I'm interested in adding a social reading functionality to our Moodle site, so that students in a class can collaborate on close reading of texts.
I see that the Marginalia plug-in (https://code.google.com/p/marginalia/) has seen some recent development (http://moodurian.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-got-marginalia-forum-annotation-tool.html; https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=232075) for use in Moodle 2.5 in connection with the forums. The examples and discussion however seems to focus on use of Marginalia as a tool for instructors to mark up / correct student posts to forums (https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=232125; https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=232093)
The focus on instructor correction of student forum posts is not what we have in mind though, in terms of a tool to support student collaboration on social reading. A couple of questions:
- Can the Marginalia functionality be applied to other Moodle resources/activities? I suppose the text to be socially read could be put up into a Forum post, but it would perhaps make more sense to be able to post these course texts in Page or Book resources.
- Can students add commentary using the Marginalia functionality, as opposed to just instructor annotation?
We are upgrading from Moodle 2.2 to 2.5 in a couple of weeks to prepare for the fall semester, and it would be great to be able to add social reading as an option for our Moodle courses. Thanks.
keith landa
Purchase College SUNY