Jeremiah Kalir’s research while affiliated with University of Colorado and other places

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.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look like to continue to be “playful” in teaching and teacher education? Design/methodology/approach To examine how teacher educators may design for teachers’ critical playful literacies, the authors offer three “worked examples” (Gee, 2009) of preservice teachers’ playful practices in an English literacies teacher education course. Findings The authors highlight instructional design elements pertinent to co-designing for teachers’ play and playful literacies in teacher education: generative constraints to practice everyday ingenuity, figuring it out to foster teacher agency and debriefs to interrupt the teaching’s perpetual performance. Originality/value The term “playful,” as a descriptor of practice and qualifier of activity appears frequently in educational literature across domains. The relationship of play to critical literacies – and, more specifically, educators’ literacies and learning – is less frequently explored.

We present, and discuss the importance of, justice-oriented media literacy, which we define as an approach to media literacy that enables the critical analysis, use, and production of media to enact more just learning futures. We detail four “building blocks,” or design commitments, that contribute to justice-oriented media literacy. These include: ● Authorship: Invitations for learners’ (both students and teachers) knowledge and ways of knowing as valuable sources of creation and interrogation, disrupting dominant ways of identifying “whose texts deserve reading.” ● Annotation/Commentary: Responding to texts through critical commentary and questioning and making that thinking visible. ● Text Pairings and Youth Media: Building from youth voice using integrated reading and writing practices, including integrated consumption and production of media. ● Digital Technology and Content Standards: Naming specific digital technology and content (literacy) goals to situate this work within the constraints of school contexts as “sites of struggle,” and highlight teachers’ self efficacy and creative agency. We conclude by suggesting “Justice-oriented media literacy is a promising approach to supporting teachers and students to critically read the world around them and to share those readings, or commentaries, as valuable instances of meaning-making.”

Purpose Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction and knowledge production. This study aims to examine the perceived value of SA as contributing to learning in multiple undergraduate courses. Design/methodology/approach In total, 59 students in 3 upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to students’ perceptions of learning and sense of community. Findings A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings of the perceived value of SA as contributing to the course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas and engagement with diverse perspectives. Research limitations/implications Studies about the relationships among SA, learning and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and from multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation. Practical implications Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal and peer-supported learning. Originality/value This study found a greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to the course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated long-standing educational inequities associated with technology access, learner agency, and participation in online learning. How were preservice and inservice educators supported in their pursuit of interest-driven professional learning that critically examined the unfolding impact of these inequities? This article describes how the Marginal Syllabus project rapidly iterated three public, online, and equity-oriented social annotation activities for educators that included: Facilitating social reading sessions which combined synchronous social annotation with videoconferencing conversation; a collaborative partnership with the Speculative Education Colloquium to augment reading opportunities for shared dialogue; and supporting teacher education courses participating in social annotation activities under remote learning circumstances. The article details three recommendations for supporting educators’ technical and sociopolitical professional learning via social annotation, and notes directions for future research that can examine how annotation-powered conversation may productively inform more equitable pedagogy and student learning practices.

Civic writing has appeared on walls over centuries, across cultures, and in response to political concerns. This article advances a civic interrogation of how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on digital walls. Drawing upon critical literacy perspectives, we examine how a repertoire of 10 civic writing practices associated with open web annotation (OWA) helped educators develop critical literacy. We introduce a social design experiment in which educators leveraged OWA to discuss educational equity across sociopolitical texts and contexts. We then describe a single case of OWA conversation among educators and use discourse analysis to examine shifting situated meanings and political expressions present in educators’ civic writing practices. We conclude by considering implications for theorizing the marginality of critical literacy, designing learning environments that foster educators’ civic writing, and facilitating learning opportunities that encourage educators’ civic writing across digital walls.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe the equity-oriented design of a publicly accessible and openly networked computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) initiative that has supported educator discussion about equity topics; to identify design principles for equity-oriented design in open education; and to propose a model for the design of open learning initiatives that are mutually committed to educational equity and educational openness. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws from design-based research methodology, specifically design narrative and the worked example. The paper is one response to the need for more “designerly work” in the learning sciences, generally, and more specifically in domains such as CSCL. Findings Four design principles are identified that informed the equity-oriented creation and iteration of the Marginal Syllabus, an open CSCL initiative: leveraging the open web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content and engaging professional learning as an open practice. This paper also advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The model integrates design principles to assist CSCL and open education designers and researchers in creating or iterating projects to be more equity-oriented learning opportunities. Originality/value This paper’s design narrative identifies Marginal Syllabus design principles and advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The design narrative demonstrates how critical perspectives on the relationship between equity and digital technology can encourage collaboration among diverse project stakeholders, attune to the dynamics of power and agency and respond to the worldly needs of partners and participants.