It happened again. I think I have some unique insight and after playing with this unique insight for a year or two I learn that it is not unique at all. I am working on a revision of my book on the instructional and learning opportunities of what I call “layering”. I have been focused on one implementation of layering which involves the educational repurposing of online content (web pages and video). I noticed that there were tools educators could use to design more effective learning content using such existing resources and I have been trying to identify design guidelines classroom educators can use. Then, I discover there were several companies that have found a way to apply similar techniques by working out agreements allowing learners to interact with the content developed by traditional textbook companies. Somewhere in the process of exploring these new businesses I came across the phrase “social reading” and began to consider what this concept might offer as an educational tactic. I bet most of those who read this post have not encountered this notion of social reading, but this type of awareness is what I consider my job. I should have known social reading was a thing,
As so often seems the case, social reading has historical roots even if these roots do not involve the use of an activity as an instructional approach. Learned folks would quote favorite passages to each other. This brings to mind those who quote scripture so if passage quotation is considered an early form, social reading goes back a long way. A more recent incarnation might be book clubs and you may have participated in this social activity. Academics often engage in a related activity called journal clubs in which folks gather to discuss a recent journal article all have read. A digital version might be represented by a service such as GoodReads [https://www.goodreads.com/].
The digitization and cloud storage of digital content offers new opportunities for social reading and brings us to the type of thing I now explore. If you are a Kindle user, you may have experienced a very basic component of social reading. If you turn on the feature, the content you read may contain the highlighting (underlining) of the passages most frequently marked by earlier readers of the same book. Amazon offers this feature as a way to allow a type of communication among readers as they share what is most important or interesting. Digitization and cloud storage allow multiple capabilities for annotating and offer the opportunity for both purposeful communication among readers and the designation of just which readers should be involved in this asynchronous communication.
This is what I think is important. Here is what else this makes me think about. It is the purposeful use of such capabilities that I think offer such great opportunities for thinking and learning – teacher to student, student to student, and student to teacher. I think such opportunities are not widely recognized so I still think my focus has value. I encountered a detailed exploration of social reading dated 2013. I include the citation at the end of this post. I always review the reference section to such works to identify research articles I might read. I found nothing directly related to educational practice. Interestingly, I also found most of the citations identified international authors rather than U.S. scholars. So, there may be some “not invented here” involved in the limited embrace of social reading among the educational authors and researchers I read.
Social reading is a thing and there are educational opportunities in applying the capabilities of the services and tools for the purpose of developing reading skills and learning from reading. Use the layering tag associated with this post to identify earlier posts on tactics I might now describe as social reading.
Cordón-García, J. A., Alonso-Arévalo, J., Gómez-Díaz, R., & Linder, D. (2013). Social reading: platforms, applications, clouds and tags. Elsevier.
