As educational content moves increasingly digital, one of the big pushes is to rethink highlighting and margin notes. On the downside, these capabilities are seen as table stakes. If students can’t do with their digital textbooks what they can already do with their analog textbooks, then that’s a step backward. On the upside, there’s a sense that highlighting and annotation is an opportunity to re-think educational affordances, particularly if you add social capabilities into the mix. But, for the most part, social highlighting has been a bust so far. Tools like Diigo have had them for some time now, and I just don’t see a lot of adoption. Even the teaching with Web 2.0 crowd doesn’t seem to have latched onto to these capabilities in a substantial way. Part of the problem, I think, is the lack of strong, core educational use cases informing the design.
Classroom Salon—a product developed at Carnegie Mellon University with funding from the NSF and the Gates Foundation—is different. It has a few key features that make it stand out from the pack as a great tool for teaching critical reading and writing.