“The heart of the matter, what the learner learns, whatever the teacher teaches, is that human beings make sense of the world by telling stories about it—by using the narrative mode for constructing reality” (

Baker and Greene (1977) describe storytelling not as a memorized performance but instead an interaction that exists between the teller and the listeners. They claim that storytelling at its best is a mutual creation.

Recent years have seen a shift to narrative studies in education and social science. This research relies less on how a narrative text is formed and more on how narrative texts are used (Cordi, 2019, p. 36).

Stories don’t just convey information; they “demonstrate relationships between tellers, hearers, characters, and others” (Shuman, 1986, p. 21). The audience members are active witnesses, participating in constructing the narrative and playing in its gaps (Richter, 1996).

What experiences haveyou had with annotation? How might those experiences prepare you to read incommunity with others?Learning is SocialAnnotation has been practiced for thousands of years as a way to improvereading. Readers annotating texts individually to aid learning is an oldpractice, one recommended by Erasmus as early as the sixteenth centu-ry (Jackson 48). Social annotations can help us learn about what we’rereading too. In the Jewish tradition, published Talmudic annotations helpreaders make sense of the Talmud (Kalir & Garcia 78). Before the inven-tion of the printing press, it was common to share a text and annotationsamong groups of readers even though the technology made reproducingthe text and annotations time consuming.But new tools for digital social annotation afford readers new possibil-ities not only for making annotations that are shared with others, but alsofor annotating at the same time and across distances. Digital annotationthus creates a more expansive space for the social practice of annotation.