Open education is increasingly being supported by a suite of open source tools that aid progressive open learning practices. We’d like to give a heads up on one of these tools: Pundit, an open annotation tool.

In the past the annotation of books has been confined to the margins of text books and the valuable insights within these notes has often been left unconnected and unpublished. Pundit is a powerful but easy to use semantic annotation tool that enables you to link sections of text to each other or to other Linked Data resources on the net such as DBPedia, Freebase and Geonames. It is easy for users to turn web documents into a semantic knowledge network by pulling from and enriching the Web of Data.

Pundit has been developed by the DM2E Project and they have just released a great video explaining how it works. The DM2E Project is building tools and communities to enable humanities researchers to work with manuscripts in the Linked Open Web.

DM2E Pundit Introduction from DM2E on Vimeo.

Pundit is supported by Ask, a web service that enables people to create and query notebooks based on annotations made in Pundit.

Pundit is fully open source, the code and documentation can is hosted on Github.

Are there any more tools that you believe can support open learning and teaching practices?