Designing a Social Learning Analytics Tool for Open Annotation and Collaborative Learning

Abstract

This chapter examines why the social and technical practice of annotation—and, specifically, annotation that accompanies digital and openly accessible texts—is relevant to the development of learning analytics in open, flexible, and distance learning (OFDL). When annotated, the text of books become a context for discussion, analysis, and shared inquiry. Social annotation is a genre of learning technology that enables information sharing, peer interaction, collaboration, and the production of new knowledge. Collaborative activity mediated by social annotation—and whether anchored to this book, or to texts like ebooks, PDFs, blog posts, and open textbooks—generate digital information that may be gathered, analyzed, reported, and interpreted as discourse data. When texts, like books, anchor social annotation, it is feasible for researchers to derive insight about group activity, meaning-making, and collaboration through the analysis of discourse data. This chapter is a reflective, first-hand account about the co-design of a public dashboard that reports social learning analytics and encourages learners’ collaborative annotation across open texts and contexts. This chapter: (1) names the theoretical stances toward open and social learning that informed design and research; (2) describes key decisions and trade-offs pertinent to four iterations of the social learning analytics dashboard; and (3) considers epistemological, technological, and infrastructural implications for the development and use of social learning analytics in OFDL.