Database of personal vocabulary

A database of personal vocabulary could be stored on the laptop and be replicated to the school server and optionally to a network site (e.g. for E-mentoring). The database could also store the occasion (document, page) where a word had (first) been looked up, which might help to memorize the word based on the context.

Wikifier

A "Wikifier" could allow to download a current index of Wikipedia and to hyperlink all indexed words encountered on a page to their corresponding articles in Wikipedia (or a local copy on a school server)

Wiktionary entries could be shown as load-on-demand bubble help in the browser, extracting only the language section for the proper language of the web page from the Wiktionary entry.

For Browse the wikifier could be a proxy on the school server.

If vocabulary is made available too conveniently can this possibly impede future capacity for remembering vocabulary?

Comment: Backing up the vocabulary learned this way to a server (when possible) would allow to keep the information past the life-time of the laptop and would allow very convenient surveys about the vocabularies learned this way. A user could also opt to make his registered vocabulary visible to an E-mentor.

The Wikifier could add vocabulary that had been looked up to a #Database of personal vocabulary, which could be used for vocabulary training from different applications. The browse application could also allow to highlight all previously memorized words on a page, which would allow a reader to verify if a word should be known before looking it up.

Persistent highlighter feature

Comment: Another form of annotation could be the in-page comment which could be linked to the HTML structure of the document by the browse application. In case of changes to the document the comments could appear as obsolete comment icons near the enclosing HTML section header, possibly in a vertical annotation bar next to the scroll bar (as found in Eclipse).

The Wikifier could also allow a persistent highlighter feature (like the greyBox template above), which could allow to mark passages of text (with the mouse) persistently and to store annotations (e.g. translations) for the marked text as bubble help.

In-page comments could be displacing (taking a place in the document without content below) or floating (hovering above the document in an independent layer); the comment area could offer a toggle widget to switch between displacing and floating. An annotation feature could also allow a teacher to set annotations, possibly with a squiggly line below text and a corresponding mark in an annotation bar. Teacher/tutor annotations could be mirrored from an annotation source on another XO laptop.

Database of personal vocabulary