{"id":36351,"date":"2020-09-23t07:00:45","date_gmt":"2020-09-23t12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=36351"},"modified":"2020-09-25t13:40:17","modified_gmt":"2020-09-25t18:40:17","slug":"teaching-with-perusall-and-social-annotation-highlights-from-a-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2020\/09\/teaching-with-perusall-and-social-annotation-highlights-from-a-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"teaching with perusall and social annotation – highlights from a conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

by derek bruff, director<\/em><\/p>\n

this summer, hundreds of participants in the 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分\u2019s online course design institute<\/a> had the chance to use a social annotation tool as part of their experience in the institute. my cft colleagues and i asked participants to read a few articles about online teaching and annotate them collaboratively, first using a tool called hypothesis<\/a> and later using a tool called perusall<\/a>. participants highlighted passages in the articles that caught their attention, then added comments to those passages sharing their questions, reflections, and perspectives. often these comments sparked asynchronous discussion, with participants responding to each other\u2019s comments with thoughts of their own.<\/p>\n

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the result for many participants was a lively engagement with the readings and with each other\u2014and a great deal of interest in using social annotation tools in their own teaching this fall.<\/p>\n

given this interest, vanderbilt adopted perusall<\/a> for campus use late in the summer. when classes started, i was curious to know how faculty were using perusall to support student learning and build social presence in their online, face-to-face, and hybrid courses. i convened a conversation on teaching<\/a> on september 15th<\/sup>, inviting faculty to share their experiences teaching with perusall and to learn from other instructors experimenting with social annotation. we had a lively conversation, and i wanted to share a few highlights here on the blog, including some of the creative and effective ways faculty are teaching with social annotation.<\/p>\n

terry maroney, professor of law, is teaching an online course this fall called \u201cactual innocence\u201d about wrongful convictions. she learned about perusall during the institute this summer, and she\u2019s using social annotation to help students prepare for their synchronous zoom sessions. for example, she mentioned one assignment that asked students to compare and contrast a text documenting what turned out to be a false confession with a video recording of the alleged confession itself. perusall supports collaborative annotation of both texts and videos, which made it a useful tool for this activity. perusall also has a hashtag feature, which maroney used to great effect: her students tagged their comments using a defined set of keywords, and maroney used those hashtags to find patterns in student comments across the two documents. those patterns then informed the synchronous discussion of the documents that maroney led during her zoom class that week.<\/p>\n

meanwhile, katherine clements, senior lecturer in chemistry, is using perusall in her upper-level, seminar-style course on macromolecular chemistry. one of her course goals is for students to read and make sense of chemistry research literature, so she asks her students to do so collaboratively through social annotation. her class isn\u2019t large, but even 23 students can generate a lot of discussion about challenging journal articles. clements uses two persuall features to focus her engagement with student comments: students can flag comments as questions for the instructor, and students can \u201cupvote\u201d other students\u2019 comments as particularly helpful or important. by focusing on flagged questions and comments with lots of upvotes, clements makes good use of her time reading and responding to annotation.<\/p>\n

over at peabody, heather lefkowitz, lecturer in human and organizational development, does have a big class, with close to 90 students enrolled in her course on talent management. she asks her students to annotate and discuss various kinds of documents, including journal articles, popular writing, videos, and more. having 90 students annotate a document in a single, shared space can result in too much discussion, making it hard for students to have a voice. lefkowitz uses perusall\u2019s groups feature to split her students into smaller groups, with each group annotating its own copy of a given document. this makes it easier for each student to say something interesting and to respond to their peers. lefkowitz is experimenting with group size (4 students per group? or 6 students?), but she\u2019s realized that having persistent small groups is an important way to make a large class feel small and to build social presence in an online course.<\/p>\n

one popular question at last week\u2019s conversation: how much time does it take to read and respond to student annotations? several faulty using perusall this fall noted how enthusiastically their students took to it, which was great for student engagement but meant a lot of student comments to scan. some instructors take katherine clement\u2019s approach, focusing on annotations that are tagged as questions for instructors or annotations that generate upvotes or replies. other instructors compared perusall to more traditional online discussion boards. \u201creviewing annotation is so much easier than anything i\u2019ve done on the discussion board,\u201d one participant said. \u201cit takes about a third of the time, and the students are much more engaged on perusall.\u201d terry maroney noted that her workload was similar in both settings, but that her students\u2019 annotations tend to be more grounded and concrete, while their discussion threads are more synthetic and abstract.<\/p>\n

we also discussed ways to help students engage more meaningfully with course materials and with each other in the social annotation space. annotation is a new skill for many students, who, as novices in a discipline, sometimes struggle to make sense of readings and other documents. providing students some guidance up front regarding the kinds of moves they might make in their annotations can be helpful. for instance, you might suggest students highlight an important point in a reading and comment on why the point was important. or they might annotate an argument they feel is weak, either with a critique or a suggestion for strengthening it. or they might draw a connection between the reading at hand and past readings in the course. or they might highlight a provocative quotation and invite their peers to respond to it. these moves go beyond the \u201cthis is interesting\u201d and \u201ci don\u2019t understand this\u201d and \u201ci agree\u201d annotations that some students leave.<\/p>\n

it\u2019s natural to use perusall with course readings and such, but we also floated some other ways to use social annotation with students.<\/p>\n