Designing for Student Voice: Social Annotation for Equitable Learning
How can education technology help ensure that every student has a voice? Perusall co-founder Gary King shares the learning design principles behind the company's social annotation platform.
Like kingfishers into the water, some students dive into their virtual classes without a splash, microphone muted, background blurred, greetings in the chat feed. It's as though video meetings are already second nature. But even for the most tech-savvy students, an unfortunate relic of the brick-and-mortar classroom still persists. Forever suspended in the upper left corner of their screen is the raised-hand emoji of the perennial student — the one who will be granted more "voice" than any other student in the room. What can education technology do to help our students navigate the age-old question of equitable learning?
To help answer that question, we spoke with Dr. Gary King, Harvard University professor and co-founder of learning platform Perusall, about his company's approach to designing equitable learning experiences. Perusall is a social annotation tool supporting conversation around shared books, articles, web pages, videos, podcasts and images. It emerged from a four-year research project at Harvard and now serves more than 2 million students at 3,000 education institutions. The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What broad design goals are embedded in Perusall's approach to social annotation?
Social annotation provides real motivation for students. As human beings, we are drawn to the collective, to what others are doing, to the crowd. We like our privacy too, but we don't want to miss out. And gosh, if we could design Perusall so that every time you opened a book you were transported to a bluff overlooking the ocean, with the sun setting, the temperature perfect, all of your friends around you animatedly engaged in a discussion about the content, and maybe even dolphins jumping in the distance, we might do that too! Humans are both amazingly diverse and remarkably predictable; it is our job as instructors to use these features of our "operating systems" to enable students to learn better and faster. That's what Perusall tries to do.
Our broader goal is to have every student prepared for every class. Our mechanism is to motivate everyone to be engaged in and around the content. The more you put in, the more you get out, and so ultimately learning is about the learner. But the teacher's job is to help motivate the students to put more in.
What is your design approach at Perusall to ensure that every student has a voice?
In our research, we found that many of the students who like to speak in class are generally conscientious and so they contribute on Perusall outside the classroom too, but more interestingly we discovered a whole new segment of the class with their own personalities and temperaments and interests who do not like to speak in front of the class, but are comfortable contributing to the class in Perusall. We then tune the platform to expand this group as much as feasible.
When it comes to designing shared learning experiences, you use the term "collective effervescence." Could you speak more about this concept?
If you choose to go to a concert, you will pay something like 47 times the cost of an iTunes or Spotify download. Now, why is that? It's not because the fidelity of the music is better. In fact, it is a lot worse. Well, "collective effervescence" is a sociological term that refers to the feeling we have when we're part of a collective. As human beings, this is an essential feature of our operating systems. Perusall taps into that near-universal motivation.
