The Philosophers' Cocoon

3 responses to “(Alternatives to) social annotation assignments in the age of AI?”

1. Bandaids

   August 5, 2026

   There’s no silver bulllet, only worse options. And they almost always produce slightly more work. But I have found the following better for my sanity than wondering if I am spending time on something a student farted out with an AI in two seconds

   – have students handwrite short answers and submit notes, diagram questions etc (for bad and illegible handwriting – use AI 🙂
   – have student submit handwritten notes of lectures. I do this once a week. I grade these once a week. Check check minus check plus.
   – more multiple choice questions for in class exams. Designing these are a pain, but they reinforce some kind of learning, and are easier to grade. They also impress upon the students of some standards. I also always explain that you can explain your reasoning for partial credit
   – I assign very recent (2026) novels and sometimes books. You can of course upload the epub files but I structure questions that ask students to predict what happens in the novel after every 5-6 chapters. AI finds this hard to do reasonably well, still.
   – AI has also forced me to expand my readings I assign. Early modern, means more women and less canonical authors. Sometimes it’s also finding older random people less known. Sometimes it’s about assigning texts that are hard to find online and have to go to library or some text to get.
   – sometimes I have books on library loan and have them send me a selfie of them going there to read it
   – Sometimes I assign excerpts and I don’t tell students who it’s by. Usually AI generated ones will then tell me it’s like Sartre or whatever and that’s like an implicit tell to corroborate (some students will of course say they heard about this idea somewhere else and that’s fine)
   -Sometimes I make up my own terms for things that should come up for students paying attention
   – no laptops or tech in class, no exceptions. Accommodations of course case by case

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   1. Bandaid

      August 5, 2026

      Just to follow up on my original reply, I know it wasn’t specifically about annotations but was hoping it would spark some further inspiration. One thing specifically about reading texts, depending on class size

      – group read along and discussion. Three or four in a group, one person reads the text out loud and then they discuss. Must be in person. Sounds insane but it works better than you think. They record it and submit
      – in class presentation of annotation individual. The avoidance of embarrassment can at least get students to do things. Five ten mins and walking through a part of the text they found hard and why. Scaffolding this a lot also helps

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2. Paul

   August 7, 2026

   In my existentialism course, I moved away from perusall to (almost) all open-book in-class reading quizzes (10-15 minute time limit in a 75 minute class). I did a mix of 10 MC, 5 MC plus a short answer question, sometimes just 2-3 short answers, and then once we were well into the semester with no AI use (short essays were written in class on a lockdown browser), I had a couple times where i had them put 1-2 quotes into a canvas discussion board along with their interpretation and why they felt the quotes were significant. This was, of course, the best assignment for class discussion and the closest to perusall. You could just have them hand-write them a number of days, bring them to class, and put them in small groups to discuss. But seeing them in advance really sparks a lot of discussion ideas for me. This is a distribution core class, so it was pretty easy at the end of the day. But the quizzes were worth 25% of their grade because that was the only quantitative measure in the course, and the primary means of evaluation whether they read. They were also loves of active, participatory assignments. And I also do lots of in-class discussion and small-group breakout sessions. Students said that they loved the course.

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