Political Philosophy: Social Annotations Assignment

Each class meeting has assigned reading that you are expected to read and think about. I will also post questions to help you check your comprehension of the main claims and arguments within each of those readings.

To assist you in this process, you will work with your classmates on Perusall to collaboratively annotate the readings by 11:59pm (midnight), Buffalo (Eastern Standard) Time, the night before we discuss it during class. Please note that there is no grace period for completing social annotations.

Here’s What I Want You to Do
Here’s Why I Want You to Do It
Here’s How to Do It
Here’s How It Will Be Assessed
Using Free Passes
Considerations for Your Account

Here’s What I Want You to Do

For each of the social annotations assignments, make at least 5 annotations to the reading.

Substantive responses to the annotations of your classmates will count as annotations of your own. Indeed, social annotations are meant to be a social experience for us, so I would strongly prefer that at least half of your annotations are in response to those of a classmate.

Here’s Why I Want You to Do It

The purpose of social annotating is pretty straightforward: they have you work with your classmates to practice and build the skills for critically reading philosophical texts while connecting that material to your own interests and experiences.

As such, social annotating are a useful starting point for you to achieve all five learning outcomes for this course:

Explain and summarize arguments within philosophical texts;
Apply these arguments to the difficult local, national, and global political debates that currently confront us;
Assess competing claims concerning the origin and purpose of the state along with how it ought to govern our collective practices;
Reflect on your own assumptions and form more considered judgments on issues of justice and political legitimacy; and
Communicate your understanding and analysis of these issues through written discourse.

To these ends, work with your classmates connecting the readings to current events and your experiences, assessing the positions those texts try to establish, and reflecting on what it is you believe about all of this.

Here’s How to Do It

In general, each of your annotations must do at least 1 of these 3 tasks:

Highlight text that you find particularly interesting, profound, and/or controversial—and then explain why you highlighted that text (that is, why do you find it interesting? or why do you think it profound? or why might it be controversial?);
Highlight text that you believe helps us answer the reading questions, give the number(s) of the reading question(s), and explain why you believe the highlighted text helps answer the question(s); and/or
Respond to the annotations made by your classmates, expanding in a substantive way on whatever it is they are saying.

Your annotations may do any combination of these tasks. This choice is up to you.

No matter what task you choose, though, all your annotations must be…

Relevant,
Substantive, and
Respectful.

By relevant, I mean that your annotations are clearly doing at least 1 of the 3 tasks above and not going off topic.

By substantive, I mean more than generic commentary, simply repeating whatever the text or a classmate says, or giving a thoughtless “I agree”. Above all else, I want to see you presenting your own careful reasoning by substantiating your claims and providing concrete examples.

By respectful, I mean that you critically assess the claims the readings and your classmates are making while not attacking the person(s) making those claims. It is fine to disagree with the reading and your classmates—even with me!—but it is disrespectful to besmirch the integrity or character of another person. Indeed, personal attacks suggest it is your position that is weak and unsound. So please no flame wars, no bullying, and no being a jerk!

Here’s How It Will Be Assessed

Your contribution to the annotations for each reading will be scored by Perusall on a scale of 0 to 10. With 41 social annotations assignments this semester, that is a total possible social annotations score of 410.

Your score on each social annotations assignment will be based upon the Perusall autoscoring algorithm. This works by first evaluating each of your annotations as “deficient”, “improvement needed”, or “meets expectations”.

After that, Perusall takes into other considerations for determining your score. For instance, Perusall gives a small penalty if your annotations are not distributed throughout the reading. The idea is that you should be reading the whole text and not just one small part of it. Your score will also be slightly modified by other considerations as well, such as how many people are responding to your annotations.

The good news is that you can set up Perusall to encourage and help you make better annotations and improve your score. Because of that, I have found that this autoscoring algorithm works quite well. Even so, I will still regularly check its results, making sure that scores are reasonable. Of course, if you feel that your annotations are not being fairly scored by Perusall, let me know and I’ll gladly score you myself!

I do highly encourage you to look over the grading scheme for this course, which goes into a lot more detail about how your social annotations will influence your final course grade. As always, though, do not be a stranger—reach out to me if have questions about any of this!

Using Free Passes

You may use one free pass to automatically gain a perfect score of 10 on any one social annotations assignment.

Considerations for Your Account

This means that you need a Perusall account. The good news is that this should be set up automatically when you start clicking on the Perusall links I have posted on the course website. (For instance, here is a link to the course page in Perusall showing all the reading assignments. Clicking that link should automatically take you to Perusall.)

The first time you use Perusall, please be sure that you are using your real first and last name, so I can identify you. I also recommend making sure that it is linked to your UB email. (When someone tags you on Perusall, you get an email message letting you know.) You may also need to enter your student ID. To keep things simple, please use either your UB Student ID Number or your UB email for that ID.

Keep in mind that you cannot be anonymous on Perusall. However, only people enrolled in the course will see your annotations. No outsiders are allowed!