Beyond reading together: Facilitating knowledge construction through participation roles and social annotation in college classrooms

Social reading is a common practice in higher education to engage students in critical reading and classroom dialogues around course materials. This paper introduces a study that integrated a social annotation technology and a scaffolding framework to support social reading in undergraduate classrooms. The framework, grounded in the computer-supported collaborative learning literature, specifies three participation roles—namely, facilitator, synthesizer, and summarizer—that have distinct responsibilities in each week's social reading activities. Using Hypothesis, the social annotation technology, we piloted the framework in a fully online undergraduate course. To examine how the framework facilitated social interaction and knowledge construction, we applied social network analysis and content analysis to a rich dataset. Results revealed that the framework fostered active participation in class with students followed the assigned roles properly. This study has practical implications for online teaching and collaborative learning in higher education.