Having Amanda Licastro come and speak for the pedagogy week was a perfect expansion of that week’s readings. Frankly, doing social annotations was a stressful activity for me. Forming something useful to add to a conversation digitally comes less natural for me and having my thoughts memorialized is the thing intrusive thoughts feed on. That being said, after reading “Breaking Boundaries With Social Annotation: An Interview With Amanda Licastro” and having her discuss the affordances around using social annotation in coursework, I wish it were implemented more often in K-12 settings. Having students get used to engaging in constructive discourse around a shared piece of media is a usual skill and might make traversing social media and other digital public spaces an overall better experience. I have read a lot about media literacy and I think techniques and methods like social annotation should probably enter these conversations more in how we teach students to engage and conduct themselves online.

I also thought the insights instructors can gleam from what students discuss in this format is such a great way to get data on how the media for class is being received and perhaps make real time adjustments easier.

While I heed and agree with the concerns Monica Brown and Benjamin Croft raise in “Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom”, especially regarding power and microaggressions in the online space, the promise of this tool seems like something we should encourage. I think about the ways students can be made to feel they have little control of lessons and how using open pedagogy and social annotations can validate their knowledge creation and allow them to feel agency in the classroom.