Social annotation enabling collaboration for open learning

ABSTRACT

Collaboration is a conceptually ambiguous aspect of open education. Given inconsistent discussion about collaboration in the open education literature, this article suggests collaboration be defined and studied as a distinct open educational practice. A theoretical stance from the discipline of computer-supported collaborative learning helps conceptualize collaboration as processes of intersubjective meaning-making. Social annotation is then presented as a genre of learning technology that can productively enable group collaboration and shared meaning-making. After introducing an open learning project utilizing social annotation for group dialogue, analysis of interview and annotation data details how social annotation enabled three group-level epistemic expressions delineating collaboration as intersubjective meaning-making and as an open educational practice. A summative discussion considers how the social life of documents encourages collaboration, why attention to epistemic expression is a productive means of articulating open learning, and how to extend the study of collaboration as an open educational practice.

KEYWORDS:

• annotation
• collaboration
• computer-supported collaborative learning
• social design experiment
• open educational practices (OEP)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all Marginal Syllabus participants and partners, including the National Writing Project, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Hypothesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Data availability statement

Hypothesis data reported using CROWDLAAERS is available at crowdlaaers.org.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremiah H. Kalir

Jeremiah H. Kalir is assistant professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado Denver and studies how social annotation enables collaborative, open, and equitable learning.