Social Reading in the Margins of Digital Texts by Sheri Vasinda

In the sixth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Rowling, 2005), Harry gets hold of an old potions book with lots of marginalia annotations. These marginal notes proved very useful providing Harry with new insights to the text resulting in his remarkable success with potions and spells.  Often students opt for used texts to save money, but some also appreciate highlighting or marginal notes.  Reading the thoughts of previous readers in an annotated book has the potential to confirm thoughts and ideas entertained during the reading process or to spark new lines of thinking previously unconsidered. 

During graduate school, I was semesters ahead of my friend Janet and would loan her a text encouraging her to annotate my text.  When she returned it, I enjoyed reading her thinking along with mine, and she would often comment on one of my notes. This often led to some spirited phone conversations. We continued this practice with recommended books, and we connected as friends, colleagues, and thinkers within the margins of the text. 

The 21^st Century offers new options for this kind of connecting.  A free, open annotation app, Hypothes.is, offers a similar and expanded experience in the margins of digital texts. Readers can collaboratively annotate web-based content, respond to other readers, and add additional resources and links. This digital, social space offers the potential of conversations and insights into the text, which my students started referring to as a “ discussion before the discussion.” 

First Encounter

My first encounter with social annotation was through The Marginal Syllabus Project, part of Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN, a collaboration of the National Writing Project, National Council for Teachers of English, and Hypothes.is. This project invited asynchronous opportunities to engage in collaborative annotation and critical conversations in the margins of a web-based text.  The texts chosen from NCTE publications focused on issues of equity and included videos with the authors giving background to their research.  Readers from around the country and the text authors engaged in collaborative annotations that developed into online conversations.

Setting up an account was easy, and I was ready to engage in the monthly reading and asynchronous discussions.  When someone responded to my comment, I received an email so I could return to the text and the conversation. One of the best parts of this project was engaging with the authors!  Their backstory videos were linked in the margins or on the syllabus and they engaged in the social annotation conversations.

Learning with My Students

What excited me the most about this tool is the social nature. Open annotation offers options to start connecting during the reading process making the process social from the start. Even if you are the first reader, the anticipation of collaboration and email alerts bring readers back together and back to the text.  The first readers also have the opportunity to ask critical and clarifying questions. If you are not the first reader, you can read the texts and annotations and respond as you read. Students make connections to the text and ask others if they make the same connections to previous texts or something different.  They question the text, add supporting videos, images, or articles, and respond to each other’s thinking and questions. Their interactive annotations prime real time or asynchronous post-reading discussions.

The things my students have appreciated the most about social annotations are:

• Viewing, reacting, and responding to the thinking of their classmates
  • Overwhelmingly, this has been my students’ favorite affordance.  Seeing other readers’ thoughts while reading the text sparked more divergent thinking and perspectives taking, and students comment on how others’ thinking broadened their perspectives.
• The opportunity to engage with peers before a face-to-face or discussion board
  • Early in my use, I had my students annotate in Hypothes.is and then respond again in a discussion board. When I noticed that I could support them in academic conversation-moves in the margins, the digital margins conversations replaced the discussion boards.
• The proximity of their comments to the text
  • Students appreciated not to have to reference a page number or copy a quote.  They can highlight it, add their thinking through annotation, and respond to others directly in the text margins.

From the teacher perspective, I also appreciate:

• Repeated engagement with the text
  • When readers get an email that someone has responded to their thinking, they re-engage with the text, someone else’s comment, and their own thinking.
• The opportunity to observe their participation directly in the text
  • Being able to see my students’ marginal conversations also showed me that I needed to support their conversation moves.  During physical class discussions, I cannot hear each table’s talk as I engage in teacher eavesdropping, or pedagogy of listening. 
• The ability to add additional resources to a document
  • When I have additional resources that can further support understanding of a complex concept, I can add that to the text margins.  Additionally, when I assign a text in which I recognize a bias, I can model countering and/or authorizing with additional resources as in the example below.

Things I’ve Learned So Far

I am transparent with my students when I am learning something new (which is most semesters as one of my former undergraduates and current master’s students recently pointed out).  We take it on together, and they offer great feedback.  I find that they are very patient and forgiving when they know that we are trying out something new and that I want honest feedback. 

Our first attempts with a web-based articles went smoothly right away. PDFs were another story.  They need a unique URL and often I got tangled up in this process. (Hypothes.is is very responsive and the process continues to improve.)  Also, initially a few readers say they just hate to read online, but I’ve seen a change in that over my two years of use.  A few readers say they are distracted by annotations of others on the initial read, but they can toggle to the option to hide comments and then go back and read the comments after and respond.

Initially seeing my students’ responses inside the text showed me that I needed to provide more support for how to engage and respond to others in a written or verbal discussion.  I use Zwiers & Crawford’s Conversation Placemat from their Academic conversations: Classroom talk that fosters critical thinking and content understanding and “Harris Moves” to develop conversation moves and a common language to describe those moves.

I also share one of my favorite Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routines that supports clarification and elaboration of ideas, “What makes you say that?” Once the conversations in the margins began to have more depth and richness, I was able to let go of weekly discussion boards or individual reading responses, but still provide real-time discussion of new thoughts.

Other Options for Social Annotation

Hypothes.is now has a Learning Management System application (currently for Blackboard, Brightspace, Canvas, moodle, Sakai, & Schoology) that students do not have to set up their own accounts. The downside is that they won’t have access to the annotated article once they are no longer in the course whereas the free web-based version provides access as long as the URL exists. 

Hypothesis is also not the only open annotation app available.  Common Sense Media offers a list of both text and video annotation options, which include Kami that has a Google Classroom version.  The LMS compatible apps have to be purchased at the university, building, or district level.  PDFs can be formatted for Hypothes.is by creating a unique URL, but they can also be uploaded to Google Drive and students can annotate together and respond to each other there, as well, which is what students did during my first semester of use when I was struggling with PDFs.   

Many of us are teaching remotely and looking for some magic to engage with our students in contexts that are new to many of us.  We seek new strategies and tools to connect our students to the work and to each other.  We endeavor to create the community we are used to in our physical classrooms.  I’ve found collaborative annotation creates and supports us as a community of readers, thinkers, and extenders in both face-to-face and remote spaces.  Recently when we had a challenging reading from a book chapter that was not formatted for Hypothes.is in our LMS, one of my students emailed me and asked if I would please make a PDF of that chapter and format it for Hypothes.is because it was challenging and several class members wanted to read it together.  That’s the kind of magic I’m seeking.

My first semester of this work that includes dialogic framing is documented in this book chapter:

Social Reading and Open Annotation: Discussion Before the Discussion in Virtual Study Groups. In K. Pytash & R. Karchmer-Klein (Eds.) Effective Practices in Online Teacher Preparation for Literacy Educators (pp. 216-238). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.  

In this literacy leadership course graduate students formed and led virtual study groups using Hypothes.is for the social reading and protocols from Janet Allen for synchronous discussions. (Let Ethical ELA know if you’d like access to this chapter.)

For more about integrating technology, check out Integrating Technology in Literacy Instruction: