Built for seminar classes

Annotations as thinking instruments.

Tinkerjots turns your reading into thinking, one annotation at a time. It captures your raw thinking at the exact moment you're reading, before it gets polished away. It's not another social annotation tool. It's a thinking instrument built for the seminar room.

Anonymized peer views · no student names ever projected

Week 3 · The Architecture of Agency · p.2

Institutions are best understood as congealed agency. In this sense, structure precedes agency in every particular encounter; and yet, over the long run, structure is nothing but the residue of agency itself, sedimented into rule and routine.

The question for a theory of learning is therefore not which comes first, but how each is made from the other…

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Prior in what sense, causal or analytic? This seems to cut against Dewey from last week.▍

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?QuestionMaya C.

Prior in what sense, causal or analytic? This seems to cut against Dewey from last week.

Diego A. built on this

Same question. Dewey would say the priority is only ever practical.

The Thinking Loop

Every jot makes this journey.

The entry point

Seek

While reading the source, capture the question you have about this exact passage, rooted in curiosity or confusion at the point where it strikes, not recalled after the fact. The question is anchored to the text itself.

Not comments, connections.

Social annotation connects you to your peers. Tinkerjots connects you to their thinking: you respond to the annotation, not the person, and construct new understanding from it.

Theoretical Pillars

Two research traditions shape every design decision.

Constructionism

In Papert's tradition, learners build understanding by building artifacts. Every jot is an object to think with: constructed, revisited, and reconstructed as understanding develops. Nothing is ever overwritten; the revision history is the learning made visible.

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating constructionism. Constructionism, 36(2), 1–11.

Knowledge Building

Following Scardamalia and Bereiter, ideas are treated as improvable objects a class works on together. Citing a jot into discussion puts it at the center of collective refinement, and the class advances its shared understanding, not just each member's own.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building. In The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 97–115).

For instructors

Know where your class is at

The class's reading, mapped as four declared zones, with student annotations as the evidence.

✓Confusion, agreement, disagreement, and connection zones on every reading, declared by students, never inferred
✓A student marks a confusion while reading and drops it straight to you, anchored at the passage with their thinking attached
✓Walk into class knowing which passages deserve the discussion

Zones · The Architecture of Agency

p.24

p.3

p.4

…in this sense, structure precedes agency in every particular encounter; and yet…

confusion

Maya C. Lost here. Does “particular encounter” mean micro level only?

connection

Diego A. Ties to Dewey: habit is structure you carry with you.

agreement

Sam N. The residue framing finally makes the long run make sense.

confusion agreement disagreement connection

For students

From jots to arguments

Discussion posts stop being a blank page.

✓Construct arguments and reflections from the jots you already made. Cite them with @ and the quote and page travel along
✓Share with your class in seconds; the reading stays one click away
✓Take up a peer's cited annotation and build your next thought on it

Give your class something to tinker with

Set up a course in two minutes: upload a PDF, share the join code, and watch the first jots appear.

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