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I am recording. So, wanted to say thank you and welcome everyone. Those of you who are just joining us, we were invited to give this presentation as part of open education week. And Michelle [Reed 0:00:15] and her colleagues at the University of Texas, Arlington thought up this event, planned this event, and put it together. And we're really grateful to them for giving us a platform to speak about this and for thinking of the idea. And it's exciting to see so many people from this community interested in this topic.
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We hope we do it justice. My name is Steel Wagstaff, I work for a company called Pressbooks, we make open source book publishing software. Prior to joining Pressbooks late last year, I worked at the University of Wisconsin, Madison for about a decade. And that's where I also got my PhD in English and a master's degree in library and information studies. A lot of the topics that we'll talk about today were important to me in my own graduate training and as a reader and as a lifelong lover of books.
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So, hopefully you'll see where some of the personal interests and professional background and current interest in teaching and learning all intersect for me. My co-presenter today is Jeremy Dean. Jeremy, do you want to say a little bit about who you are? You're muted, I'm sorry. I'm also a rogue academic in the technology and education technology space.
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I taught high school for many years and went to grad school for English, got my PhD at UT Austin. And left UT to work for Rap Genius startup, doing annotation with them. If you're not familiar with them, they were a venture capital funded rap lyric annotation platform, that then got a bunch of money to try to bring their model for annotation to a lot of other domains.
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And I left them to join the non-profit Hypothesis, but for the past seven or eight years I've been working on collaborative annotation in the classroom, but before that, like Steel, I was a student doing lots of annotating. And a teacher telling students to annotate. So, I can still see in my mind's eye annotations I made on middle school English texts. And I have books that have been annotated at every level of English education to look
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back over the strata of my own thinking about books. So, this is something very near and dear to my heart. Thanks Jeremy. And what we're going to do now is I'm going to ask Jeremy to share his screen. And we're going to be presenting from a slide deck that we put together. If you'd like to see the slide deck, download it, or reference it as we're talking, I posted a link to Twitter just recently. And we're also going to drop a link to it in the chat.
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So, the slides, if you'd like to see them you can find them at this URL that I just dropped into the chat. And here's a Tweet that has a little bit more information, including a downloadable PDF. The slides are CC BY licensed, and they include our contact information, so if you want to get in touch us afterwards. And as we noted earlier, this is being recorded and we'll share the recording as soon as it's
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done processing and we've had a chance to make it accessible. Okay, Jeremy, start us off, give us the problem statement here, Dr. Dean. Sure thing. I just want to double check, though. Am I sharing the slide deck, can you guys see that? You are sharing your slide deck, I don't know if it's full screened? I can still see your browser bar at the top, but otherwise it looks good. All right, I'm going to let the browser bar stick there for now, and we'll live with that.
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So, yeah, let's move forward. So, this is not something new, which is one of the things that's neat but also exciting about it is that annotation has been around for a very long time from the invention of the book. We can look back over ancient texts and see people's thoughts in the margins, scholars' thoughts in the margins. So, it's not a new technology, in education or scholarly space.
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For those of us that are in education, we probably were forced at times from a very early age to write in the margins of our books, to highlight, so it's really a proven learning tool, annotation is, so this, you can see is more student-like annotations. And when books move online, we really lose the ability to practice this age-old scholarly and scholastic technique of writing in the margins.
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And it's a problem, because there's research out there that suggests that students who are reading online are not retaining as much, they're not engaging as meaningfully. And we've lost this basic tool that they use to do that traditionally. So, social annotation can really help solve that problem. And that's what we're here to talk about today, this is a picture of a Pressbooks textbook
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with a Hypothesis annotation panel open. I think this is still me, okay. Yeah, so here is a picture of a text, an ancient text and just to dig a little deeper into why people annotate, annotation can provide context. So, readers can come to a text and be given additional context in the margins, to help
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them go through the text. They can show us conversations, different takes, debates, like the Talmudic model, where we might see different scholarly Rabbinic angles on the meaning of the bible, or other texts. And then, it's always going to be additive material, material that adds to the base content.
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When this goes online, a lot of new radical possibilities are opened. And as an English teacher, and somebody who accidentally found themselves in the technology space and learning a lot more about the history of the internet and the ethics and practices of technology. It was very exciting a couple of years ago when, we just passed the anniversary. I don't know that I marked that, when the W3C, the governing body of the internet, ratified
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annotation standards for the web. So, they recommended standards for annotation, there's a whole spec for how annotations should be structured technically for those of us, like Hypothesis that are building annotation technology. Standards are the basis of the internet, the wonderful knowledge ecosystem that we have
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on the internet. So, getting annotation as a standard was a huge win for Hypothesis and for those that are interested in annotation. But I was personally gratified by the fact that suddenly this thing that I had been teaching students in high school teaching and college teaching, a fundamental practice that they needed to include in their repertoire of activities, as they worked in my class has now become an internet standard.
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Was super exciting to me. And it's going to open up lots of possibilities that Steel is going to talk about. But one of the things that I just want to point out that is part of this spec is that we normally traffic in pages on the internet. We send somebody an article, it's got a URL. The recommended web annotation standards recommend that every annotation should have it's part
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of the standard that every annotation should have its own URL. So, now we have this much more granular way of trafficking in information online. And my colleague, John [Udell 0:07:23] says it better than I. He says, "If the web is an information fabric, web annotation increases the thread count of that fabric." So, this whole health of our information ecosystem online, the way we traffic in pages and we know from recent history that that trafficking on Facebook of just shared links is not a
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profound and meaningful way to share information. Now we have this much deeper way of talking about the information that's online. And it's employing basic skills that teachers like us have always asked students to practice, like close reading. So, they can then become the stewards of that information ecosystem with the traditional training that we've given them. Thanks, Jeremy. What I want to talk about a little bit is reframing and thinking about what annotation
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was or is for those of us who have a great love of print. And I broke it down into this use case and who's able to read, write, and different methods. So, typically, when we think about print annotation, this is a simplification but there's kind of two types. There's one where you have some kind of primary text that's considered of value to a community.
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And one or more readers wants to comment on that text, so some use cases here might be Jeremy go ahead and click forward just once, I'm going to see some little visual examples there. So, if this would be like an example of the Midrash. So, in the center of this text you have the sacred, the word of God for the commentators. And then, you have a series of accreted commentary where different readers over time have added
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to their understanding by adding a commentary or some kind of gloss on that text. The next example might be a critical edition. So, this is something that's still happening, this is a part of the practice of scholarship. The example is a bit small, probably but what you're seeing on the left-hand is a text from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. And on the right-hand side a scholar or a handful of scholars have given you a bunch of commentary or annotations that help explain what you're seeing in the text.
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So, that's the historic use for the publisher layer, where one or more people create annotations, they become fixed in a printed form, and everyone can read them, if they get a hold of that commentary or that printed book. The other kind of real common use for annotation is what we call marginalia or notetaking. There's a couple of nice examples here, that I just grabbed, where you see someone who's
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conducting a conversation. In this case, this book was passed between readers. So, you have one person writing for maybe two or three other people, or one person writing for themselves. Those of us who love books, or who love writing, or love ideas often have found ourselves writing in the margin of a book, or carrying on, or wanting to carry on a conversation with the author or with others. And that's really what was possible in the era of print.
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Jeremy talked about web annotation opening up a new standard. And what I want to suggest is it also opens up a couple of new possibilities. So, when we think about web annotation or annotation on the open web, there's a new type of annotation or a new type of communication that is possible. First, we're talking about public annotation. This is something that can be read by anyone, and it can be written by anyone.
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It's democratic in a kind of radical sense. The use case for this would be open learning or social conversation, because it's a standard supported by the open web, anyone can engage in public annotation that can be seen by anyone. And they can do it almost anywhere on the open web. There's pretty profound implications for teaching and learning, as you can imagine for there. The other thing that's possible also matters a lot for teaching and learning, because many
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times learners especially as they're developing their ideas, and trying them out, and growing, deserve or want private spaces to carry out that teaching and learning. That's why many of our courses happen behind walled gardens in a learning management system. So, the second thing that you can do is you can create what's called a private annotation group. And this is certain people can write to this group, and certain people can read what's
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been written in that group. The use cases for this would be educational classes. It's also really interesting that you can do editorial review, where you invite a small number of curated experts or peers or friends to say, "Here's a private group, let's discuss and talk about this, or help us improve this idea before we take it public." And the third use case would be for affinity groups or for peer groups or for friend groups.
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You could say, "We're going to make an annotation group and we're going to read something together, and it's just going to be those of us who have been invited to this group can have this conversation." The thing that I want to suggest that's really radical about this is that not only are these two types of annotation new and very difficult to do in print, but web annotation and open web annotation makes each one of these methods possible on the same text at the same time.
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This is where we're getting into a little bit about layers, here. So, with open web annotation, using Hypothesis or other tools you can take any website, any article, any PDF, any ebook, any document, or even multimedia. And you can add a layer of your own private notes, your personal marginalia. You could then have a layer that's an expert community, which is the publisher layer, where
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you have a certain set of people that are publishing public notes on that document. And on top of that layer you could then have a private group, that might be say a UT Austin biology 101 class. And above that layer you could even have a public layer where anyone can read and write to that. Each one of those things can exist simultaneously on the same document. And readers and writers and annotators can move between those layers and do things in
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different places. So, the thing that I really wanted to stress is that as we think about open web annotation, it should be expanding our sense of the possible. There are things that we can do on the web, that we really couldn't do with print that are quite exciting for teaching and learning. Okay, so web annotation for teaching and learning, this is where I'm going to hand it back to
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Dr. Dean. So, we're circling around here, back and forth, about what's valuable about annotation traditionally, which I think remains the case. But also, what's possible now with web annotation. I want to step back again and reiterate, and this is probably redundant for many of you that are teachers especially in the humanities, but I just love this poem. I would literally hand out this poem, before I knew about Rap Genius, before I knew about Hypothesis, before I knew about this webinar.
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I'd hand out the entirety of this poem, it's an ode to marginalia by Billy Collins, on the first day of the semester, when I was teaching high school or college. It was the number one thing I started with. So, we're going to read a lot of books, I was an English teacher. And I want you to write in there, I want you to highlight things, I want you to write question marks, asterisks, it can be anything. If you read the full poem, you can see he really outlines quite the range of things that can come with a good annotator.
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From simple man versus nature like thematic annotations by a student. To the ending of the poem, he falls in love with another reader in a book he's reading because they've left some sort of stain, like an egg salad stain, I think it is, in the margin of the book. But anyway, the basic premise is "we have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we do not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
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we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge." Close, active reading, it's not a new thing. But as books move online and annotation follows them, and annotation has the new possibilities of networked, social network and internet connectivity, new things can happen. Online, this is Jennifer Howard writing in the chronicle of education several years ago,
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she uses the term "social reading", but I think it's interchangeable with collaborative annotation. "Online, a book can be a gathering place, a shared space where readers record their reactions and conversations. Those interactions ultimately become part of the book too, a kind of amplified marginalia." So, something different is happening, a lot of those notes that we took, or I took in my middle school texts, they're lost.
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I can go back and visit them, if I remember where they are in the bookshelf, if I've held onto the books that long. But now, marginalia is amplified in all these new and exciting ways. So, I want to talk a little bit about that amplification. There are three ways that I think shared web annotation is incredibly powerful. One is it makes reading visible. When I handed out that poem to my students and told them to annotate, that was it.
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The next thing I saw was a final paper. So, writing your books I hoped they did it, I knew teachers that would actually make, and this was in high school, open their books, have the kids open their books and be like, "Did you annotate?" But even that, I'd see some highlighting, I'd see some underline, I'd see some marks in the margins. So, you did it, so you get a check. But now, this black box of this incredibly essential activity in terms of literacy and
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comprehension, a really basic thing in any classroom, are you getting the reading? Are you building on the reading? Is now visible in really powerful, new ways. One very simple way to put it is that you can now know the students have read. I don't love this one, but there's lots of times when teachers say, "And now I know the students read, because they had to do these annotations. Before I would just hand out the reading and say do it, and then stare at them in discussion
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or check to see if the [iClicker 0:16:55] was measuring whether they had successfully done the reading." But you don't know they've done it, but you not only know that they've done it, but you can look deep into how they're doing it, how they're interacting with the text, how they're interacting with each other. I think this is going to be a huge space for learning analytics down the line, we're very immature in our data gathering and transformation into [Caliper 0:17:18] standards and other
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things. But I think the potential to harvest data from how students are annotating and convert that to learning analytics could open up entirely new fields of literacy, basically. It makes reading active, again, this is not so much a new part, but it does bring that active reading piece to online spaces, so that students are grabbing a piece of text
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and saying something about it. And then, it makes reading social, this was touched upon before, but I love this quote. I quote the student directly, because they published a blog post about it, and they actually were working in a Pressbooks with Robin De Rosa. Shout out to Robin. And the student had such a profound experience that Robin had her write a blog post about it. "When I'm reading, I sometimes wonder does anyone actually understand this? Am I crazy?
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With this tool, I know I'm not alone." So, it brings students together to work through difficult text, in a social way that they understand, in a social way that they can leverage. The number one thing that students say when they give us feedback about how things went with Hypothesis is I learned a lot from my peers. Jeremy, I just wanted to add I think everyone of us who's planned and designed a course has used discussion forums to have discussions.
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Especially when you're having a discussion around course content, the closer you can get that conversation to the content or to the textual material, whether it's literature or science or whatever, the better that discussion can be because it can be anchored in referencing the text or the ideas or the content a little bit better. And that's where I see annotation being really helpful. It adds discussion-like features to course content, whatever it is. Right, so you can think about it as discussion forum 2.0.
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And I think there are two important points to be made about that. One rather than a teacher prompt followed by student responses, these could be organic student ideas that arise out of the text and become discussion forums in and of themselves, rather than something that was anticipated by the teacher as important and then requiring students to respond. And the other thing is that it's authentic discussion, I really feel in my experience
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it's not just because I work for Hypothesis that social annotation is about as close as you can get to a small seminar feel with an online tool. And this is not to displace face to face learning, but it is to say in terms of the things we ask students to do online, this is a pretty intimate and social one that really feels real.
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And just quick to say, I think we've touched on this before, it's not just an ed tech tool, this is something that Hypothesis has a general purpose web tool that you can use and annotate privately, annotate with your friends in or outside of the academy. I use it all the time, personally for notetaking, but also just to say, "Hey, this is a cool thing and let me share somebody more granular on Facebook or some other piece of social media.
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It's not just this article but it's this piece of this article that really ticked me off." And long term, our goal is to really change the ecosystem of how knowledge is spread online. Another thing that I want to stress, thanks Jeremy, go ahead and advance the slide for me. Not only does web annotation make different kinds of annotation possible, I want to suggest
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that when we think about web annotation, the annotation itself can be substantively different. When you're annotating a print book, you're writing physically on the media or drawing on it. And it's text or your doodles on text. Web annotations can be more than that, they can include all of the rich media the web can include. So, here's an example if you take it to the next slide.
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This is an example, Jeremy, go ahead and jump a slide for me. This is an example here of a learning activity that I built in Pressbooks for a poem. And you'll see a similar version of this later. Where on the left-hand side is a bit of context, there's a poem, there's a post poem quiz. And on the right-hand side, in the annotation layer we've included images, we've included an embedded video, we've included external links, so it's got hyperlinking in the web.
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And at the bottom, you can't really see it very well, but it's HTML5 audio. So, you can play audio, and all of that content can live in the annotation layer. That's something that was very difficult to do when you were writing your own marginalia. And it was even harder to share with others. So, we'll talk a little bit more about how annotations can be replied to and shared but adding interactivity to annotation is one of the really exciting things that happens
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with open web annotation. That just is not part of a normal instructional design when you're working with print media. The other thing, this came up in the comments earlier, thanks, Taylor. The idea of open source and the open web. Both Jeremy and I work for companies that make open source software. And we make open source software to serve an idea of the open web.
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This is a really important thing for both of us, and for the mission of our organizations. The idea is that when we have open source software, that is publicly owned, or that can be publicly contributed to, we have open standards which are widely accepted and employed. We build open infrastructure that lets people use these tools without always serving commercial interests, and also in ways that are really limited by their creativity or by the designs
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or constraints of the situation that they're in. So, that's something, an important principle I think for both of us. And I think Jeremy had something he wanted to add. Yeah, I just wanted to add that I think there's open source and open tools and open resources. And I think another piece is open pedagogy. And I really think a lot of the things that you can do with students in Pressbooks and Hypothesis they are not disposable assignments.
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They are things that are opening up pathways to real learning and learning that extends beyond the classroom. And I think that's another piece that I really value. And I think it absolutely comes hand in hand with some of the other ideas of openness as well. Thanks Jeremy. And if we jump back, I want to talk a little bit about Pressbooks. So, Jeremy has explained a little bit about Hypothesis or will explain.
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I wanted to talk a little bit about Pressbooks, what we are, and why this tool matters for me. So, if you go to the next slide. Pressbooks, as I said earlier, we make open source software. This is our founder, Hugh McGuire, the company is based in Montreal, Canada. I don't need to read this slide, I think you're all capable readers. But essentially, we make a publishing platform that makes it easy to publish books to the web and generate them in a number of offline non-proprietary file formats.
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Pressbooks is built on top of WordPress and it's open source. The other thing to know about Pressbooks is Pressbooks itself, each installation is a network. It's what we would call a WordPress multisite. And that network can contain a huge number of books, hundreds, thousands of books. So, it's a single network with many different books on it. Each book on the network has its own URL, its own address on the web.
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And books can be kept distinct and separate from other books on the network. So, they could have a different structure, they could have a different theme or a different appearance. One book could be totally licensed openly with the creative commons license, another could be all rights reserved. One book could let Jeremy be an editor and one could let Jeremy be an admin, and one could let Jeremy be a contributor. So, books on the network have their own autonomous administration, but it's all in a centrally
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managed, shared network. So, that's the idea of Pressbooks. Within a Pressbooks network an individual book, if you take it to the next slide, Jeremy. This is what the homepage or the landing page for a book would look like. In the top left, you have the title and information, including licensing information. In the top right, you have the cover image.
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If the authors choose to, they'd make file downloads available, that's what shown just below the cover. And you could download the book in lots of formats: ebooks, print ready PDFs, lots of different flavors of downloads we make available. There's a table of contents that could be expanded and show you all the content in the book. And then, there's much more licensing and metadata that I wasn't able to fit in the screenshot that lives in a Pressbooks' homepage.
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That's Pressbooks, Jeremy will tell you a little bit about Hypothesis now. First I want to just say one thing about Pressbooks, which is that I'm a literary scholar, and I've obviously been looking at how literature looks online for students and for academics. And in my experience, there's no better looking book than a Pressbooks' book.
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Pressbooks is designed by people that love books, like I do, real books and care about real books and what happens with real books. And I think from the beginning, the technology had this in mind and really was very careful and thoughtful and elegant in the way that they have been allowing people to create books online. So, whenever I am talking to people who want to make anthologies, Pressbooks is my number
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one recommendation. And that's before Steel became a dear friend. Yeah, we do love books. And Hugh, the founder of Pressbooks, has written quite eloquently about the issues of bringing books online in different ways and reading online. So, Hypothesis is a non-profit, again, we're philanthropically funded.
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And our vision is to bring annotation to the web and to do so through open standards. So, that Hypothesis is just one of many options for somebody to use when they create and read annotations online. There may be other tools that work for folks, but if everybody's working with standards, then they'll be interoperable. And I'll be able to read Steel's annotations with Rap Genius and he'll be able to read mine.
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Although Genius was never quite open to the open standards idea, they were more the proprietary model, like lock people into their annotation platform. But this is our team, I always like to give a shout out. It's a really, really great team in every aspect of it. And everybody's really dedicated to open source software and working for a non-profit organization and this idea of bringing a better way to talk to folks online about the information
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that they are seeing there. We are going to be interactive later. So, I do encourage you to sign up for a Hypothesis account, it's free. All you need is an email address, and you will need to confirm via email your account, before you'll be able to join our annotation party later. So, if you have the presentation you can click on sign up there, or just visit the Hypothesis
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homepage and go slash sign up to get there. Looks like it's in the chat as well. It can be used as a browser extension, so there's a Chrome extension which is really the optimal way to use it, if you're going to be moving around the web and annotating on different topics or different types of content in different places. There is a bookmarklet for other browsers, but the Chrome extension, I think, is superior. And this is the way that most people on the web are using Hypothesis through something
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that is added to the browser, although one day the dream would be that maybe the browsers come with an annotation tool as they come with some other in-built tools. And indeed, the original Mosaic that was designed by Mark Andreessen was intended to have group annotation. But they scrapped that piece of the project, because they didn't have the funding to host the annotations, and that's all of a sudden become much, much easier in our day and age.
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We do have an LMS app, since this is an education audience. The LMS app is probably the easiest, most streamlined way to bring annotation to students in a classroom. There's a link here to more information about the LMS app. It's LTI compliant, so it works across the spectrum. And the really neat thing for students here is that for a long time, the gung-ho Hypothesis educators were having students sign up for accounts, and they were having them install
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this thing called a browser extension, which frankly I didn't know about until I started working for Rap Genius what browser extensions were. And the students had to go through all that and you can imagine if you've introduced technology to students, that's a whole lot of onboarding where somebody can fall off. And now, that's all streamlined in the LMS app, it gives the student an account and Hypothesis is just native to the LMS environment. Very simple tool, you select text, we'll do this together in just a second.
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You can select text and you can annotate or highlight. Those annotations can be private, they can be shared to a group, or they can be public. Hypothesis is really built around conversation and threads, threaded conversation about specific pieces of text. And so, I always say compare it to some other tools, especially like Google docs, you're not going to have a long and deep conversation in a Google doc margin.
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They do, yes, have annotation, you could put a William Blake poem in Google docs and have a discussion forum like thread from there. But if you really want to see how people are replying to each other and have a more authentic conversation, I think Hypothesis and some other tools are better forms of annotation for discussion. And replying is a key piece, I think, of talking to students and introducing students to Hypothesis in the classroom. You really want that conversation to get jumpstarted.
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I mentioned you can annotate in smaller groups and have multiple groups, so you can have multiple classes on a particular text. You could have a group that's just teachers also teaching the same text, that's private to the teachers, a kind of teachers' guide, teacher layer. You can search your notes, this is one of the really neat things. I should have some books behind me and talk about that, like a true scholar, when they're getting interviewed on TV.
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But with the books on the shelves, in the margins you'd have to remember which book and hectically flip through the pages. And that's a good experience, too but with Hypothesis your notes are archived, and you can go and search them for key terms. And I do this all the time when I'm preparing for presentations, to gather my notes. I'll tag things and then search the tag and then leverage that in turning my research
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into some kind of writing. Annotation in the classroom, I'm just going to quickly go through some examples here. It works on PDF, so this is grad students in New Mexico State annotating a PDF. It works online, this was from an EdX course, out of Davidson College. I guess a Davidson X course. Shout out to Mark [Sample 0:31:55]. And they were annotating on top of Wikipedia. But any HMTL webpage can be annotated with Hypothesis.
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This one is neat, I always like to show this professor at St. Louis University, sophist_monster on Twitter, really great guy has students annotate each other's blogs. So, it can be done on published writing like a PDF, or something published on the web by some capital A author. But it can also be used to deepen discussion around student writing as well.
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And then, there are some very sophisticated uses of Hypothesis, you can see this is a project out of Tufts, where the students' annotations were pretty programmatic. They had a set format that they were supposed to be annotating with, certain tags and links. But then, they harvested those annotations using our open API and did some amazing visualizations of Greek and Roman mythology. You're up, Steel.
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I think you're muted, or you're muted to me. I am also muted, yeah. That will stop me from being heard. There's a question for you, Jeremy in the chat from Todd Ellis. You could probably speak better to that than I can. And I can't type and talk at the same time. So, if you'd be willing not to jump, thanks, okay. If you want, I can switch the screen share, if you'd rather? No. Go for it. I can. All right, so the other thing I wanted to note is Jeremy was talking about lots of different
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ways that people can use Hypothesis. One is a browser extension and that's a pretty common way to do it. The browser extension works with Chrome or you can use a bookmarklet for other browsers. The other thing that's possible is many website owners or publishers can enable Hypothesis to display on their site, without needing a browser extension.
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It's just a single line of Java script that gets injected into the head of the site. With Pressbooks, we've enabled the Hypothesis plugin so that any book author can turn Hypothesis on for their book. It can be quickly configured. I'm showing a couple of the settings, so you can get really granular. So, you could say, "Yes, I want it on these types of pages. No, on these other types of pages. Or yes, include it on this page, and this page and this page, but not on this other
00:34:07
page." So, you can control where annotation happens natively in your Pressbook. If users use that plugin, it means that any visitor to the site can use Hypothesis without having to install a browser extension. If you jump to the next slide for me, Jeremy. Here's an example. So, here is a Pressbook title on the left-hand side. Here's someone that's already made an annotation.
00:34:31
I selected that text that you see in that darker yellow. The Hypothesis annotation would pop up and you can see over in the right-hand pane the ability to make a new annotation. And that's just there without a browser extension. Anybody who visits that website, would see and be able to use the Hypothesis pane, just natively in their browser. As an example of what you can do with this, putting a lot of the things together, take
00:34:57
me to the next slide, Jeremy, if you would? Here's an example of a close reading activity, we've built hundreds of these at the University of Wisconsin for teaching literature. This was for a French literature class. I picked this example, actually because the image that's being shown here is actually Averroes' 12th century commentaries on Aristotle. So, the image itself is like a medieval annotation, which is kind of fun.
00:35:20
It's meta, right? But here, you'll see here's an activity where the instructor says, "Read this image, listen to my two-minute commentary, and then here's a quiz." Here’s some interactive stuff that they're doing in the annotation layer that's built on top of this reading activity, where they're being asked to read Thomas Aquinas. In this particular example, we're using a publisher layer, which means that students
00:35:46
can view and read this layer, but they can't write to it. We're keeping this layer kind of sacred or preserved for the instructor or the instructors to write the activity. And then, students can go to a private group or to the public layer, if they want to have conversations about this. So, the multiple layers is really a nice feature to have when you're designing an activity. I'm ready for the next slide, if you can jump in there?
00:36:16
John, that's a good question, I can probably handle that one offline. I'm not sure which John this is, but send me a private message, and I'll get to that shortly. So, what we want to take you in to do next is we want to do a shared annotation activity together. So, if you've created a Hypothesis account, or wanted to do that, we want to invite you to join us in this activity. So, take us to the next slide. What I did with Jeremy just before this is I put together a fake or a basic poetry anthology,
00:36:44
that's my great love from graduate school. And Jeremy also, I guess enjoys poetry from time to time. [Poetaster 0:36:49] if you will. So, I put together four sample poems. And the links are there if you want to jump into one of them. And if you prefer to make annotations in a private group, rather than on the public layer, I've also created a private group. So, you can feel free to make your annotations in private rather than public.
00:37:10
And in each of these links, you'll see a poem and you'll see a couple of seed annotations, there's some questions. We'll walk you through what you do, when you make an annotation. So, as an example, jump to the next slide, please Jeremy. You'd select some text, you click the annotate button, then
00:37:33
next slide. You can then use this little simple Whizzywig editor on the left-hand side to add rich text, to add images, to add links or other kinds of things in the content. You can also paste YouTube videos or Vimeo videos or even references to MP3 files, and they'll automatically get turned into little iFrames that display. You can also then use tags, that's shown on the right-hand side.
00:37:59
If you jump back. So, you can tag your annotations, so that they can be clustered or sorted by type, so that you can find them and arrange them later. It’s really helpful if you're making annotations for like research purposes or for a class. If you jump to the next slide. Then, if you're the author of an annotation, you can edit it with that little pencil, you can delete it with the trashcan.
00:38:22
The reply button would let you reply. And we'll jump to the next slide and I'll show you the last thing that you can do. Reply is on its own slide. So, you can reply. And then, if you click on that share button, what you'll see is each annotation as Jeremy said gets its own unique URL. I love this because when I'm an instructor, students frequently have questions, especially if I've got a long text that they're reading digitally.
00:38:46
They have a question about something from the reading. In the book, I'd be like, "Turn to page 84, it's in the third paragraph." On the web, there aren't pages, and I can be like, "Oh the 17th paragraph." But who's going to count 17 paragraphs? Instead I could simply create an annotation with some kind of explanation or link or other resource and send that URL to that student who's having a problem or to everyone.
00:39:12
And when they open that URL, the page will open, and it will take them to the annotation in context. So, it's a way to create perma-linked anchors that point to something that I want to draw someone's attention to on the web. It's really quite amazing, and it's really powerful. You can share them through social services, or you can just email. Social services, social media (laughter). Is that a reference to Brazil? Yeah, I mean, the profound here to me again, and I think Steel can appreciate this is the
00:39:41
unit of analysis, the unit of engagement that I always try to get students to participate in close reading of a text is now instrumented as part of the infrastructure of the web by making an annotation a standardized URL. Pretty awesome for us English teachers that that's now part of the internet.
00:40:08
So, Steel shall we open up the text and do a little live annotating now, while people are annotating? What do you think? Yeah, I'd like that, let's do some live annotation. I'm answering a couple of questions on the chat that people have been sending me privately. But open up the annotations and if you want to jump directly to some questions, here's an example of a question that I asked in the Lorine Niedecker poem.
00:40:35
So, I dropped it, and let me put it in the public. So, that link if you were to click on that link and jump to it, it would take you to that particular annotation. And it's a question that people could reply to. That's part of the awesomeness, right? Like Steel has just shared a link in the chat that will take you not only to the book he created, not only to the poem he's talking about, but to the specific annotation and
00:41:02
target within that book. That's a really great demonstration of the power of this web annotation standard. Are you guys now seeing the Pressbooks' book? Or are you still seeing a slide deck? Yeah, we're seeing your screen. Okay. So, I can click on the highlighted pieces, open up the different annotations.
00:41:27
Steel has a t-shirt cannon that works interstate, so if you successfully create an annotation here, he will shoot a Pressbooks t-shirt. We should have Pressbooks Hypothesis co-branded t-shirts, that would be a cool idea. But I'll be calling people out. Looks like Steel did a bunch of annotations here, but I'll be calling people out who have successfully annotated. Looks like people are staying away from the Niedecker, it's all good, maybe in one of
00:41:52
the other poems. Steel: It's a shame, because she's the greatest. Where's [Bob Butterfield 0:41:55]? Lorine Niedecker, she's from Wisconsin, Bob. Represent. If I didn't make clear, this is a competition. It's all Steel, Steel's winning. Who's going to be the first? If you look at the timestamps, I did it a bit earlier. Nobody's going to tackle this, is this you again?
00:42:16
That was me, I asked a question. All right, if you want to get a shout out on the webinar in the next two or three minutes, this is the time to play around with the tool. Looks like just now kdenlinger has created an annotation, so congratulations there, Kyle, thank you, sir. Denlinger. It's always hard with the usernames.
00:42:41
Nice work, bringing in some outside context, I like that. Citing Wikipedia. Kyle, we'll chat offline. Get somebody to create one on Black Hawk, all right, thank you Corinne, I may be pronouncing the name incorrectly. So, one thing I'll do here is that it can be hard, because Steel gets carried away, he's that kid that always talks in class. So, I am going to go to the upper part of the sidebar and rather than search by location,
00:43:10
I'm going to search by newest. And then, the UNICollabTraining group, shout out to UNI, has created a sample annotation with nothing insightful in it, but nonetheless successful use of the tool. So, congratulations there, and KLCarpenter, congratulations there. Lots of test annotations, I encourage you guys to slow down, we do a little bit of time to actually read the poem and see if you can say something smart.
00:43:35
Steel will shoot a t-shirt at you across state lines in his t-shirt cannon. One thing I also want to show— I do not have a t-shirt cannon, just in case you're a literalist or just listening to this by audio. I do not have a t-shirt cannon, but I do have a mango the size of my head. This little icon here tells me there's new annotations on the page, so rather than refreshing
00:44:01
the whole thing, I can click there. And I can see that DrPyrate has created a successful annotation. So, shout out to DrPyrate. Look and see if folks have annotated, any Sappho takers? Just you again. All right, some folks in the Sappho essay. Jeremy, Dr. Dean, we have a great question.
00:44:28
Is it possible for us to decide if our annotations are public or private on an individual basis? Would you show me how that looks? Your screen is a little bit grainy, but maybe others can see it more clearly. Yeah. So, right now I've highlighted longing, and I'm given the option to annotate or highlight. Highlights are default private. We get asked this a lot. I want to make public highlights. And I technically could by creating a blank annotation, but our premise is that I'm less
00:44:53
interested in your highlight, again, this is about conversation. I'm more interested in your annotation. So, once I create an annotation, it's going to default to the previous mode. It says I'm in the public layer, and I have a choice in the public layer, down here. Once I create an annotation, I can either make it public or I can make it only me. So, that is a private annotation in the public channel.
00:45:20
You guys won't be able to see this something clever annotation. It won't register, because I've made it privately. I could also annotate in a private group, this is my group dropdown, I'm a member of a lot of groups, because I support a lot of classrooms. But I'll just go to Hypothesis Reading, this is an internal one. Obviously, we're not reading Sappho at Hypothesis. But this annotation you also wouldn't see, you're looking at this doc, maybe fragments
00:45:45
of Sappho, but if I annotate here it's defaulted to the group I selected. So, this one also would not be visible to you where you are looking at Sappho. So, yeah, I can create private annotations, public annotations, or I can share them to the group. Steel was talking about some other forms of groups, there could be a group that we have that is just Steel and I, that is our annotations for you guys to see, and it would be the Steel
00:46:09
Dean layer. That's a good name. Steel Dean layer, and then, you would see those annotations in a public group, but you wouldn't be able to contribute to them, if it was a closed public group. No takers on the Jiao poem.
00:46:34
Are we coming up on five minutes left here? Yes, conformance to [Wikkag? 0:46:44] we can talk about that. I'm in the private group, thanks. Kyle, you're calling me out all over the place here. Steel, does this end at 1:00?
00:47:02
Shall we do some more open question and answers? Yeah, so I'm trying to get back, I've got a bunch of chats going on, so I'm a little overwhelmed, doing too many things at once. But I think in the big picture, the thing that I wanted to stress is hopefully, you've seen a bit of a flavor for what web annotation can contain. The various kinds of layers that it can exist on, both for public and in private situations
00:47:31
and settings, some of the extensions for teaching and learning. Now, Jeremy and I focused a lot on humanities and literature-based conversations today, but as you can imagine, it's really genericizable. Or you can use it across disciplines or within other disciplines. It's quite common for journalism for fact checking. It's really common as part of the research process or practice. It's a really helpful tool when people are learning how to read new genres of writing,
00:47:56
whether it's academic research writing, or whether it's scholarly reports. And it's really a powerful tool in the sciences, so you can annotate datasets, you can annotate all different kinds of things as long as it has a web address, a URL, or is a PDF. Those annotations can anchor to them and can be used to conduct the learning experience that we covered today.
00:48:22
There were a couple of other questions in the chat. Before we go, I do want to thank Michelle and others at UT Arlington for asking us to put on this webinar. Hopefully, it met or matched your expectations for what we were going to talk about and how useful it might be. We focused a lot on the two tools that we're most familiar with.
00:48:46
But of course, these principles are generalizable. It doesn't have to happen in Pressbooks, it doesn't have to happen with Hypothesis. They're just really great open source tools that let you do this. Did we miss anything from the chat?
00:49:10
Hey, sorry, I'm talking to the group here in person. I was asked, we have one question for you, if you can stick around for a couple more minutes, and I was just sharing with everyone that we are about to transition to a different room, where we'll have a hands-on opportunity to work with Pressbooks and Hypothesis. So, for many of the people in the room we weren't able to have the same experience as
00:49:35
those online. So, we are going to be working on that in the next session. What was your question? Can you come up here to ask? Is it microphone? Just talk into the— Okay, so I have a question about control of annotations, like when you do it with students, sometimes you need to overwrite or delete stuff.
00:50:01
Is it possible? So, it depends on which layer the annotation takes place in. If you're doing it in a private group, then yes, if you notice on Jeremy's screen, he's got these little flags? Annotations can be flagged for moderation and then, the group owner can moderate those annotations. I'm going to flag Kyle, because he was calling me out on all my mistakes earlier.
00:50:26
And also, these are just test annotations, so, sorry, Kyle that didn't really contribute to the conversation here, so I'm going to flag it. So, in a private group the creator of the private group is the moderator. And that would be the case in the LMS, like whoever the instructor is for the course would be the moderator. They would get an email when that flag was raised and be allowed to hide the annotation.
00:50:53
On the public channel, Hypothesis is the steward of that, and we have community guidelines. So, if something has been flagged as inappropriate and it doesn't meet our guidelines, we have the power to hide it. I also want to note that for the public annotations, there is a really interesting creative commons or licensing perspective that's taken.
00:51:17
So, each of the annotations made in the public layer for Hypothesis by default are CC Zero, they're essentially placed in the public domain. Which is really cool, I think it's a great way to contribute knowledge and ideas into the open web. And it means those annotations, that new knowledge can be reused. And it belongs essentially in the public domain. So, when you make a public annotation, it really is public, and publicly licensed, as
00:51:41
well. With Pressbooks, you can choose the license, each author can choose the license they wish to apply for the book and at the chapter level. So, we give authors ultimate power over how they license their contributions. Yeah, you'll notice that when I was annotating privately, there I didn't have this CC BY license. But now that I switched to annotating publicly, I have that CC BY logo there to point that
00:52:10
out. But private annotations, private group annotations are not permissibly licensed like that, the individual user retains ownership. I think we're at time. Thanks, everyone for coming and listening to us talk about annotation. We hope it prompts some thoughts, some inspiration. If you'd like to continue this conversation, Jeremy and I would love to talk to you more
00:52:35
about the tools that we built, about open web stuff generally, about annotation, about publishing. And about the future of whatever you're trying to do at your institution of teaching and learning. Our emails are listed here and we're both on Twitter. I hope you have a terrific rest of your open education week. And we'll see you in the world, somewhere.
00:53:03
Thanks Michelle, thanks, folks. Stay in touch. Thank you Steel and Jeremy (applause).
End of transcript