ACTIVITY 9.19
Sharing Critical Annotations

Why share critical annotations? If your previous research experiences have been good ones, you have probably learned much about the topics you've researched, and that kind of independent learning can often be more fulfilling and satisfying than learning from lectures. You have also learned that research is sometimes grueling work, fraught with dead ends, unretrievable sources, and sheer information overload. Although on-line research can offer you easier and better access to more information sources that you don't have to trudge off to the library to track down, a simple, if unfocused, search on a World Wide Web search engine can lead you to hundreds of sources. As you get better at conducting focused searches and better at reading and evaluating on-line sources, your research will become more streamlined and efficient.

One individual, however, can only go so far. By pooling your efforts, each member of the community can get leads to more and different kinds of sources than any individual can find alone. If five people are interested in researching and writing about the use of computer technology in education, for example, each individual would do well to come up with a dozen or so sources. If those five, each of whom might have found a dozen unique sources of information, pooled what they have found and share that with everyone else interested in the topic, each member would then have leads to forty-eight additional sources-far more, of course, than any individual might need to write a well-researched and -documented paper on the topic. Well-written critical annotations, however, will help individuals sort through and evaluate the various sources and help them determine whether a particular source is worth seeking out. This activity, then, offers suggestions for sharing critical annotations.

Step 1: Determining the Number of Critical Annotations to Share

Your learning community, that is, your teacher and your classmates, will first need to determine how many critical annotations each person in the class will share. How many each person will write and how many each will share depend much on your class's purposes for writing the annotations. Your learning community might have engaged in this project merely to learn a tool for evaluating and critiquing E-texts-an exercise that in itself has merit as a critical reading activity. If this is the case, your class might decide to have each person share just one critical annotation as a way of exploring the various approaches people can take to complete the activity.

On the other hand, maybe you wrote the critical annotations as the preliminary step toward your research to write other documents, such as those discussed in Chapters 10 and 11. If this is the case, these annotations could serve collaborative research purposes. Thus, your group needs to decide how many critical annotations each person will write. In the introduction to this chapter, we recommended writing at least five critical annotations as you conduct background research. How many each person will write and how many each person will share depends on the class's goals for this activity. If, ultimately, your community will create a database of critical annotations for everyone in the community to draw upon to find leads for their own research, each member of the class might want to share five or more critical annotations.

Your class, then, will need to engage in an on-line or face-to-face discussion about the learning community's goals. The discussion should lead to concrete decisions about how many critical annotations each person will write and how many they will share.

Step 2: Determining with Whom to Share the Annotations

Your community also needs to determine how widely to share the annotations. If, for example, your community has subdivided itself into peer groups of three to five members each, you might decide to share your annotations just with the members of those groups. Or, you might have divided yourselves by topic interests so that all those working on censorship issues, for example, will work together in one group, those interested in economic issues will work together in another group, and so on. The critical annotations, therefore, might be shared just among members of those groups. A case could be made, also, for everyone to share all their critical annotations with everyone else, especially if the activity is being used to help community members think about topics they might write about. The biggest determining factor hinges on how much information community members are able to handle. For example, if you have twenty-five class members and each writes five critical annotations that are to be shared with everyone in the class, everyone will receive 120 critical annotations!

Step 3: Determining How to Share Critical Annotations

How your community will share the critical annotations depends much on the kinds of technology your community has available to it and how comfortable with the various forms of technology each member has become. Here you will find some options to consider.

Option 1: Sharing Critical Annotations through CMC

You could use various forms of computer-mediated communication, including E-mail, usenet newsgroups, or electronic bulletin boards, to share your annotations.

If your class has decided to have everyone share all their annotations with the whole group, send your annotations as E-mail messages or newsgroup articles to your class E-mail group or newsgroup.

If your class has decided to work in smaller groups-preformed writing groups or topic-centered groups-you will want to develop a way to share the critical annotations with those people only. You can accomplish this in a number of ways:

Whatever method you use, remember to offer your readers as much descriptive information as possible in the header of your CMC message. A real possibility exists that people could be receiving scores of critical annotations' therefore, you need to provide them ways of determining whether the contents of the message are something they should consider reading. Be sure, then, to put the most focused, accurate description you can on the subject line of your message header. For example, if you were sharing a critical annotation on an E-text you read about freedom of speech, you could write in the subject line one of the following: "Annotation," "Freedom of Speech," "Free Speech Annotation," or "Pro-Free Speech Annotation." The first example wouldn't give your potential readers much to go on, other than the fact that the contents of the message includes a critical annotation rather than an invitation to a party. The second one would offer more information-the message is about free speech-but the reader wouldn't know whether you were sharing a critical annotation about an E-text on free speech or your personal opinions on the topic. The third one would at least cue in your readers that the message contained an annotation about a free-speech E-text. The last one would tell your reader that the message was a critical annotation about a pro-free speech E-text. Your busy classmates will much appreciate the more detailed, descriptive subject line.

Option 2: Sharing Critical Annotations through the World Wide Web

If the members of your community have access to and have developed World Wide Web authoring skills, you may decide to share your critical annotations on the Web. Doing so has the advantage that those who are interested in your annotations only can seek them out without having to trudge through scores of E-mail messages, newsgroup articles, or bulletin board postings to find what they are looking for. On the other hand, other members of the learning community may not know where to look for your annotations. Again, a number of possibilities exist:

Class members could place their annotations on their individual Web sites. If you choose this option, you will need to send a CMC message to all your classmates or at least to the subgroup with which you're working, informing them of your URL and the general contents of what critical annotations they will find there. Such information will permit those classmates interested in the same topic to seek out your annotations.

By this point in the semester, your class might have begun a collaborative Web site authored by one Webspinner, a delegated group of classmates, or everyone in the community. The benefit of placing all the community's annotations on the same Website is that the community creates a central repository that makes finding the annotations easier. The logistics of creating a collaborative site include these:

Some Considerations on Using the Shared Annotations Effectively

Your community has now created a rich database of sorts about a wide range of E-texts on wide range of subjects. What you have done for one another is provide multiple access points into the vast universe of information on the Internet. As a group you have not uncovered everything, of course, but you have created leads-places to start-on your individual quests to learn more about a particular subject so you can write about it. How each individual uses these leads is crucial.

When you first started looking for E-texts, your search was necessarily broad. Some of what you found individually might have provided general background information about the topic or very specific statistics dealing with one specific aspect of your topic. Undoubtedly, some of the E-texts you found contributed very little to your knowledge about the topic, and some might not have contributed to the focus of your research. If you are using the critical annotation project as part of the research process, you will find that as you start to write your researched document, you will need specific kinds of information to support various parts of your document. For instance, if you were writing an argument about freedom of speech on the Internet, you might realize that having a copy of the First Amendment or various legal rulings and interpretations of it would be useful. You have a couple of options to find such specific information. Of course, you could conduct a whole new search on the First Amendment. Although doing so would be worthwhile, the fact is you might come across hundreds of E-texts on the subject and you would have to read and evaluate many of them to determine which might best serve your purposes. Another, and perhaps more efficient method is to see whether any of your classmates interested in the same topic wrote a critical annotation about some aspect of the First Amendment. If the annotation was well written, you will be able to evaluate rather quickly whether the original source is worth tracking down and reading on your own.

You must also keep in mind the purpose of the critical annotations so you can make effective and ethical use of them. The annotations serve only as an evaluation of an E-text and should not be used in place of the E-text itself. No matter how well written and documented one of your peers' annotations might be, you cannot use that annotation as a source. You can only use the annotation to determine whether the source looks like something worth looking up yourself. Remember, a peer's annotation is only one reading and one perspective on the source. If your peer did a poor reading of the source and you used that source in your paper without reading it yourself, you could end up using the source in a misleading fashion.

In short, do not cite a source you know about only through a peer's critical annotation. Use an annotation only as a lead to a potential source. Decide from the annotation whether the source is worth tracking down yourself, and read and evaluate the source on your own before using it in your paper.

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