Article: Learning Technology

Five Ways to Use Social Annotation With and Against ChatGPT


Derek’s Recommendation

Some of the details about what ChatGPT can and can't do are now dated in this article, but the core ideas about using annotation to emphasize the process of learning (and to make that process more visible) hold up very well more than a year later.

Part of the problem that ChatGPT presents in education is in how teachers assess student work, though these challenges were not created by generative AI. A summative assessment causes both student and teacher to focus all their attention into a singular product that is supposed to stand in for a larger set of critical processes enacted over time. But with annotation that final product can also be a record of all those earlier stages in the act of production. When students annotate their own writing they gain agency in the assessment process rather than being merely a subject of it.