Social Annotation

Distilled from http://www.grandviewcetl.org/tools-for-teaching-social-annotation/

Why Social Annotation/ Perusall?

Social annotation takes the usually solitary act of reading and allows students to do it in community with one another. By using digital tools to highlight, comment, or otherwise annotate a text, students “do the reading,” but do so in conversation with their peers.

Social annotation is an age-old process that is very medieval. What is different in speed. It would take centuries for texts to accrue a surrounding commentary, but we can do it online in real time in a very short span. Commentary (medieval or modern) can link to other media, can define key terms, provide further details or contradict the main text. We are, in essence, crowdsourcing (you being the crowd) the readings to allow you to deepen and expand your knowledge.

Perusall allows us to organize all our readings in one place so that we can annotate them together.

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 31, f. 2r

The above image is of a twelfth-century commentary (or Glossa) on the Biblical Song of Songs (aka, Canticles, Cantica Canticorum). The text in dark brown is the biblical text. The much more copious lighter brown ink is the commentary, definitions and explanations of the meaning. What does this say about how we interact with texts even now?

By the later Middle Ages, an official commentary of the Bible had arisen called the Glossa Ordinario, which laid out what the "Big Thinkers" had said about various parts of the Bible. They did not always agree and so the comments would make clear to those reading the Bible what areas of disagreement might exist.

We will use it that same way in class. We can use your annotation and commentary to highlight areas of confusion and disagreement and explore debates (amongst yourselves and in the field). You can use annotations to ask questions or answer them for your fellow students. They key is that we can do it together.

Bibliography

If you want to read up on the research done on the benefits of social annotation, see:

• Miller, K., Lukoff, B., King, G., & Mazur, E. (2018). Use of a Social Annotation Platform for Pre-Class Reading Assignments in a Flipped Introductory Physics Class. Frontiers in Education, 2018(3).

• McFarlin, T. J. (2020). Using Open-Source, Collaborative Online Reading to Teach Property, forthcoming in the St. Louis University Law Journal, Vol. 64.