Bridging Social Annotation Practice with Perspectives from the Learning Sciences and CSCL

Social annotation has emerged as an important approach to supporting students’ social interaction and collaborative knowledge building in the classroom. Despite great interest among practitioners and a growing body of literature, social annotation activities are often guided by practical intuitions rather than informed by theories of learning and technology-supported collaboration. To strengthen social annotation practice, more work is needed to explore the systematic application of rich theories of learning and collaboration in this context. The proposed hybrid symposium aims to engage learning scientists, CSCL researchers, and stakeholders in productive dialogues to explore the integration of social annotation as a complex practice that can benefit from meaningful application of theories, explicit consideration of learning constructs, and careful design of technological and analytical support. The symposium will both contribute to social annotation practice in the classroom and help learning scientists and CSCL researchers in achieving broader impacts in the education system.