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hello everyone and welcome to liquid margins community in composition annotation and english education thank you all for being here
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today's guests are laura roche phd candidate in english rhetoric at indiana university alex penn visiting lecturer at indiana university
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raymie collier assistant professor of learning design and technology at the university of colorado denver i'm also proud to say that rainey is our 2021 hypothesis scholar in residence
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and we have got a guest moderator today justin hodgson associate professor of digital rhetoric in the english department at indiana university
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and with that um thank you for listening to this introduction and housekeeping and now i'm going to turn it over to justin i thought i would start by taking a moment to sort of introduce you to how we got to where we are um
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and then maybe sort of situate some points in relationship to the connections between social annotation and writing studies more formally um but this this project which is now a nine-member research team right looking at i don't
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know it grows every day i feel like i'm picking up people like i'm collecting cats or something but uh you know we we started in the spring redesigning our online first year composition course which is
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um you know a standard competition course like any other place but we have a multitude of options within that frame but we wanted to expand our offerings for online and this was of course before the pandemic disrupted everything we had a
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plan we were going to make some quick changes and as part of those initial conversations we thought we would like to improve the level of engagement students have with some of the course text that we require them to read
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that they then use to think through uh some of the key ideas and concepts from uh the course and so we were making progress and alex and and laura were on on the project team redesigning our online class so they both have extensive
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experience teaching online and teaching our w-131 course and then we decided you know after the pandemic hit that we would take our little boutique offering and scale it up for the entirety of our freshman composition
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course which is roughly 60 sections uh first year composition per semester covering about 1250 students and so uh it became very uh evident right away
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that we needed to make some some changes to to accommodate not only the different kinds of instructors who would be teaching this course um but people who've never taught online but very specifically instructors who've never taught at all before either so many of them are first-time
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teachers in the first time space and then first time online but the one thing that remained i think consistent for us across was uh the potential value we saw in hypothesis for helping recreate some of the community
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and engagement that occurs in our online space and so uh this is literally one of those moments in life where the cart was actually before the horse because as we built this thing moving into july it dawned on us that we're
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going to have this huge data set now all the students are participating in online through our canvas course they're doing all their annotations and hypothesis and and they turn all their assignments in through these two digital repositories for the most part so we would have access to everything
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they've written for the class that's gradable and part of their development as well as all their annotations and that's when we reached out uh formally to working with jeremy dean at hypothesis and he in turn connected us with raymie
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to figure out well what what could a research project look like and what would it look like and how could we actually discern things of value from this process or product uh but the reality is
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we just have way too much information and so like we should do something with it okay we should figure out how to make something out of this uh and so we begin this journey of trying to figure out what that looks like
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that makes sense everybody so far i've got everyone on the board we're all on the same page i haven't missed any steps yet um and so then we we began the process of going through irb um and i have battle wounds if you like you know they wear them deeply
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trauma through irb uh it's an ongoing fun service for those who have done irb before and uh but we we got to prove our study got approved our protocols are in place and starting as of yesterday i think officially
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we were already gathering data so we are at the first stages of actually making sense of what we have and what hypothesis is doing but we have a lot of hypotheses uh no pun intended uh about what the study might
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uh reveal to us and that includes not only thinking about social annotation as a writing activity um but as well as like the process of how those activities impact student writing how they lead to things like community development how
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instructors are teaching it how that process relates to the engagement whether or not they bring it up in a synchronous class um and so that's the larger frame as a quick maybe a quick overview of alex you want to break down a little bit like how does our course work in terms of the
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structure so people get a sense of you know the synchronous asynchronous kind of dynamic yeah so the current model we have is a mix of synchronous and asynchronous fully online instruction
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so we ended up with our model because we had courses converted a little bit at the last minute in the fall they were originally taught three days a week so we ended up with a model where that first day a week
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was replaced with asynchronous instruction and activities and then the other two days were replaced with synchronous uh instruction via zoom and so a place that a lot of the hypothesis stuff is
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happening in fact all of the built-in assignments is in that asynchronous monday so where normally students might in the regular classroom read an essay over the weekend to come in and discuss it what they do instead is
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read the essay over the weekend make some annotations as they're reading and then before coming to the next class respond to their peers so that is sort of both replacing the discussion that would normally happen
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synchronously but then also preparing students to have a little bit of synchronous discussion but to start in a more advanced place when they come to that synchronous zoom class does that sort of help
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fraud immunity uh yeah that's perfect i just i think it's important to understand the context within which we're using the tool i think most folks who who know anything about social annotation will tell you it makes sense that it would connect to a class that involves reading text and
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writing i mean i don't think that's a stretch but when you think about how it operates um in the online space for us it's really critical to the experience it provides more so i think at least as we
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approached it as designers it was about the experience more so than just how does it help annotate and engage the content and so it's a it's a really fun dynamic to think about we were replacing an in-class discussion
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component um five times a semester with a social annotation activity that will lead into an in-class conversation um as a way of augmenting that experience and so that's sort of i just want to make sure that listeners or our viewers in the future
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would understand you know it's not like a regular class for us it's this unique hybrid that uh was supposed to be innovative and fun and it was but then it became this one-size-fits-all box for every instructor in w-131
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um and so that's sort of how we how we got there and then of course we brought on uh raymie and he complicated everything for us and um but you know amy you want to give some background to sort of what you see
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going on with our study like and how it fits a little bit with some of the larger conversations yeah you know i will and i just want to first of all pass along another thanks justin to you laura alex just the whole team at iu because
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you know in regards to the really dynamic work that's happening at indiana university right now and the work it's doing you know justin's describing in the department of english with social annotation this is a really
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large scale kind of fundamental shift in how students are interacting with texts interacting with each other and interacting with their curriculum and to do so at the kind of scale that justin and alex and laura will describe and to do so
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really with a lot of intentional pedagogy instructional planning approaches to assessment this is really unique and what has made me so excited about this work and i think what's really exciting hypothesis
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as an organization is that across the board there are many schools k-12 and higher ed that are adopting social annotation because it's such an effective kind of replacement for the dreaded
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threaded discussion forum and there's a lot of excitement around really using social annotation to support the kinds of learning practices that we know social annotation encourages it encourages meaning making
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it encourages textual analysis it encourages peer-to-peer collaboration and it's a really useful way of setting up future writing activities such as composing essays and thinking analytically and so again there's just a lot of
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enthusiasm around social annotation right now and the again the real intentional approach that justin and alex and laura the whole team at iu the whole team of the department which has taken
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to make this a kind of department-wide commitment to really support a whole host of instructors again justin mentioned and we're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of sections across
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multiple classes our work will you know ultimately touch not only thousands and thousands of students but potentially hundreds of faculty instructors this is a really uh consequential uh endeavor that we're
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embarking upon here and so yes there are a lot of questions to ask a lot of interesting research that we can do but i just really want to kind of start by pointing you know just you know pointing out that this is really a unique kind of educational
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situation that that has kind of emerged um in bloomington and also online and we're just so excited about that so just again thanks there for that for that yeah i mean it's a we we we had a
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project in mind and it keeps growing every time we meet just you know um so we started out with w131 as our focus and that's probably the primary area of our conversation today but for folks who might want to know we we have expanded our
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our data collection and our inquiry practices to include a series of literature courses introduction to fiction introduction to poetry introduction to drama i believe um and then a couple other what we call l 200 classes
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that are related to the critical reading and writing um and then we have another section of classes called the w170s which are topic specific courses that actually count for w131 credit and so we are including them i think
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it's also important to recognize that at iu we have what are called two foundations courses two courses that are required by every student no matter what your major and discipline and w131 is one of those two foundations courses so
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it is required by everybody and i think if as this works um it may end up causing us to also think about how social annotation could be pushed backwards towards our acp credit um and other transfer possibilities as
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students bring credits into the university to account for this experience but that's sort of the the bigger bigger frame um you know laura you want to take a minute to talk about like how this works in practice in terms of what is what does our actual
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hypothesis activities look like could you break that down for folks yeah so um students in 131 at least will read five different texts
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throughout the semester and they are responsible for using hypothesis to annotate those texts a lot of the instructors will prompt the students with a few questions
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to consider as they're reading the text some um even plant questions in the text for students to come across as they're reading but for the most part it's pretty uh student-led it they're the
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the instructors do for the most part very little when it comes to actually guiding the student discussion it's very much student run and i think alex and justin and even rainey can
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speak to the advantages of that from a pedagogical and just like emotional perspective um but the it's a pretty low stakes assignment as far as we've designed it i
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think it's worth maybe like five points um but it does hold the students accountable for doing the work because there's this sense of performativity involved where they uh have to converse with their
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fellow peers they know that people are going to be reading what they've written along uh beyond just the instructor looking at that and so it promotes more thoughtful i think
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engagement with the text and conversation with the students as a whole perfect let me um within within our again the two course of the we have kind of like two trees if you want to think about it that way we have the 131 side
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where instructors do their own thing and then there's all these other courses that have their own variation as well uh in nw 131 our actions with hypothesis require uh students to do three uh additive
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annotations and two responsive annotations in each one of those additive components those initial sort of engagements with the text are framed around either a prompt that we've provided as a generic prompt or the instructors customize
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uh then the second one's around a discussion question that the instructors are supposed to add themselves based on their theme and the readings they've chosen and then the third one i think is a make it ask a question of the text and so it's real formulaic and it's
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meant to be a starting point from which instructors work not meant to control what they do it gives them some grounding to begin with and we did this all last semester so my hope and expectation is this semester when we're gathering data for the first
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time that those who had the experience last semester now feel more comfortable taking some liberties with reshaping those questions or reshaping those prompts to fit maybe a little more systematic with what they do pedagogically but also
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with their their content and delivery and so that's sort of like the nuts and bolts of it all right um from a compositional standpoint our our conversation begins really with how can we improve
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student writing right and at the core we want to help students not only to develop as writers but to develop you know critical thinking analytical skills and practices and our entire w131 course as a core element of iu
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is built around analysis for the most part um learn students learning to critically read a text and to apply those ideas elsewhere and so the one thing that's remained true in my years here at iu is that the better students understand those critical texts they choose that
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are chosen for them the better they apply the ideas there's no i mean there's no substitute for clarity of thought when it comes to being a solid and excellent writer and you know that that approach to helping them understand the text is sort
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of where everything began for us because so much of their success in the class is dependent and at least in part on how well they're able to read and understand and then leverage the ideas from those essays so we wanted to
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give them an extended space to think about engagement that doesn't just require the instructor to drive that process and i think so far given that we had a bit of a was it was it a workshop professional development activity
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yesterday and you know we had about eight or nine instructors show up some of which have used it some of which hadn't um and given the conversations i think so far the preliminary indications are it's working quite well right um at least from those who showed
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up but it's it's it's interesting to think about you know the experience students are having and how that activity in social annotation is working for them in class or in this case from the instructor's perspective what are they noticing what are they not
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and so i thought maybe we could go um to go back to alex a little bit here to talk about her experiences because of us alex is the only one that's actually taught this course with this tool um laura and i have taught the online course and helped design it but we're not
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weren't actually teaching it last semester so alex is the only one of us here with actual experience on the ground for for this activity um because though raymie doesn't teach for us right so no matter how much i keep asking him to
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he doesn't just sign up you know you know so uh ralex could you walk through a little bit like you know what has been your experience how did you approach it uh maybe help folks get a sense of you know the ins and outs of your
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encounter so far yeah so it might be helpful to give a little background i've been teaching online for a few years now in a slightly different version of this course that did not use hypothesis
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and so um you know i could see that students maybe didn't have as much engagement with the text as they would in a traditional classroom where maybe we'd hand them paper texts or require them to print paper texts or
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give them paper texts or something like that uh and i could also see that even though we had these synchronous classes where we met face to face and where i was able to form these personal connections with students there was also this problem where
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students weren't really connecting as much with each other as they would in a traditional classroom and i was really struggling with ways to facilitate that so enter hypothesis this past semester
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hypothesis really allowed me to do two different things more more i'm sure but but two of the things it allowed me to do that i really appreciated were on the one hand it got my students much more engaged with the texts
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and um at a nitty gritty close reading level so that when they went back to write their essays they could really incorporate details from the texts and and they just had much better contact
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with the texts in class discussions and in their writing and then on the flip side hypothesis created the space for my students to be with each other and hear each other's ideas and respond to each other's ideas
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where i was largely absent so i didn't do a lot of responding to or moderating their annotations i would grade them there's a very easy way to grade them in canvas but then that like did not show up of course so what they were seeing on the text
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was um each other's ideas each other's comments each other's questions uh our very favorite my very favorite prompt that we had for them was ask a question of the text and very quickly i think
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students realize that really um they should be asking questions to each other about the text and so i have i have one beautiful little example here if i can
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find it uh we were reading foucault an excerpt from from birth of the present on panopticism and one of my students asked this question that had four other students then respond to it she said
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what do you think are some of the psychological effects of thinking that you are always being watched but never actually knowing if you are and so a whole bunch of students responded to this in really interesting
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ways that helped everyone understand the text better and then in turn use that text to analyze our films so i would say from for me my experience with hypothesis has been very
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positive in both practical ways increasing that contact with the text that we always want but also increasing the student's contact with each other which has been really nice to see excellent thanks alex um yeah it's i
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mean we've been over this sort of practice and process and in terms of what are the what are the best outcomes what are our best forms of engagement and hopefully as we learn more from you know not only our instructors but the the way we are analyzing and looking
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at information from them and from the student perspective we can get a better sense of actually what is working well for them beyond just how well the tool itself is working and so i i think the pedagogical component is absolutely important um we had a
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question i think jen had asked in the chat about seeing an example in in in the system so i'm going to share my screen real quick and just show what it looks like for us um in the w131 let me see if i can make this happen today
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it's a tech event right so this should probably fail miserably right that's how it's supposed to work all righty and we'll just share that can i assume we can all see that we got a non okay um uh so anyways in in our typical
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this is actually a course from last semester so i can show you some things but i can't show actual annotations because it would be a ferpa issue identifying students in that way but the basic structure is we have a weekly module set
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this is what they do before the semester begins and gives them information and things of that nature and we have resources built into our canvas modules for instructors on how to actually connect or stitch a text to a hypothesis activity
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you know how to use hypothesis hypothesis in the classroom we have some of that training material but for us it really begins uh sort of week two where we have this thing called monday peer engagement which alex mentioned earlier and laura kind of went over a little bit and
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we initially called it collaborative annotation because well we didn't know there was a thing called social annotation we this is what we thought was a collaborative activity is the way we were thinking about it um but so if you see you would the students would see this all the green is
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what they would see um they would click that activity there and it would open up this ac this assignment um and so it's week two gives them the purpose of the assignment and then it breaks down their specific task you know three annotations and two
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responses so each text they engage they have to have at least five um sort of creation activities with it um or five engagements and then the additives have the prompt the question
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and the uh asking a question frame that i mentioned earlier and then the responses are basically respond to two of your peers and so students would come through here they have our little design canvas
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space and we added all these fun little images and and whatnot to make it a little more visually engaging and then at the bottom they would click this button it's not working right now because it's i currently blocked it so i don't
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accidentally open up hypothesis but this is a button that would click and link out and that would open up hypothesis for the essay in a new window and the students can annotate it
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how they see fit from that point like any other hypothesis activity and so you can see here like on this one we have the question this is i think on cohen's uh essay on monsters right and so the question is why did i assign this
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essay for a class about monsters it's the theme of the class and so that's the the frame frame so far in this process let me see if i can see that okay time for all right so i'm gonna stop sharing to
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that but it's uh yeah i mean it's it's relatively a seamless uh process um in canvas for those of you who are canvas users there's two ways of stitching or creating a hypothesis activity there's one as an assignment
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and there's one as like just a module element as an external tool however if you want to use the speedgrader function uh which i highly recommend if you get into that process then you need to actually set it as an assignment so that you can
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work individually through students annotations so each one of our students are required to do five and in speedgrader i can quickly pull up sarah smith's five right and i can just see them and and for most of us
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i think our approach was we really thought of this more as a completion activity not a can i grade your intellectual engagement um and and the process being it's an opportunity to to not only intervene and
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highlight things that are successful or really great questions and bring them to discussion but also really uh i think the phrase it was course correct right if a student is sort of drifting really far off from the point or as alex
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often says i ask him to identify the thesis and they almost always say the counter thesis is the thesis you can insert your own comments at that point privately in the speedgrader uh with the tool but if you're spending time with it at all
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you're probably familiar with this process as well but so that's our that's at least one of our examples um i don't know exactly how it looks like in in all the literature classes because they they have more control over their own
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design whereas this is a a campus shell a canvas shell blueprint course that we push out to all the instructors in 131 and so that's why it has all those designed features in it um but it's that's the basic basic
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process so far i find if you don't mind me jumping and picking up on a point that alex mentioned a few moments ago she was talking a little bit about some of the decisions that she's making as an instructor in her class with her
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students in response to the kinds of annotations thank you for reading through that thread that was really awesome to kind of hear students thinking through that um but also a little creepy given this ago but in any case it was really it was really fun
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um i want to mention that given the course context that both again laura alex and justin have all spoken to at this point um one of the interesting things from from my perspective as a researcher but again also somebody who has taught with hypothesis in many of my classes
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for many years now is that there's actually not a whole lot that's well known and well documented about how to teach with social annotation period there's just not a lot out there
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you know of course liquid margins this webinar series is now filling a really urgent need again as social annotation becomes a more popular teaching and learning activity particularly in higher education
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there's a need to begin to kind of capture these anecdotal stories you know perspectives from professors kind of instructional moves it's really important to make these stories more accessible
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and to do this kind of like public you know sharing of practice as a way to kind of reflect upon effective instructional strategies that said again there's actually very little research about
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how educators actually plan their instruction teach with assess and then reflect upon their use of social annotation that literature really doesn't exist again we know on the student side of
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things that social annotation does a whole lot and we can get into that and that's again related but distinct and so what i think is so generous of everyone at indiana university
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and what is just such an important commitment on behalf of the department and all the instructors has been a willingness to say this is an opportunity to really also study faculty practice to begin to learn a little bit about
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some of the examples and dynamics that have come up so for example like again like alex was sharing how much do instructors kind of step back and let their students kind of own the margins and kind of try and make meaning
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on their own what does that really look like and what does that feel like and how do you kind of plan to create that kind of flexibility and when do instructors step in to try and tell people that they can't quite
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identify the right thesis and the right argument you know things like this and so these are all things that we hope to learn as we not only study what students are are learning but also what instructors are doing
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i had the mute sorry um the you know raymie you raise a interesting comment i think the most fascinating thing about our workshop development thing yesterday with the stuff the faculty who were teaching with this uh at iu
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uh came specifically from the questions and challenges instructors were having i think you know it was a nice professional development moment to help guide folks in the use of the tool and to think about its practices but i know brian one of our instructors had mentioned and then a couple
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others echoed this sentiment which is they found that the students would do these really great annotations in the hypothesis activity and then not want to repeat their information in class but they felt like they did like why would i regurgitate this we already had
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this conversation in the threads and so you know this need to think about well does it facilitate conversation or is it the beginning part for a larger or a more extended conversation or moving in a new way and so you know brian had some really
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interesting ideas about how he was adapting to that and and looking for gaps and and moving the conversation forward but i would i never like as we started this i never anticipated this possibly closing conversation
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right in the classroom discussion um but it does raise those things those questions like you know how do we teach with it what do we do with it how does the what practices are available that we know that might be best practices um and then how does it work across
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disciplines so your writing is one sort of frame but you know like i see this having obvious implications in history and in sociology and any of the courses that require sort of critical reading as a fundamental component of their course engagement so i just i
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don't know the i think this question about the teacher thing the teaching side of it is at the root of what we are after i know laura that was one of your interests when we first started right yeah in general i'm really interesting
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it really interests and really interesting i'm really interested in writing pedagogy and so i am always sort of thinking about how do we get students to do this
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better how and how do we do it better how do we um write with more clarity how do we convince students to write with more clarity without losing um depth of thought
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something that i have heard be an issue with students using hypothesis is not that they don't want to um repeat what they've said but that their annotation is significantly
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more thoughtful than how they write about the text in their essay so talking about um we're sort of building on what justin said about this being the start
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of the critical thinking process rather than sort of the climax of it the epitome of it uh i am really interested and be and i decided to be a part of this project
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because i want to figure out how we can help students understand text as things we have conversations with one-on-one like me with the text and i think hypothesis
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helps facilitate that because the conversation is larger than just the student and the text at the beginning so that they can eventually evolve into writing an essay about the text that is conversational that does
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sort of go back and forth between i thought about this and then uh from i thought about it from this perspective and then i thought about it from that perspective and um sort of continuing the critical
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thinking process rather than stifling it if that makes sense yeah i mean that makes that makes perfect sense well at least to me but i'm also a scholar in writing study so this is you know maybe that's a
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i mean one of my areas uh we're about 12 minutes left i think right uh frannie is that correct we're going to 12 45 yeah and i'm wondering if we should maybe open it up too yeah that's what i was thinking is if we could go to the q a that would be great if folks have questions that we
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can respond to or maybe help with uh or at least tell you how we broke it yeah and i actually would like to just ask a question because it it's really germane to what you were just talking about about the conversation taking place in
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the annotation space but then students are like i already said that do you think in any way there's a generational influence there so that this generation is more maybe comfortable speaking
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in the digital space hmm that's complicated it just occurred to me when you were talking about it yeah i mean i know that you know in in writing studies for example uh lester fagley did some work in the 80s and 90s about the role of chatting
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uh the use of chats in classroom spaces and how that enabled voices in ways that it didn't but it wasn't really necessarily generational it was more about access to to content engagement and actually having a voice in class so the more reserved introverts
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felt more comfortable it was his claims right um but i think i initially i would say there might be something to that idea about students and their use of digital technologies you know the quote-unquote myth of the digital native as i like to call it
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but at this point i think the pandemic wrecked all of our baseline so so um if the idea was students were inherently more digital uh they are excessively more digital at this point right and uh and so i i don't i don't know to what
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extent that might play a role but that might be something for us to con i mean to look at um if we we could find other studies that show maybe generational engagements uh that might be a nice way of thinking about this and yeah i'll just pick up quickly here and kind of invert
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frannie's question because you know freddie i see your question as echoing you know really deep questions about practice which is the extent to which educators are comfortable facilitating different kinds of discussions in different kinds of
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settings and i think that if educators feel comfortable doing so students will kind of rise to that occasion you know actually another member of our research team who's with us today chris andrews who's also at iu and is a learning scientist and you know
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getting his phd looking at educator practice teacher learning we actually having this conversation yesterday following this pd session which is that this dynamic between opening up a
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a social annotation conversation that is digital that is asynchronous that is in the margins where students are actually having very rich deep meaningful conversation and then they come to class and
00:32:51
the question is does their instructor expect them to regurgitate what they've already said online or has that instructor themselves gone through a kind of
00:33:04
reflective professional learning process so that they understand it's time for a new kind of discussion now when we come together whether it's face to face over zoom or face to face in a classroom when that's safe to do again
00:33:17
does an instructor understand that there's one conversation that was a kind of rough draft thinking the kind of like maybe meaning making that laura was just talking about i'm speaking back to the text but i'm also speaking with my peers in
00:33:29
relationship to that text and then what happens in that classroom conversation that is both different from but connected to and building upon what happened online and so yeah i don't
00:33:41
know for any if it's generational but i think that our team is also you know again thanks to folks like chris and others are very interested in making sure that that instructors have the kinds of dispositions and the kinds of skills
00:33:53
to kind of sequence these kinds of discursive based activities to make them very meaningful for students that include social annotation but it uses that as a way to kind of augment other kinds of of collaborative
00:34:06
learning activities yeah that's great i just typed in the chat like as you're describing it it makes me think of all the flipped classroom practices right and how instructors have to adjust writing's done that for a while right but but this like hypothesis come becomes
00:34:22
like a flipped classroom kind of component man i think that's uh that's a great uh i don't know i'm intrigued i'm gonna i put notes down i'm gonna revisit this later this is how it works right um i know we had a question uh nate you would you had mentioned i think nicholas
00:34:35
had a question that you wanted to bring up yeah it's i mean and alex was sort of riffing on it too and i think it was um you know around this it sort of grows out of the discussion you just had in a
00:34:47
way about how can discussion be different right and it's um part of it is this idea of you know our students um and because of pedagogy being kind of trapped in a world where they're
00:34:59
treating each learning experience as kind of a singular modular activity and how do how can we draw connections across modules in a course or even across courses or across you know academic careers and you know can social
00:35:13
annotation play a role in that yeah that's a good one so so there's a in in writing studies we have transference as a one of the core concepts that have emerged in the last you know i would say decade and a half
00:35:29
transference of skills transference of rhetorical capacities from the context of a writing class to not only other classes on campus but then beyond the academic frame i know we you know in w-131 we create
00:35:42
it's a thematic thing and the idea is to try and intentionally weave theme theme based elements and engagements and skills from unit one to unit two to unit three and there are activities that are designed for that they don't always work
00:35:55
um and and if you get into when when education gets defaulted to canvas right uh if it's complete controlled by canvas and zoom then it inherently orients students around modules and completion activities
00:36:08
rather than sustained engagement and so it actually takes significantly more effort to create that inter-integrated kind of uh female element or or through line and how it works than it does in a regular
00:36:20
face-to-face classroom at least that's been my experience teaching online and i haven't done it with a hypothesis but overall that's been been the the place but alex you had some things you mentioned in response right what did you have to say
00:36:32
yeah and i must say this is largely hypothetical at this point because in the fall i don't think i did this but it's something i want to do going forward is ask my students as one of their three
00:36:44
annotations for every text i want to ask them to make a connection either to another text we've read or a class discussion we've had or to the real world or to another one of their classes which
00:36:57
i think there's some research around this being like a place where a lot of learning happens for students where they start making connections between their classes um and so you know that's not like a immediate solution to this much bigger problem but
00:37:10
i'm hoping that'll help students get in in the mode of thinking about how these learning experiences can go from being these discrete modular things to being these more interconnected cumulative things
00:37:24
it does go ahead raymie are you sure okay uh it does fall to in my opinion the instructor to facilitate those connections and to
00:37:36
encourage the transfer of thinking and knowledge because students are so used to compartmentalizing not only their courses but the course work within their courses like in a test-based culture
00:37:50
students are learning learning learning taking the test forgetting to make room for more learning learning learning for another test so um something that brought me into writing studies was the practice of
00:38:02
mindfulness and encouraging students to be actively aware of the thoughts that are coming in that might seem unrelated but are actually tangential to
00:38:15
and connected with the core i don't know text that's being studied so encouraging students to sort of follow the uh distractions and think about where they're taking
00:38:28
them and not uh i guess not discouraging somebody who's reading foucault in their 131 class from thinking about how that applies to their
00:38:40
psych 101 course that they're also taking so really keeping it open-ended and saying yeah that's a really interesting question um even if you don't answer the question like alex was saying
00:38:52
letting students respond to students is a really valuable way to continue the conversation laura that's great i'll keep this really brief which is just to say that you know to nicholas's point here into again the
00:39:05
comments that have now been made i think one of the unfortunate side effects among many of the educational aspects of the you know shifts to everyone online pandemic pedagogy everyone's now digital
00:39:18
educator is that there will be i think for many students a feeling that online learning is increasingly highly structured kind of formal by default
00:39:30
very modular and sequential in a way that really can some may perceive delimit the kinds of divergent interest driven and messy learning that occurs you know wherever it may be
00:39:44
now i've obviously drunk the kool-aid here but i think that there are actually few but some very useful learning technologies that show a very different possible future for digital and online learning and i
00:39:56
think that social annotation is certainly one of those where social annotation to get to laura's point right now certainly what alex is just mentioning about making connections social annotation is inherently about these associative trails
00:40:07
these way in which cognition is distributed and stretched across people that you're in conversation with resources ideas and all of that occurs over time this can't by definition be bounded
00:40:20
necessarily to a class a semester you know modular one readings to module two readings etc and so you know once higher ed wrote large kind of
00:40:31
moves into whatever post-pandemic phase of teaching and learning we may eventually find ourselves in the next few years i think that there will need to be a kind of pretty radical reset on what it means to teach and learn online
00:40:44
once everybody's kind of again out of this emergency mode and i think that few technologies and few practices will actually survive as kind of very meaningful things that we should continue to do but i believe that social annotation
00:40:57
will be one of those things that's great that's great remy uh remy it's uh 12 44. i know there's at least two more questions i think we want to touch on real quickly before we run out of time and i'm happy to stick around for an
00:41:09
extra few minutes just to to respond to some things the first one was muffy had a question and i just lost it it was about how much time do faculty spend training students because you should notice that um where is it at i just
00:41:22
hit the button it all disappeared um essentially the student students are not digital natives i don't care anyone tells you they do not come with some grand ability to work with technologies they might have an affinity for making things work but many of them don't have any
00:41:34
experience with your lms and so for them it's a whole new learning curve in our previous online course design our very first day was required to be in person and we would we would walk them through all the technological considerations they would
00:41:47
need for that class was a full class day of here's how to make this online class work however in the pandemic moment that is no longer the case and so i can say that our faculty don't we don't they don't intentionally provide a lot of training for students
00:42:00
to use the system but we have built-in training modules into our canvas shell that students can view or walk it walks them through how to access certain materials or how to participate there's even i
00:42:13
think it once as a quiz like are you prepared for online learning like that kind of basic level of not only technological support uh inquiry but also conceptual uh inquiry and so i i i think that
00:42:24
we would all benefit more if students had a little more hands-on training for how to use standard university technologies um but uh and and maybe actually since we touch every student maybe the the freshman course is where that should
00:42:36
occur um but as of right now it's it's sort of instructor dependent and then they mostly rely on the the few uh training module elements we have four students in our and the 131 design
00:42:48
at least out of the other courses we work with it's different but um so that's that's the framework there and then oh there it is i lost it the chat moves so fast all right and then um wait one more
00:43:00
question about what was the uh yeah the central question curtis it says new kinds of discussions which makes him ask what are some of the things that can and should happen in the synchronous
00:43:12
session that follows and builds on the asynchronous hypothesis session and so that's this question so uh i'll leave it to the others here who maybe know more about this but what what should happen in the synchronous classroom alex you've done this what
00:43:24
what is your go-to strategy well i typed this a little in the chat um and i i want to be sure we get to to ronnie his or raymie sorry because i know he has um sort of some different and more interesting uh solutions but
00:43:40
one very simple activity i like to do is either by zoom pole or chat have all the students vote on the answer to a question either a question that students have actually posed in in their annotations or one that
00:43:53
comes out of their annotations so like one an example of one that could come out of the annotations is like some people identified the thesis as this and some people identified the thesis as this and some people identified it as
00:44:06
this which one of these do you think is the thesis and then say you do that as zoom pull like it pops up and then you can say like okay people who voted for this one you know what made you think this so like that's that's the or it could be
00:44:17
much simpler like so and so asked this what do you guys think vote yes or no in the chat and then the nice thing is um if you do that kind of voting in the chat you know who to call on you can be like oh so and so you said no why did you say no because the um sort
00:44:31
of impromptu participation impromptu unmuting is harder to do in the zoom space so those are just some very little practical things but i think raymie has some um much more interesting ideas he could
00:44:43
probably share alex now you're the expert here i'll just you know just really briefly you know say that i put a few ideas into the chat but i i i wrote me all this phrase as a question which i know a lot of people on this call and perhaps a lot of people
00:44:54
in you know who are joining us in the webinar or who will watch and listen to this i think are just really interested in the fact that these social annotation activities they don't kind of live alone and they are going to be paired with
00:45:06
other kinds of learning either assignments or activities that are very likely also collaborative or social in some way and again i think that there is not yet a kind of knowledge base for
00:45:18
what that can look like there again is very little if any research about what actually is effective in pairing these kinds of social annotation activities with other kinds of classes again i know what i've done in my classes i love hearing alex
00:45:30
and laura justin chris is you know here as well kind of riffing on like what may work for them and their students but i think this is a really important you know conversation to continue thinking about is how do we not only facilitate these
00:45:43
really rich conversations with social annotation how do they connect to the other things that we know we really care about as educators and what we ultimately want our students doing i think that
00:45:55
including hypothesis a hypothesis or social annotations in the writing classroom specifically changes how students fundamentally think about writing like when you picture somebody reading
00:46:07
or writing they are doing so in isolation like it's it's a hermit in the corner frantically scribbling you know or um the or reading i suppose it's it's a it's
00:46:21
thought of as this isolated activity when in reality everything all the research and writing studies shows that it is a social activity when you're writing you are inherently responding to something whether it's
00:46:32
your own thoughts which are a product of your environment or um somebody's comment and hypothesis so it sort of forces students to think about the relationships not only between them
00:46:45
and the text but between them and their classmates between their classmates in the text it humanizes writing and reading practices in a way that i think can often and easily be overlooked
00:47:00
i'm going to jump in this is such a great discussion but i'm going to jump in we are over time we can keep going if the panel wants to keep going but i just want to let everyone know that if you have to jump
00:47:11
off you know feel free to do so but i just want to be a little cognizant of the time yeah no my next meeting doesn't start till one so i got a few minutes very good
00:47:26
this is great i mean i think you know i part at the core of what we want we hope our research will do is to illuminate uh maybe some initial responses to these kinds of questions i don't i don't think we have any great answers
00:47:39
in terms of like definitive claims yet but i think we all have really wonderful interesting ideas about how we might do it or how we might extend it um in our in our own specific context and how that works i mean i i'm i teach mostly with digital media
00:47:52
digital writing digital rhetoric um making things for media i'm i'm going to include hypothesis one of my courses this semester and i'm going to have them focus on adding images into the text as a core component i don't know what
00:48:03
that looks like and so um i'm intrigued to see how badly i messed this up right because i learned so much when we fail fail fundamentally right it's like i always talk about fast failure fun failure and formative failure and i really embrace those things as key
00:48:16
components of how i teach and so i think taking chances and trying things and realizing that didn't work is just how we get better um yes they should be informed and positioned but ultimately like oh i think this could work and then you're like no no that did
00:48:28
not work at all at all so and that's how our online class got built right so uh because it's i think it's in its third iteration now of design and proofing so um but these questions have been fantastic i really appreciate everybody
00:48:41
showing up today and asking us questions and you know poking and prodding the inquiry so that's great well um i think we should probably wrap this up we're almost at the top of the hour
00:48:53
but i just want to say thank you to our guests you've been wonderful alex laura justin raymie and thank you to everyone who attended
00:49:06
um there will be a recording of this i put that in the chat but i'll just repeat that there will be a recording of this um on the hypothesis website probably this coming monday the 18th
00:49:19
mlk day um or before that and it will also be on the liquid margins youtube channel i also dropped in a chat a link earlier to another webinar that we have for people who just
00:49:32
want to see um have a more specific walk through of hypothesis as a tool and a demo um we do have another webinar series called hypothesis 101
00:49:44
and we've got an one coming up on january 20th next wednesday so uh look for that um and i will just say uh goodbye and thank you for coming to
00:49:58
liquid margins this has been a really great show
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