Learning Communities

Online Curation & Social Annotation @ Vanier

Vanier College, Montreal, QC

About

The OCSA project aims to integrate online curation (OC) and social annotation (SA) into the classroom. Both strategies help develop critical thinking, research, reading, communication, collaboration, digital skills, and are excellent strategies for active learning classrooms.

Like disruptive technologies, both require new approaches to ensure student success: new pedagogical practices, teaching methods, learning activities, and assessment rubrics. This is why we have formed the OCSA team: with the support of Vanier’s Pedagogical Support and Innovation office (PSI), three teachers with release time are developing strategies, teaching tools, and resources to integrate online curation and social annotation …

Our Areas of Focus

Online curation is increasingly recognized as a necessary life-long skill for managing information overload.

It consists of purposefully collecting online content, selecting and organizing it, summarizing each piece while explaining its importance for the collection as a whole, and sharing the curated pieces, all on a cloud-based platform.

Such platforms provide collaborative learning opportunities: students can curate in teams or offer feedback on their peer’s source choices.

Curation also promotes autonomy as students take ownership of their research and its dissemination.

To curate well students must know how to consume media critically. Social annotation helps them learn to do so. Cloud-based- social annotation platforms allow students to comment on elements of a discourse (video, image, or text) and each other’s comments.

Together, students collaborate to understand or deepen their understanding of a discourse.

“The Metaliterate Learner.” Figure 3.1 in Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners, adapted by Patti Kingsmill for the OCSA Project, is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA

Today, students require not simply information literacy but metaliteracy—a 21st century, comprehensive framework that encompasses multiple literacies and the active consumption, creation, and sharing of content in participatory, digital environments. It values ethical, socially responsible online behaviour, and promotes critical thinking, metacognition, collaboration, and peer-learning.

As part of their work, the OCSA team seeks to teach metaliteracy through the use of online curation and social annotation activities, as well as other online collaborative work.

Touted as an essential 21st century skill, collaboration affords the opportunity to learn from others. When students collaborate together, they organically help each other learn.

Teachers can structure activities to optimize that learning process. Because peer-learning is not only central to social annotation, but can be valuable with online curation, the OCSA team has developed tools to help teachers promote peer-learning in these contexts.

For More Information

Online Curation & Social Annotation @ Vanier

A site of curated resources on OCSA

Students Should Be Content Curators

Video produced by college professor John Spencer.

Metaliteracy/Information Literacy

This website is designed to provide information about the concept of metaliteracy.

Integrating Online Curation and Social Annotation into Courses

By Patti Kingsmill, Posted on: Vitrine technologie-éducation (VTÉ)

OCSA Projects & Resources

As part of their mandate, the OCSA team has produced various resources:

“The Curation Process” by Patti Kingsmill. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

An OCSA Netboard which contains curated resources on online collaboration, metaliteracy, technopedagogy, peer-learning, peer-assessments, research, and the evaluation of sources, as well as resources created by the OCSA team:

Guides

Marking Rubrics

Other Resources

“Integrating Online Curation and Social Annotation into Courses” an article published on la Vitrine Technologie Éducative website in which we describe the work we did in the winter of 2019