Social annotation: Promising technologies and practices in writing

Abstract

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.