#819: Reframing Social Annotation as a Text-Embedded Collaboration Analytics Ecology: The Idea Creation Cycle in Social Annotation

While the emergence and evolution of ideas are central to collaborative learning, these processes often remain invisible in digital environments. Social annotation (SA) embeds collaboration within shared texts, forming a distinct ecology where reading, annotation, and discussion occur as a single, integrated workflow within one representational space. This study introduces the Idea Creation Cycle in Social Annotation (ICCSA), a theory-informed and analytics-operationalized framework that models how ideas move and transform through four recursive phases: sensemaking, anchoring, interactive elaboration, and re-anchoring. Using multimodal SA traces, ICCSA captures the temporal trajectories of ideas, examining how cognition, artifacts, and interaction coevolve within one representational space. A proof-of-concept analysis of undergraduate course data reveals distinctive transition patterns and highlights re-anchoring as a key mechanism of knowledge advancement. Together, these findings position ICCSA as a bridge between CSCL theory and actionable learning analytics, advancing the understanding and support of idea development in text-embedded collaboration.