Annotation and Learning with Remi Kalir

It's one thing to pull a book off a shelf, highlight a passage, and make a note in the margin. That's annotation, and it can be a useful learning tool for an individual. It's another thing to share your annotations in a way that others can read and respond to. That's social annotation, and when I heard years ago about digital tools that would allow a class of students to collaboratively annotate a shared textbook, I thought, well, that's the killer app for digital textbooks. It transforms the use of a textbook into a truly interactive space where students can learn from and with each other.

I didn't have the chance to build any opportunities for this kind of digital social annotation into my courses at the time, mainly because of the intellectual property challenges of getting a digital copy of a textbook of my choice into a social annotation platform. But I always had social annotation on my radar as a potentially transformative application of educational technology. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and a new push at my institution into online teaching and learning. I started sharing social annotation pedagogies with my faculty colleagues moving their courses online, and they were a hit! Faculty teaching text-heavy humanities courses appreciated the way social annotation fostered close reading, but I knew science faculty who used social annotation to help students make sense of research journal articles.

In 2021, I had the chance to integrate social annotation into my first-year writing seminar. The tools of the time weren't restricted to textbooks (although there were options that made textbooks more feasible as annotation spaces), and I was excited to have my students collaboratively annotate news articles, webpages, novels, podcast episodes, and more. I wrote about this on my blog, framing the social annotation as "asynchronous active learning." I continue to hear from faculty who find this teaching approach useful, mostly recently as a way to add some productive friction to the class reading process in an age of generative AI.

This brings me to this week's episode of Intentional Teaching, which is all about annotation and learning. Back in 2022, I had the chance to interview Remi Kalir, a scholar of annotation, for my old podcast Leading Lines. Remi provided a deep dive into the power and potential of annotation, and particularly social annotation as a learning tool. It's an interview I find myself referencing again and again, including in a Teaching Hub collection on annotation I put together late last year. I'm very excited to re-share my 2022 interview with Remi on Intentional Teaching this week!

When I talked to Remi Kalir in 2022, he was an associate professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado. He’s had a recent career change, and he is now the associate director of faculty development and applied research at the Learning Innovation and Lifetime Learning unit at Duke University. He's also the author of a new book out this week: Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. Here’s the tag line from the MIT Press website: “An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.” So if you like what you hear from Remi about annotation and learning, please check out his new book!

​You can listen to my "encore" conversation with Remi Kalir about annotation and learning here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Around the Web

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• "3 Questions for UVA's Sarah Cochran" - Joshua Kim featured my University of Virginia colleague Sarah Cochran in his Inside Higher Ed column this week. Sarah started at UVA around the same time I did, and I've enjoyed collaborating with her on a couple of projects. Sarah is senior director of learning experience and digital innovation, and in this interview she discusses some of the rather innovative ways she and her team are helping departments and schools launch new online courses and programs.
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• ​Thresholds in Education​ Special Issue on GenAI - This morning I saw that past podcast guest Marc Watkins announced a special issue of the journal Thresholds in Education edited by Marc and his University of Mississippi colleague Stephen Monroe. It's actually the first of three special issues focused on generative AI in teaching and learning. I haven't read it yet, but Marc and Stephen's introduction has me very interested to do so!
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• "The Harvard-Trump Standoff" - I started reading the Tangle newsletter by journalist Isaac Saul and team a few months ago, and it has become my go-to for making sense of America's current political moment. Each issue tackles a main topic by sharing what is known about the topic with links to news coverage of the topic then presenting what the right is saying about the topic, what the left is saying, and what Isaac's take is. It's reading the news in stereo instead of mono. I've been looking for an excuse to recommend it here in the newsletter, and Wednesday's issue on the Harvard-Trump conflict is definitely on-topic for my readers. Isaac cedes his "my take" space to Audrey Moorehead, Tangle intern and current senior at Harvard University, and her essay is enlightening.
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• "Behind the (Birding) Scenes on the Show 'The Residence'" - Okay, this is off-topic, but I feel at liberty to write here about birdwatching whenever I want to. Emily and I recently finished watching The Residence, a Netflix show about a murder in the White House. It was so entertaining, not least because the detective and main character is a serious birdwatching. In one of the later episodes, I caught it when the character namechecked bird expert Kenn Kaufman, and now I know why: Kaufman was a consultant on the show! This piece by Kaufman shares his experience working with the series.

Thanks for reading!

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