Abstract
Every moment of reading offers readers the opportunity to enter into the text as part of a larger conversation, one that likely started long before the reader encountered the text. Yet there remains the myth that reading is about encountering a text ossified in time rather than bringing an idea into a dialogue. Recognizing that a text is lively, that it invites voices to intervene and disrupt a conversation, is critical to the creative development of new thought. The Social Web offers opportunities in college classrooms to make the ongoing conversation that begins in a reading visible so that students can enter into a conversation in shared textual spaces. This chapter offers a broad understanding of what social annotation is and why it is important by offering the benefits and challenges of social annotation while briefly reviewing the empirical literature on social annotation from a variety of disciplines. Talking Back to Texts: An Introduction to Putting the “Social” in “Social Annotation"