What is it about?
Pedagogical issues based on the number of annotators, amount of annotation, and public access for a document have not received much attention. Collaborative annotation also has some natural connections to the formative assessment field, which have not been sufficiently explored in the past. This brief review will examine how the number of annotators, an issue of scale, can hinder or benefit learners, and how annotation can embody a formative assessment practice.
Featured Image
Photo by Xavier von Erlach on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Formative assessment is typically preferable to summative assessment. Instructors should look for ways to make their assessments more formative, supporting students with feedback in the process. They can "meet students at the text" in a collaborative annotation environment and provide formative assessment through dialogue. The amount of annotation on a given reading is likely to be affected by the number of annotators; how any volume/quality tradeoffs occur in larger or smaller annotating groups is not well known.
Perspectives
This paper is just a small starting point, as many others are likely to soon explore issues of scale surrounding annotation practices, and how to make collaborative annotation work more optimally as a learning tool for their students. Treating collaborative annotation as a formative assessment practice may be one element of many in a successful implementation of annotation for learning.
Gavin Porter
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Collaborative Annotation, June 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3491140.3528322.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
