Smarthistory: The Blog

I admit it. I have a real thing for annotating.

Somehow the Academic Commons article led me to some books on Amazon, and ultimately to this book — Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace which I couldn’t resist ordering. After completing the order, Amazon asked me if I wanted to be able to read it online for an extra $5.95. How could I resist trying that? So, lo and behold, I have the book online via my Amazon Online Reader, and I can comment and highlight and tag whatever I like. Wow. What a world of difference this would have made to my dissertation research! I have to admit I find this writing-inside-the-book online absolutely thrilling — more so for some reason that just writing in a paperback. I think it has something to do with having more room to write more (often I go back and have no idea why I wrote what I did), also being able to search by tags seems incredibly handy, and I’m fascinated by the idea of other readers making their annotations public and being able to read and share annotations. What if you could limit this to a class instead of making annotations public?

I’ve also been playing with Conceptshare as a tool to use in class. You can annotate an image, connect your annotations to specific areas of the image, you can highlight part of an image, and even draw on it. Each comment begins a discussion thread of sorts so you can have separate discussions going on about a specific section of an image. You can also see who’s online at the same time as you, you can chat with them, send them messages, etc. Now, if only there was some way to make assessment of student contributions simple (or maybe we need to do away with assessment altogether?)