Annotation as Connected Conversation in CSCL

Research has yet to explore how the social and technical affordances of open web annotation (OWA) can mediate connections among educators in service of their professional learning. This study examined educator participation in the Marginal Syllabus, a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment that encouraged connected conversation via OWA. Multiple quantitative methods, including text sentiment analysis and social network analysis, were used to discern key discursive characteristics among the 9 conversations of the 2016–2017 Marginal Syllabus (1,163 annotations authored by 67 participating educators). Key discursive characteristics of educators’ connected conversations include: (a) generally positive sentiment; (b) educators who annotated most prolifically also authored the greatest percentage of annotations with neutral sentiment; and (c) conversations of at least 4 annotations tended to demonstrate a greater percentage of negative sentiment. The sentiment trends and study limitations are addressed in the final discussion. Annotation as Connection From handwritten scholia atop Homer’s Iliad to layered Talmudic commentary, the act of annotation has notable historical roots that precede our digital era. Annotation, according to Sanderson and de Sompel (2011), is “a pervasive activity shared by all humanity across all walks of life” (para. 1). Inspired by the centuries-old practice of adding marginalia to printed texts, the need for digital forms of annotation appeared in Berners-Lee’s (1989) proposal for an information system linked by hypertext—what we know as the World Wide Web—and was a feature of Mosaic, the first web browser. Today, web annotation allows a reader to comment upon, correct, highlight, and categorize online text. According to Udell (2017): If we think of the web we’ve known as a kind of fabric woven together with links, the annotated web increases the thread count of that fabric. When we weave with pieces of URL-addressable documents, we can have conversations about those pieces, we can retrieve them, we can tag them, and we can interconnect them. (par. 11) Web annotation serves as a means of connection; more specifically, it can serve as a process mediating connected conversation among people, their ideas, and fine-grained linkages to online content such as phrases, sentences, and data. Today, connected conversations mediated by web annotation appear in journalism, legal education, scientific research, and scholarly publication. Within the field of education, a growing body of research has examined web annotation in relation to students’ reading comprehension and critical thinking, the development of domain-specific knowledge, and as a form of collaboration (e.g., Johnson, Archibald, & Tenenbaum, 2010; McNutt, 2014; Su, Yang, Hwang, & Zhang, 2010). However, educational research has yet to robustly examine how the social and technical affordances of web annotation might mediate connections between educators in service of their interest-driven and professionally relevant learning. Under what conditions might educators leverage web annotation to have connected conversations about their teaching practices and professional interests? What may be the discursive qualities of this conversation? And, ultimately, why would such conversation matter? Given the relevance of connected