During high school, my father came to speak and during his talk, he enthralled the audience with the concept of a global conversation and the possibilities of making connections across borders and boundaries of all kinds.

Forty years later in late 2020, I attended a faculty development seminar at Mercy University, New York, where I’ve taught online courses since the early 2000s. There I was introduced to the marvelous social annotation platform, Perusall. It was a lightbulb moment. I had found the tool for social learning I’d been looking for my entire career!

By the beginning of 2021, I had integrated it into all of my courses at Mercy and at the University of South Florida, live and online.  Perusall became our library to peruse and have great conversations.

Perusall was my dream come true.  It is the consummate technology and platform for Socratic dialogue and what Plato re-envisioned as “The Maieutic Method”, a way of “midwifing” ideas into higher rhetorical power through conversation. In 2021, I abandoned using the LMS/LTI integration with Blackboard and Canvas because I found the traditional way of using Perusall limiting. I wanted our great conversations to endure, to continue long after students leave the course or even leave their college. I wanted to create a lifelong learning community.

I wanted our conversations to be inclusive so that we can invite participation from students all over the world, particularly those we meet around the world on our service learning trips to places like Colombia and Haiti, Brazil, Israel and Palestine and Jordan, Germany and Nigeria and Morocco.  Many of them can’t afford to go to school so we wanted to become that social space for academic discourse. I created a sustainable master class about the human condition and the solutions to our existential problems that any student from any university could join. We abandoned the notion of assignments and instead created folders and subfolders in the Library for each academic course that I taught, including Cultural Anthropology, Psychology of Environmental Sustainability and Justice, and Climate Mitigation and Adaptation. Students could join the conversation on their schedule.

This way all of our students, past, present and future, and all the stakeholders we meet with through our community engagement projects, locally and globally, can join the conversations and engage with one another in that unique Perusall way. We post and annotate our own writings and our own unique video content. As a community of learners, the never-ending story of the dialogues continues to grow and grow as new generations of learners join and comment and add their voice to the mix.  The coursework is measured so we have our own rubric of points that Perusall keeps track of. If a student gets 320 points in a semester, they would have completed A level work.

Because our way of using Perusall is such a departure from traditional applications, I made a detailed “edutainment” YouTube  video called “PERUSALL: WHY AND HOW WE USE IT IN OUR CLASSES”. The video takes you step-by-step through the philosophy and process of participating in my master course.  Through Perusall, our community of learners just keeps expanding, day after day, year after year.  In this way, my father's dream of us all joining a great conversation is realized through the Perusall platform.  All our learners need to do is connect.

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You can learn more about  how and why we use Perusall in our courses here:
PERUSALL:  WHY AND HOW WE USE IT IN OUR CLASSES

‍And how our gamified point system works here:
Training the Next Generation of Sustainability Super Heroes, Pt 1: How to Get an A in Culhane Class

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T.H. Culhane, Ph.D., is the director of the Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Concentration at the Patel College of Global Sustainability at USF, Tampa where he teaches “Nexus Thinking” to solve global problems.  He also teaches online and service learning courses about “Environmental Sustainability and Justice”  for both USF and Mercy University in New York.

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