Social annotation: innovating the teaching-learning process at university

The innovation of the teaching methodologies in higher education is an issue that concerns all countries [1]. A promising innovation arises from the digital reinvention of one of the essential activities of scholarly inquiry [2]: annotation. “Social annotation” is a practice that is spreading across the Web and could be widely applied in higher education. It can be an element for a real innovation because it has the potential to break down the pretty common “exam-oriented” habit that encourages rote learning: skipping the lessons or attending them without tackling with the course work until a few days before the in-class exam [3, 4]. Educational research indicates that the students’ engagement with the reading assignments has decreased over time [5, 6, 7]. One way to reverse this trend is involving students in ongoing activities throughout the course. Redesigning the overall learning-teaching process is necessary to accomplish this goal, changing the lectures, the study and the assessment, mutually integrating them with the active involvement of the students [8]. The social annotation process has the potential to foster this innovation, and nowadays, we can apply it in undergraduate courses, employing some Web environments explicitly developed for this purpose.