Christopher Daren Andrews’s research while affiliated with Indiana University Bloomington and other places

Social annotation has emerged as an important approach to supporting students’ social interaction and collaborative knowledge building in the classroom. Despite great interest among practitioners and a growing body of literature, social annotation activities are often guided by practical intuitions rather than informed by theories of learning and technology- supported collaboration. To strengthen social annotation practice, more work is needed to explore the systematic application of rich theories of learning and collaboration in this context. The proposed hybrid symposium aims to engage learning scientists, CSCL researchers, and stakeholders in productive dialogues to explore the integration of social annotation as a complex practice that can benefit from meaningful application of theories, explicit consideration of learning constructs, and careful design of technological and analytical support. The symposium will both contribute to social annotation practice in the classroom and help learning scientists and CSCL researchers in achieving broader impacts in the education system.

The act of annotation is intimately associated with reading, thinking, writing, and learning. From book marginalia to online commentary, this centuries-old practice has flourished in contemporary educational contexts thanks to recent advances in digital technologies. New computational affordances, social media platforms, and digital networks have changed how readers–as writers–participate in acts of annotation. Of particular interest is social annotation (SA), a type of learning technology that enables the addition of notes to digital and multimodal texts for the purposes of information sharing, peer interaction, knowledge construction, and collaborative meaning-making. This chapter reviews prominent SA technologies, functional specifications, key products, and insights from research, with particular attention to the use of SA in writing studies and composition. The chapter concludes by discussing implications for writing studies and suggests SA technologies can make a critical impact on student reading and writing practices.

Given technological developments, pedagogical insights, and enthusiastic use of SA within both composition and literature courses, it is pertinent to review how social annotation (SA) is relevant to writing studies. In this chapter, we first examine the core idea of social annotation technologies and their practical specifications. Then we identify key SA technologies, offering a brief examination of their specific affordances and constraints. Finally, we offer insight into existing SA research in, and adjacent to, writing studies and critically explore the implications of SA technologies for writing studies from pedagogy to practice.