<aside> 👨🏼🏫 "Feel free to bookmark this page: it is a live link, just like a Google doc. I should also say up front that I've adapted a number of these resources from various sources, but I have done my best to link back to the originals wherever possible."
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I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general [...] In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly — boldly — originally — with abandonment — without conceit."
-Edgar Allen Poe, "Marginalia" (1844)
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own And reached for a pen if only to show We did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; We pressed a thought into the wayside, Planted an impression along the verge.
-Billy Collins, "Marginalia" (1996)
After the transition to online instruction, I found myself in dire need of ways to connect my students with the texts we would normally discuss together in class. In the past, I had often relied on small group readings of short passages, which we'd then piece together as a class. This offered an approachable way for tackling complex works of literature while engaging students as critical readers.
Of course, this all changed when instruction went online due to the pandemic. Students became siloed from me and from each other, and reading retention seemed to be going down dramatically. After spending a long time looking into the various options available, and trying out a few in my classes, I found the platforms below to be the most powerful, flexible, and helpful tools for engaging my students with assigned readings (and with each other). They offer different strengths, depending on your curricular needs, and I'll do my best to outline what these strengths—and weaknesses—are below. But in general, the tools you choose are less important than the general practice of social annotation: the work of reading (and commenting) on texts together.
Click over to this article from The Guardian to view some sample annotations and highlights (as you will see, I have some thoughts.) Just click the arrow hovering on the upper-right-hand side of your browser (Chrome works best, if you're having trouble). You may be prompted to create a Hypothes.is account—it is free, secure, and completely unassociated with any of your personal data, but you don't need one to see my highlights. Feel free to comment and/or respond yourself if you do set up an account.
After reading and experimenting with Hypothes.is, let's have a quick conversation together. Click over to this Google Doc to respond to some questions based on looking at the document together.
<aside> 👨🏼🏫 We'll answer this question together, in the Google Doc.
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<aside> 🌐 Here's an admittedly optimistic introduction to the power of open annotations from the folks at Hypothesis:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/QCkm0lL-6lc
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<aside> 👨🏼🏫 For a more educator-focused approach, here is a fantastic interview with Remi Kalir, one of the leading scholars/users of social annotation, on an equally fantastic podcast, Teaching In Higher Ed:
Annotating the Marginal Syllabus - Teaching in Higher Ed
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