Social annotation

It’s a useful pedagogical tactic to help students engage with a text by shifting the emphasis from passive reading to active engagement. As well as allowing for collaboration with peers, social annotation can enhance students’ critical thinking and provide an additional form of useful feedback from their peers.

What is social annotation?

Social annotation requires students to read and contribute annotations to a shared text, usually via a digital platform. It combines reading and thinking skills and encourages students to critically interact with the text and with their peers.

Students may participate by highlighting passages, adding comments and contributing insights while having visibility over other annotations from their peers. By engaging with a text in this way, students have the opportunity to move beyond the passive activity of individual reading and instead participate in an active dialogue among learners.

Social annotation can also be useful as part of formative assessment. Contributing commentary to a text and interacting with other students’ comments can be an assessment in itself. This form of assessment is useful for measuring comprehension, criticality, evaluative thinking and expression (Miller et al., 2018; Porter, 2022).

Why is it useful?

Benefits for students

Increased level of feedback

Due to its collaborative nature, social annotation provides an opportunity for peer review and feedback. By requiring students to interact with each other’s annotations students are able to benefit from another layer of feedback on their comprehension and reasoning skills. Any contributions the staff makes in response to student commentary is also visible to all students, so this transparency benefits the whole cohort.

Modelling academic critique

Social annotation tasks as formative assessment help equip students by modelling what academic critique should look like. By reviewing commentary from staff and students, they can compare their own reasoning and expression of ideas.

Social construction of knowledge

By sharing their insights and reactions to a text with each other students experience a social constructivist approach to learning. In other words, participating in this way enables students to learn from one another, share diverse viewpoints, and construct knowledge collectively rather than in isolation. By annotating collaboratively, participants can question, clarify, and deepen their understanding of the material, making learning a more participatory process.

Active dialogue versus passive reading

Social annotation platforms provide a means for students to engage in discussion as part of assessment, facilitating instant feedback and collaboration. Rather than reading alone and in isolation, this peer-to-peer interaction can enhance social bonds within the learning community, making the educational experience more inclusive and supportive.

Enhancing communication skills

Social annotation provides a formative assessment opportunity for students to express their ideas clearly and constructively and hone their skills through dialogue. By crafting annotations that resonate with their peers, learners refine their ability to communicate effectively.

Benefits for educators

Opportunity for assessment

Social annotation activities are a good way to measure comprehension as part of formative assessment. It is also a good assessment task for students to practice and get feedback on how they form and communicate their ideas (important skills they will inevitably need to hone for summative tasks). These discussions also provide peer feedback opportunities in addition to teaching staff feedback.

Promoting active engagement

In order to participate in the commentary, students have to engage more deeply with the text. Research has also shown that social annotation can lead to improved comprehension and retention of material, as students actively reflect on their learning (Gao, 2013; Jarrett, 2024).

Encouraging critical thinking

Annotating texts prompts learners to analyse and evaluate information critically. As students articulate their thoughts and reactions, they practice synthesising complex ideas and drawing connections between concepts. This critical engagement enhances analytical skills.

Promote essential reading prior to an in-class activity

When reading is essential to complete activities in an in-class event, such as a discussion in a tutorial, having assessed social annotation better prepares students to participate in that activity.

Creating vibrant learning environments

By integrating this social annotation into your teaching, you can create vibrant learning communities where students actively participate in their learning journeys and benefit from collaboration with their peers.

As a teaching method, critical social annotation allows for equitable conversations to unfold in line with the knowledge being presented in course texts. In this way, it can potentially subvert or even redress instances of inequity in course content. Brown and Croft (2020)

Challenges with using social annotation

Alongside many benefits of social annotation, there are also a number of challenges:

• Requires clear instructions and guidelines for students on the sorts of commentary they should be making and how they should be interacting with other students.
• Marking criteria for a social annotation task requires careful consideration i.e. should students be assessed on comprehension skills, quality of expression, degree of criticality?
• Marking student annotations can be time consuming
• Ideally instructors should monitor and also participate in the discussion, even though it happens asynchronously
• If the cohort is too large, the activity may become quite cumbersome and negatively impact the quality of social interaction and diminish feedback potential.

How do I implement it?

If you are interested in implementing social annotation in your teaching, try these strategies:

Set clear objectives

Establish clear learning objectives for the social annotation activity. Specify what students should focus on while annotating – whether it be identifying key themes, asking questions, or making connections to other texts. Clear objectives guide students' contributions and ensure that discussions remain purposeful, enhancing the overall learning experience.

Foster a supportive environment

Create a classroom culture that values respectful dialogue and diverse perspectives. Encourage students to respond to each other’s annotations, fostering a sense of community. Model constructive feedback by demonstrating how to build on peers’ ideas and ask probing questions. Creating a supportive environment is crucial, as it encourages students to take risks in their learning and share their insights.

Reflect on the process

After the social annotation activity, set up a reflection session. Ask students to consider how their understanding evolved through the collaborative process and what insights they gained from their peers. Reflection reinforces learning and helps students articulate the value of social annotation. Research indicates that reflective practices enhance metacognitive skills, allowing students to become more self-aware learners.

Have students annotate in groups

Having the whole class annotate one documents quickly can become overwhelming and a cognitive overload for students to monitor. If students annotate in groups of 10-15 they are better able to follow the conversation and take part. The supporting technologies allow for grouping students to complete the social annotation together.

Supporting technologies

There are a variety of available supported technologies that can be used for digital social annotation, which are outlined below.

• Feedback Fruits has an Interactive Document function which uses social annotation to encourage active student engagement with the reading materials. You can include instructions and even a reflection task via this tool. For useful information on how to get the most out of social annotation tasks on FeedbackFruits, also see how to engage students with questions: 6 best strategies for social annotation.
• Perusall is a social reading platform available to students as an integration into the LMS. Perusall allows students and teaching staff to digitally annotate readings (with text, links, and embedded content). Readings can include access to chapters or sections on an eTextbook that students purchase or copyright compliant readings that you can upload. It also has a feature called the Confusion Report, which summarises the top areas of student confusion for staff to identify which aspects students may be struggling with. Perusall uses natural language processing (NLP) writing analytics to automatically evaluate student annotations. This marks can assist staff when marking Perusall activities, but staff are responsible for ensuring all marking is fair and appropriate.
• Microsoft Teams is another option for facilitating social annotation. By creating a shared Word document and making it available from a shared drive on Microsoft Teams (with editing access allowed for all students), your students can access and leave comments and respond to each other on a live version of the document.

Resources

• Brown, M and Croft, B. 2020. Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020 (1):8, pp.1–8
• Bjorn, G. (2024). The CERIC method plus social collaborative annotation improves critical reading of the primary literature in an interdisciplinary graduate course. Frontiers in Education, 9. 16 October 2024
• Fleerackers, A., Alperin, J. P., Morales, E., & Kalir, R. (2019). Comment, reply, repeat: Engaging students with social annotation
• Gao, F. (2013). A case study of using a social annotation tool to support collaboratively learning, The Internet and Higher Education, 17. Pages 76-83
• Jarrett, C. (2024). 10 Things We Learned at AnnotatED 2024. [Accessed 1 November 2024].
• Kalir, J. 2020 “Annotation is first draft thinking”: Educators’ marginal notes as brave writing. English Journal, 110.2 (2020), 62-68.
• Miller, K, Lukoff, B., King, G., and Mazur, E., (2018). Use of a Social Annotation Platform for Pre-Class Reading Assignments in a Flipped Introductory Physics Class. Frontiers in Education, 3(8), pp. 1-12
• Nguyen, N. (2023). How to engage students with questions: 6 best strategies for social annotation. FeedbackFruits. [Accessed 1 November 2024].
• Porter, G. Using Social Annotation Tools to Unlock Collective Wisdom. Harvard Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning. [Accessed 7 November 2024].
• Porter, G.W. (2022). Collaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform Comparisons. Sec. Digital Education, 7
• Sprouse, M. (2018). Social Annotation and Layered Readings in Composition. In Chen Chen, Kristopher Purzycki, and Lydia Wilkes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Annual Computers and Writing Conference (pp. 39-52). Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse.
• Sun, Y. & Fei Gao. (2017). Comparing the use of social annotation tool and a threaded discussion forum to support online discussions. The Internet and Higher Education, 32, 72-79.
• University of Nebraska at Kearney, (2024). Reading Together: Social Annotation and How it Impacts Student Learning. [Accessed 1 November 2024].
• Wranovix, M. & Isbell, M. (2020). The digital common read: Creating a space for authentic engagement with social annotation. Journal of the European Honors Council 2020, 4(1).
• Zarzour, H. & Sellami, M. (2017). A linked data-based collaborative annotation system for increasing learning achievements. Educational Technology Research & Development, 65(2), 381-397.

Requesting support

If you require assistance in implementing social annotation in your subject, please lodge a request for support to Teaching and Learning Innovation.