Annotation and the power of teaching a process

This paper reports on an informal experiment in an economic history course in the Spring 2026 semester. I used physical annotation on a printed text as the key component of a structure for simultaneously avoiding overreliance on LLM’s and fostering stronger student engagement with course material and deeper learning. Compared to other pedagogical approaches, this system gets the teacher closer to directly observing the process of ultimate concern: the allocation of attention and the inner response to ideas. The approach is consistent with findings from cognitive science on the relationship between mental effort and learning, on the importance of fact-based knowledge for thinking, and on the role of attention as a scarce resource that people must learn to apply and allocate. The initial results warrant further exploration.

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Speaker Biography

Karl Seeley joined the economics department at Hartwick College as an assistant professor in 2002, receiving tenure in 2008 and promotion to professor in 2017. Originally trained in environmental economics, at Hartwick he has also taught macroeconomics, as well as electives in development, agent-based modeling, and sustainability. With Amy Forster Rothbart he created an off-campus January course on “Populism in Central Europe,” traveling to Budapest, Vienna, and Prague. From early in his Hartwick career, he sought ways of grounding macroeconomics in the realities of resource use, leading ultimately to his textbook, Macroeconomics in ecological context (2017). He is an inveterate classroom experimenter, creating new types of assignments as well as adapting and designing classroom games to illustrate particular economic concepts.