Collection
At a Glance
Discipline
- General
- Interdisciplinary
Online Curation & Social Annotation @ Vanier
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 in their courses and promote their use among their peers. The OCSA Community of Practice consists of other teachers who work with the OCSA team as they experiment with these strategies in their own courses.
Areas of Focus
As part of our mandate, the OCSA team has produced various materials. This includes the 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. Created resources include guides on integrating online collaboration, curation and social annotation into a course and various types of marking rubrics. See resources below.
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.
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.
Author(s)
Patti Kingsmill, Pedagogical Support and Innovation , Judy Ingerman, Humanities , Kelly Macdonald, Social and Cultural Sciences and Heather Roffey, Biology - Vanier CollegeAt a Glance
Discipline
- General
- Interdisciplinary