Reflection 5

A thing I did not expect from this course was to spend a week thinking this much about margins.

Notes in the margins, comments on a page, highlights, replies, little marks on things; I always treated that stuff as extra. Helpful maybe, but still extra. This week kind of messed that up for me in a good way. It made me realize that annotation and curation are not study habits or productivity tricks. They can actually be part of how people think together and respond to each other.

The Remi Kalir talk was probably the part that changed how I was looking at this the most. What I liked about it is that he did not talk about annotation like it was only an academic thing where you underline a sentence and move on. He was treating it like something way bigger than that. The examples he used stuck with me because they were not just from school. He talked about stop signs, cookbooks, protest walls, coffee sleeves, stuff like that. That made the whole idea feel less formal and more alive. Annotation was not being framed as this boring school skill. It was more like leaving a trace, adding meaning, interrupting something, or replying to the world a bit.

Another part from Remi Kalir that I really liked was when he talked about the syllabus as a rough draft instead of a contract. That was such a weirdly simple idea but I actually think it says a lot. Usually a syllabus feels fixed and kind of untouchable. But if students can annotate it, question it, respond to it, and reflect on it together, then that changes the whole relationship a bit. It gives students more voice. It makes the class feel more like something people are part of, not just something being done to them. I think that idea connects a lot to digital literacy too, because it is not only about using tools correctly. It is also about whether digital spaces let people actually contribute.

The privacy part of annotation was interesting too. I liked that the course did not treat everything as automatically public. There is a big difference between giving feedback and being forced into visibility. I think that matters especially in a course like this where blogs, online identity, and digital footprint are always in the background. The option to stay private but still participate feels way more thoughtful than acting like openness is always the best thing in every situation.

Zotero was another example of something I used to think of in a pretty narrow way. I mostly just thought of it as a citation manager, like storage for sources so you do not lose them later. But “curation” sounds different from storage. Curation feels more intentional. It is not just collecting random stuff. It is choosing, organizing, and building a trail of what matters. I think that is a useful distinction because the internet throws so much information at us that just gathering more of it is not automatically helpful. A curated set of sources says more than a giant pile of tabs ever will.

I think that is what I am taking from Week 8 more than anything. Annotation is not only note-taking. Curation is not only saving sources. Accessibility is not only a technical fix. All of them are connected to participation. Who gets to contribute, who gets heard, who can access the material, and who gets left doing extra work because someone else designed badly. That feels like a much more real version of digital literacy than just being able to use apps well. It is more social than I thought, and honestly more human too.