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Hi everyone.

I’ve never been at a THATCamp before, so I’m not entirely sure how the breakout sessions work. But one topic I’ve been thinking about a bit is social annotation. I’d like my students to be able to annotate texts collectively as they read. I’ve tried to do this class wikis (Columbia uses wikispaces) and with google docs, but both get very balky when the texts are long and multiple readers are working at the same time.

I’ve been looking at some MIT projects called Annotation Studio and NB. Annotation Studio seems well set up for long texts–one of their samples is Moby-Dick–while NB may be more fully developed at this point. The PI at NB turns out to be a college friend of mine, and the site includes a paper about classroom use of social annotation: “Successful Classroom Deployment of a Social Document Annotation System.”

I’m wondering if anyone who’ll be at THATCamp has tried either of these systems (or similar ones–the Annotation Studio site lists the following similar tools: eComma, Domeo, Highbrow, Prism, OpenMargin, Public Poetics, CommentPress, Marginalia, Co-ment, and NB) and might be interested in talking about how they could work for course reading. Again, I don’t know if this is what break-out sessions are for, but I’m happy to talk about this either at a break-out session or elsewhere. I don’t have a lot of time to prepare material much beyond what I’ve posted here–my paper for the regular conference is not yet written.

I welcome your thoughts.

Thanks.

Lisa Gordis