Collaborative Annotation: Links to Formative Assessment and Issues of Scale for Pedagogy

Annotations on text have been made to spark thoughts, add nuance, and facilitate reading since the inception of printed text itself. Newly emerging collaborative online annotation platforms, such as hypothes.is and Perusall, are enabling annotation of webpages and digital documents on a scale never before seen, serving students in very large numbers. Hypothes.is also seems poised to positively disrupt the peer and post-publication peer review process. Previous review articles have done an excellent job critically analyzing annotation for those in higher education, and predicting the future, but pedagogical issues based on the number of annotators, amount of annotation, and public access for a document have not received much attention. Collaborative annotation also has some natural connections to the formative assessment field, which have not been sufficiently explored in the past. This brief review will examine how the number of annotators, an issue of scale, can hinder or benefit learners, and how annotation can embody a formative assessment practice. The educational technology and assessment fields have much to gain by investigating the routines surrounding dynamically annotated text.