Unravelling the synergy

Online social annotation platforms nurture a community of inquiry, enabling students to annotate texts, exchange ideas, and collaboratively construct knowledge. These platforms allow students to take notes, engage in discussions about reading content, share personal reflections, and integrate external learning resources. Such diverse annotation behaviours not only provide rich learning opportunities but also reveal the interplay between academic and everyday learning. However, the question remains: how do academic learning and everyday learning intertwine in these contexts? This chapter seeks to address that question. The participants comprised 54 postgraduate students from a university in Hong Kong, enrolled in an MA(TESOL) course titled English Language Teaching Methodologies. Data were collected from their annotations on ten assigned readings via Perusall. A combination of methods was employed: content analysis to categorise students’ annotation types, sequential analysis to identify transition patterns between academic and everyday learning, and discourse analysis to explore the facilitation mechanisms underlying these transitions. Based on these results, we discuss the interplay of these two forms of learning and provide pedagogical implications for fostering their integration in digital annotation learning contexts.