Examining Student Participation in Three Learning Activities Supported by Social Annotation Tools

Abstract: Social annotation (SA) allows learners to highlight and comment on Web pages and share annotations with each other online. Despite its potential in promoting collaborative learning, examining how to integrate it into educational settings has not been fully studied. The purpose of the study is to examine student participation in three different SA-based online activities: (1) peer review, (2) annotated discussion, and (3) collaborative reading. Students participated in all three SA-based activities and took a survey at the end reporting the effectiveness of these activities. The analysis of students ’ annotations and their survey responses suggested that although participants perceived the use of SA tools in all the three activities to be relatively effective, their levels of participation in the three activities varied greatly. The authors discuss the pros and cons of using SA in each of the activities based on the findings. Suggestions for future use and development of SA tools are also provided