This session explores early results from a study on an emergent digital pedagogy: using social annotation activities (with the tool Hypothes.is) to support collaborative reading and analysis and to enable students to do public scholarship in a general education literature course. In this course, social annotation has been added to a more established digital pedagogy: students regularly blog about course texts in individual Wordpress blogs connected to a class site. This study examines how these pedagogies, particularly social annotation, shape students’ learning and their abilities to contribute to the construction of knowledge in the course.
Textual annotation and blogging tools have particular potential in literature courses, where reading and writing are core emphases. My students are using Hypothes.is to annotate almost every primary text we read. They do so in a private, class group as they read them. By class time, they have already added their own comments, questions, information, and images to the text and seen and responded to their classmates’ comments and questions. For two longer projects, they move out of this private class space into public, taking control of a limited section of a literary text and producing scholarly annotations viewable by the public. Though students have not (yet) engaged in dialogues with readers in the margins of the public texts, they know their work may be read and even discussed by anyone who visits a page they have annotated.
In this required, lower-division, general education literature course, my 19 students are all non-majors and are sometimes minimally motivated or prepared to learn about American literature. Most feel ill-at-ease doing literary analysis, many express low confidence in their writing and analysis abilities, and few see themselves as having the expertise to contribute to the construction of knowledge in our course. As a result, I am particularly interested in how close textual annotation, combined with the social and public discursive space made possible by Hypothes.is, might change how they learn, especially when tied to short and long writing assignments that require them to build their growing knowledge upon one another’s annotations.
Although social annotation pedagogies have become more common in college teaching in recent years, their use in literature courses, especially lower-division courses, remains limited. Hypothes.is, in particular, is a new tool, launched for general use only in October of 2014. It was created by a non-profit organization that seeks to create an open layer of annotation over any page on the entire world-wide web. In addition to private class groups, in the public annotations students can interact with other annotators from all over the world on any web page.
In this session, I outline what I have learned from studying students’ work and feedback on mid- and end-of-course surveys. This presentation will be followed by a demonstration activity, in which participants set up Hypothes.is accounts (a quick process), collaboratively annotate a sample text, and then critically inquire into the affordances and challenges of this pedagogy.
