About
An online learning experience for everyday readers and curious students passionate about annotation and how this literacy practice aids collaboration, learning, and the construction of new knowledge.
The Annotation Academy is built upon the research and writing of Remi Kalir, a scholar of annotation whose work examines how the addition of notes to texts facilitates social, collaborative, and justice-directed learning.
Remi is the author of two books published by MIT Press: Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice (2025, open access) and Annotation (2021, co-authored with Antero Garcia), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles about social annotation, collaborative learning, and critical literacy.
His scholarship identifies five functions of annotation — providing information, sharing commentary, sparking conversation, expressing power, and aiding learning — and argues that this everyday literacy practice can be reimagined as a critical and civic act that inscribes public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.
The Annotation Academy offers six core courses organized into a foundation, two learning pathways, and a collaborative capstone — plus short-format extension electives.
Pathway A: Social Reading & Collaborative Annotationdraws on the learning sciences and computer-supported collaborative learning to explore how groups construct knowledge together through shared reading and social annotation. It is grounded in Remi's research on the Marginal Syllabus, a public project that has facilitated collaborative annotation conversations among hundreds of educators since 2016.
Pathway B: Critical Annotation & Re/Marks on Powerexplores annotation as critical literacy through vivid case studies: Harriet Tubman's legacy, the US-Mexico border, America's memorial landscape, and the #SharpieActivism campaign against book censorship. It asks learners to find and compose re/marks in their own communities.
Both pathways converge in The Annotation Studio, a collaborative capstone in which learners annotate a shared text together as a learning community.
The Academy is committed to openness. Re/Marks on Power is published open access by MIT Press through the Direct to Open program and can be read and annotated freely at direct.mit.edu. The Academy's curriculum draws on open scholarship, encourages public annotation, and invites learners to contribute their own marks to the growing conversation about annotation as literacy, learning, and justice.
Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice
Kalir (2025) · MIT Press — Open Access
Annotation
Kalir & Garcia (2021) · MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Social Annotation Enabling Collaboration for Open Learning
Kalir (2020) · Distance Education
When I Saw My Peers Annotating: Student Perceptions of Social Annotation for Learning
Kalir, Morales, Fleerackers, & Alperin (2020) · Information and Learning Sciences
Visit remikalir.com for Remi's full publications, the #AnnotatedSyllabus resources, and more about his research on annotation and learning.