Community
A persistent space for shared reading, public margin notes, and collaborative dialogue that extends beyond any single course.
The Annotation Academy isn't just a set of courses — it's a community of annotators. Throughout your Academy experience and beyond, you're invited to read with others, share your annotations, and participate in the ongoing conversation about what it means to add notes to texts in pursuit of collaboration, learning, and justice.
The community layer runs throughout the entire Academy. Whether you're in Course 1 or finishing the capstone, you're part of a group of readers who believe that annotation is a social, critical, and generative literacy practice.
Shared readings
Each month, the community selects a text to read and annotate together — modeled on the Marginal Syllabus, a project that has sustained public annotation conversations among hundreds of educators since 2016.
Peer dialogue
Your annotations aren't just notes to yourself. They're invitations to conversation. The community is where you encounter other readers' thinking, respond to their ideas, and build shared understanding.
Cohort connections
Connect with fellow learners from your courses and across pathways. Pathway A learners bring expertise in collaborative reading; Pathway B learners bring critical annotation skills. Together, the community is richer.
Public margin notes
When you annotate open access texts — like Re/Marks on Power at direct.mit.edu — your annotations become part of a public layer visible to future readers. You're contributing to a growing archive of collective thinking.
To participate in the annotation community, you'll need the Hypothesis browser extension installed. Hypothesis is a free, open-source tool that lets you annotate any web page and see others' annotations alongside your own.
Once you have Hypothesis installed, join the Academy's annotation group (your facilitator will share the group link) and start reading. Every text in the Academy can be annotated collaboratively — and your annotations become part of the community's shared knowledge.
The Academy's community model is inspired by the Marginal Syllabus, a project founded by Remi Kalir that has used social annotation to spark and sustain public conversation about educational equity since 2016. Over its six-year run, the Marginal Syllabus brought together hundreds of educators to collaboratively annotate scholarship about critical literacies, civic engagement, and equitable learning.
The Annotation Academy carries this legacy forward: reading together, annotating with care, and believing that the social life of documents can transform how we learn, teach, and participate in public life.