I've been working on AnnotateIt! for about a year now. It has come a long way from being a critlink clone to what it is now. It is an open source electronic response system. Annotateit enables teacher and peer group feedback on student writing.

It has support for document uploads by students, automatic conversion from .doc and .rtf to .html files, which can then be annotated by members of a group, if desired. The system basically can completely eliminate the need for a student to send a teacher potentially dangerous attachments via email. Instead the student would upload the document to the system. There's no more excuse for not turning in a document on time.

Access to annotations and comments is controlled by their creator and can be specified as public, group, or private. This facilitates group interaction by protecting students from the sight of people not in their group. Students are sometimes shy. This gives them a measure of anonymity. In addition, students may post their comments anonymously (though the teacher will know who posted the comment).

Although most word processors can allow a document to be annotated, this feature enables all students in a group to see all the annotations made at any given time. Word processors would require a cumbersome passing of the document from one user to another, whereas annotateit does not.

Users can define how they want to see annotations, either in-line or hyperlinked.

Instructors can create rubrics using groups of evaluation criteria (or 'vectors') consisting of a quality and a quantity. These rubrics can be associated with assignments. Documents handed in to the assignment can then be evaluated using the rubric associated with the assignment.

The system can gather meta-data about a document ranging from surface statistics (thanks to the GNU style and diction programs) to counts of pre-defined and custom annotations a teacher or group makes.

Annotateit would also be well suited to qualitative research on a corpus of electronic documents, considering its ability to gather and present metadata.

There are many features planned for AnnotateIt. See the enhancement list on bugzilla.buzzmaven.com. Try the system out and, if you see something you want, add to the enhancement list. A few people have tried it out, but I haven't had the courage to spam them with a questionnaire. I'd love to hear some feedback about the system's functionality. I'm particularly interested in forming some associations with people who would be willing to work with me to better the system, but all criticism is welcome.