Purpose: Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction, and knowledge production. This case study examines the perceived value of SA in multiple undergraduate courses.Design/methodology/approach: Fifty-nine students in three upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to students’ perceptions of learning and sense of community.Findings: A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged, and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings about the perceived value of SA as contributing to course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas, and engagement with diverse perspectives.Research limitations/implications: Studies about the relationships among SA, learning, and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation.Practical implications: Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional, and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal, and peer-supported learning.Originality/value: This study found greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.

Collaboration is a conceptually ambiguous aspect of open education. Given inconsistent discussion about collaboration in the open education literature, this article suggests collaboration be defined and studied as a distinct open educational practice. A theoretical stance from the discipline of computer-supported collaborative learning helps conceptualize collaboration as processes of intersubjective meaning-making. Social annotation is then presented as a genre of learning technology that can productively enable group collaboration and shared meaningmaking. After introducing an open learning project utilizing social annotation for group dialogue, analysis of interview and annotation data details how social annotation enabled three group-level epistemic expressions delineating collaboration as intersubjective meaning-making and as an open educational practice. A summative discussion considers how the social life of documents encourages collaboration, why attention to epistemic expression is a productive means of articulating open learning, and how to extend the study of collaboration as an open educational practice.

The purpose of this article is threefold: a) to describe the equity-oriented design of a publicly accessible and openly networked computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) initiative that has supported educator discussion about equity topics; b) to identify design principles for equity-oriented design in open education; and c) to propose a model for the design of open learning initiatives that are mutually committed to educational equity and educational openness. Design: This article draws from design-based research methodology, specifically design narrative and the worked example. The article is one response to the need for more "designerly work" in the learning sciences, generally, and more specifically in domains such as CSCL. Findings: Four design principles are identified that informed the equity-oriented creation and iteration of the Marginal Syllabus, an open CSCL initiative: Leveraging the open web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content, and engaging professional learning as an open practice. This article also advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The model integrates design principles to assist CSCL and open education designers and researchers in creating or iterating projects to be more equity-oriented learning opportunities. Originality: This article's design narrative identifies Marginal Syllabus design principles and advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The design narrative demonstrates how critical perspectives on the relationship between equity and digital technology can encourage collaboration among diverse project stakeholders, attune to the dynamics of power and agency, and respond to the worldly needs of partners and participants.

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This case study examines educator learning as mediated by open web annotation among sociopolitical texts and contexts. The chapter introduces annotation practices and conceptualizes intertextuality to describe how open web annotation creates dialogic spaces which gather together people and texts, coordinates meaning-making, and encourages political agency. This perspective on texts-as-contexts is used to present and analyze educator participation in the Marginal Syllabus, a social design experiment that leverages open web annotation to foster conversation about educational equity. One conversation from the inaugural year of the Marginal Syllabus is analyzed using mixed method approaches to data