Not only does annotating help to improve a reader’s comprehension of the story, ornamenting a text also offers a way for individuals to self-reflect, express their identities, and share their personal interpretations of what they are reading. When done in collaboration with others, this process can lead to a deeper understanding of the story as readers identify and discuss important themes, concepts, symbols, and images or connect the elements of the story to things they already know as individuals or care about as a group. As students may know from their participation of shared spaces online, such as fan forums, or teachers may know from their experiences in the seminar room, knowledge-building can be a collective practice. What emerges from this process may be a shared resource for future conversations. When knowledge is distributed across participants, readers don’t have to worry about memorizing key ideas; they are free to engage in the text and work with the key ideas in other ways.

Rudy Cabrera from Moby-Dick: Then & Now comments:

I can speak for the entire young crew when I say I think we were on the edge the entire way through because we were also responsible for bringing knowledge to the table. This was not a project where the modern story and the original story were dealt with separately. We were put on the spot plenty of times. There was an expectation for us to not just understand what we knew about the modern world and how our lives pertain to “The One” but also to understand the older world and what Herman Melville was really trying to tell us using the Pequod. That connected the entire project. There was rarely ever a rehearsal where only the adults were called in or only the youth were called in. We were there as one all the way through learning from each other.

Collaborative Reading helps students to foster the skill of networking—the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. Networking a text encourages a participatory model of reading where:

• Scanning the text helps you decide what to focus on in the passage.
• Finding additional information beyond the original text helps you clarify, define, explain unfamiliar terms and phrases.
• Synthesizing information helps you to understand what you found, especially in relation to the context of the text being read.
• Disseminating techniques helps you decide which information is most relevant to share with others.

You can apply collaborative reading techniques to the wordless picture book, Flotsam. The book tells a story about children actively consuming, creating, and spreading media through their interactions with a mysterious “Melville” camera (an intertextual reference to Moby-Dick) that takes magical underwater photos. Once the film is developed, the children discover fantastical images—like a mechanical fish swimming with red snapper and anchovies; or a family of octopuses (not octopi) sitting on sofas in their underwater living room. Author David Wiesner describes the process by which he created the rich world where this story takes place. Whether the author discusses ideas with friends and family seeking interesting facts and artifacts to incorporate, or whether the author is inspired by other texts created in conversation with others; he/she now, among other things, is a networker inspired by other texts.

University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab brought together a diverse, international group of communication scholars, children and youth librarians, producers, writers, artists, engineers, and computer scientists to deconstruct and analyze the book, Flotsam, with the goal of designing a digital book that modeled more participatory reading practices. Each participant in the group made unique contributions to the analysis, but what we created collectively was very different from what any one of us might have created on our own. In this process, the group identified three different, but related, paths through the story -- each of which represents a potential springboard for interdisciplinary learning.

The first path stems from the Melville camera itself and the lenses (both literal and metaphorical) through which the characters explore their environment. This focus on lens was implicit in many of the book’s core images—the reader can view the story through the view point of the boy holding the magnifying lens, through the viewpoint of the mole crab the boy stares down at, or though the viewpoint of the mechanical fish in a sea of real fish.

The second path centers on the book’s intersecting timelines and histories (both fiction and non-fiction). Based on the many children and animals viewed through the Melville camera, you can learn about a boy from the 1910s or about the penguins that stare intently on this new “thing” that has landed on their block of ice. You can also read the book in relation to its literary  references, such as Atlantis in the Mermaid city pictures, Moby-Dick in the Melville underwater camera, or the Great Wave of Kanagawa in the remix of Hokusai's Japanese wood-block print.

You can also read with a focus on geography as you travel to the multitude lands and oceans through the camera lens. Each picture depicts a unique geography, whether real or fantastical. The camera has the power to connect people and places that might not come into contact if the flotsam floated by unnoticed.

Good readers have a large vocabulary for engaging with a text, each encouraging them to pay attention to different elements of the story, to make different speculations about what will happen to the characters, or to ascribe different interpretations to what they have discovered in the story. Literary instruction should both reward students for the interpretive approaches they have mastered and introduce them to other ways of reading. In the classroom, students with different investments can pull new insights from what you are collectively reading—if teachers adopt a more open-ended, less prescriptive way of reading and discussing the text.

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