by a comment selected by the evaluator from the standardized set of evaluator comments by the respective tag.

6. A system, as in claim 5, where the second window further includes a comment field in which an evaluator can optionally enter a comment which is associated with the tagged project element.

7. A system as in claim 1, where an element characteristic of the tagged project element changes when the tagged project element is tagged, the tagged element itself remaining unchanged.

8. A system as in claim 7, where the tagged project element is text and the element characteristic includes any one or more of the following:

color, font, underscoring, unique icon.

9. A system as in claim 7, where the tagged project element is a multimedia object and the element characteristic includes any one or more of the following:

color, sound, sound identifier, play speed.

10. A system as in claim 1, where the set of tags is predetermined by one or more evaluators of the portfolio.

11. A system as in claim 10, where the portfolio is generated by a student and the evaluators are any one or more of the following:

a teacher, a school official, a school system official, and a government official.

12. A system as in claim 10, where the portfolio is generated by an employee and the evaluator is a manager.

13. A system as recited in claim 1, wherein said system is used in an educational environment, the projects are authored by a student or a trainee, the evaluator is a teacher or administrator, the predetermined set of tags are determined by a group of evaluators in order to standardize a grading process, and a user of the system is able to view a subset of all tags associated with a project based on the user'"'"'s authority level.

14. A computer implemented method for storing and accessing information in a database of annotated author documents comprising the steps of:

responding to a selection by an evaluator of an author and a particular document by displaying the selected document in a first window of a graphical user interface;

displaying in a second window of the graphical user interface a tag list of tags with a predetermined set of tags from which the evaluator can choose;

receiving a selection by the evaluator of a portion of the displayed document by an evaluator;

receiving a selection by the evaluator of one or more tags from the list of tags;

associating one or more selected tags with the selected portion of the displayed document; and

saving the document and one or more tags in the database as an annotated document, wherein the tags are stored separately from the original displayed document to maintain integrity of the original document, and the tags and document are stored in memory as a relational database of annotated author documents.

15. The computer implemented method, as in claim 14, where the tag list with a predetermined set of tags is a standardized list of evaluator comments and the tagged portion of the document is annotated by a comment selected by the evaluator from the standardized set of evaluator comments by the respective tag.

16. The computer implemented method, as in claim 15, where the tag list with a predetermined set of tags is optionally a list of goals and the tagged portion of the document is annotated by a goal selected by the evaluator from the set of goals by the respective tag.

17. The computer implemented method, as in claim 15, where the second window further includes a comment field in which an evaluator can optionally enter a comment which is associated with the tagged portion of the document.

18. The computer implemented method, as in claim 14, wherein the tag list with a predetermined set of tags is a list of goals and the tagged portion of the document is annotated by a goal selected by the evaluator from the set of goals by the respective tag and a quality weight to indicate how well the author has met the selected goal.

19. The computer implemented method, as in claim 18, where each goal is part of a tree of goals and subgoals, wherein the subgoals may be summed to higher levels to indicate how well an author has satisfied goals by multiplying the quality weight of the goal'"'"'s execution by an assigned importance weight and summing those products.