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greetings everyone i'm going to uh reorganize who's appearing here just for a second uh so as i'm sure everybody is tired of hearing
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now i made angel from hypothesis and i want to welcome you to this very special edition of what we're calling featured educator office hours where we invite some folks from around
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the community who have some experience with social annotation to just come have a kind of casual chat and conversation with whoever shows up about social annotation and how they might use it in their practice
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maybe questions of pedagogy what is it what does it look like in the real world or other topics as well we can really talk about anything we want here and so uh without further ado i want to
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give our our featured educators here a chance to introduce themselves and i'm going to ask each one of you a kind of specific question to kick things off and this is really the only kind of structured part of the
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conversation and the rest of it from here will be completely driven by the conversation um and that that first question i'll go to dana first if you don't mind dana um that first question is if you could tell us a little bit about what your role is
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um you know what you do in your day-to-day and then how you came across social annotation and and how it relates to your practice and then we'll follow up with that same question to the other folks and after
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dana has a chance to go absolutely so my name is dana connard i work with a unit called online education at uc santa cruz here in california so it's still morning for me
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um my role is instructional technology support specialist so i specifically help instructors put in instructional technology like a hypothesis into their course
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our lms is canvas we also have a video hosting platform so my day-to-day is helping instructors deliver their well-designed instructional content
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to their students and i first learned about hypothesis from the the instructors we had a lot of requests from instructors who had heard about hypothesis and wanted to use it in their course so so then our journey was to to
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implement it in our instance of canvas and to onboard instructors and we've been using it officially since fall 2020 that was our pilot um so we've only been using it for a few quarters so far but the
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reaction has been very positive both from instructors and from students so awesome that's that's great um and i think one thing that is clear here is that we do have a kind of special focus today on um some of the
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folks who are a little bit more behind the scenes with enabling social annotation at their institutions as opposed to what you might call you know front and center at the beginning of the classroom so um kyle kind of the same question to
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you um what do you do with your days and i should ask what are you reading as um as raymie and ontario just asked in there um maybe we'll get to that in a minute but uh and then how did you come across
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social annotation and and how does it fit into your practice yeah so my name is kyle denglinger i'm the digital pedagogy open education librarian at wake forest in north carolina um and in my role i'm on a team in the
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library called digital initiatives and scholarly communications so we deal a lot with digital humanities humanities projects and anything that really touches on copyright and access uh related to
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scholarship um and with the addition of me on our team to more digital pedagogy things um such as oer and that kind of stuff and um i also teach fully online and i've been teaching a fully online
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information literacy course since 2015 and in my own just kind of looking around being very much online i found hypothesis probably through some online discussions and wound up using it in my own fully online course
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before we had an integration into canvas my role has kind of shifted a little bit since i moved on to this new team i still teach online but now i am much more faculty outreach oriented and supporting faculty development of
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online courses and specific digital pedagogy projects um so the big thing that happened with me at wake forest was that of course with the transition to covid i really wanted to integrate hypothesis
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into canvas and get get hypothesis in front of as many people as i could before we went live in fall 2020. um and so i could speak a little bit to our kind of faculty support model uh
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that happened in the summer of 2020 which i think was really successful at getting a hypothesis to be well known on campus and to be extremely widely used in fall of 2020. so really really cool and i'm i want to
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give shauna a chance to jump into but we know that she might be having a little bit of trouble connecting uh i uh i love hearing um the very different perspectives that you guys
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um kind of have already brought to the table um and uh i'll just um your would you um would you say what i'm already thinking about is sort of the institutional context in which you're
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working and so i think um i don't i don't know i don't know wake forest that well i'm gonna admit um i have spent a little time at the what may be the most beautiful campus on earth at uc santa cruz um
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go banana slugs and um it's what a fantastic location that is i just don't it seems like unfair that anybody even gets to go to school there really um but i'm i'm curious and maybe we could start
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actually with kyle this time is there do you think there's something i know that social annotation has kind of taken off at wake forest in a pretty big way is there something do you think that's specific about the
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culture or context at wake forest that has made that possible that's a good question and it's kind of um i would say when we piloted hypothesis in fall 2020 it was kind of a perfect storm
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of things and i think a lot of it had to do well i think it's partially due to like our heavy emphasis on small courses or small classes uh wake forest is a private university so we have very small class sizes
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um and it's quite a luxury right and it's very liberal arts oriented and so there's a lot of reading and writing even in the more science disciplines and i think there's also a really healthy culture of
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teachers doing really experimental innovative things and feeling protected and doing so so i think when people were exposed to hypothesis in the summer of 2020 in this faculty development program that we ran
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they saw a lot of applications for it um in many different disciplines and uh they just kind of ran with it um yeah so it i think it has a lot to do with the teaching culture but i think um more than anything it had to do with
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the way we did faculty support in the summer that makes sense that i mean what you say about there being a perfect storm is is sort of true just with the pandemic as a whole i mean at hypothesis we've just seen uh social
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annotation usage skyrocket and that's a kind of disturbing silver lining inside the pandemic but if that's what it takes to jumpstart
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something like this i don't it's not like i uh i'm happy that the pandemic happened but if there is some good to take away from it one little piece of good maybe that's it so maybe then over
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over to you then dana do you think i know that santa cruz there's also been quite a bit of rapid adoption i would say i don't know if it looks that way from your perspective but from what i've been seeing is do you think there's something special about the culture there at santa
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cruz that makes that possible i would say absolutely um one of the leading departments that wanted to get hypothesis was our writing department and they have smaller classes and they wanted their students to engage more i think a lot of
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the driving factor of hypothesis as as fantastic as the platform is has been the social aspect of these annotations um because students you know there's only so much
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zoom boxes you could take i think hypothesis came at a perfect time because it was a way for students to interact with each other in a way that wasn't just those zoom boxes um and it
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the popularity of hypothesis really was propagated by the instructors and they they have had wide support for it they really enjoyed the tool and i will say our onboarding was fantastic um we did adopt it
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pretty quickly in my experience for a digital tool but i i will shout out aaron um from hypothesis she was fantastic with um helping us through that transition we had maybe
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three workshops in the beginning of uh but right before fall where she held our hands she walked us through it she answered faculty questions um it was exceptional so hypothesis really helped us with that
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transition as well and now that we've been using it for three quarters uh we're seeing a lot of adoption well i'm so glad that you were able to to come on we can see and hear you perfectly um and i'm wondering i want to
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give you a chance to to kind of kick things off the way that kyle and dana did by um uh giving us an introduction to you know what do you do in your days just so we can understand your context a little bit and then
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how did you come across social annotation and how does it enter into your practice yeah my apologies for the technical troubles but it's happening and i think i share um
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real similar to what i heard both kyle and dana talking about i'm an academic technologist i work in the college of liberal arts at the university of minnesota twin cities campus um i support faculty like dan i do canvas
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and we do a lot of my my personal area of passion is working with geographic information systems but i have to say annotation is very quickly making a is climbing the ladder in terms of um
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the technology that i feel has the most impact with students um so what we the way we got involved was a former colleague of mine had worked quite a bit with
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jeremy i believe and when the pandemic hit we we were already exploring getting the integration with canvas and when the pandemic hit the college was said we need something
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we need another tool something else to um give instructors another way to interact with students so for me the pandemic in this case was good because it led us we tried to did a pilot first of all and then we did do a contract last semester just within the
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college of liberal arts and we kept it pretty limited for the first um the first year of this use we are going um full contract for my college next year so i'm very excited about that
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that's created you know another thing came up that i think might be really interesting to hear from you about too and that's i mean you're at another institution also near and dear to my heart um because obviously who doesn't love the
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twin cities but um i mean the weather the weather sometimes leaves something to be desired but um what a what an awesome place and i nearly went to grad school there i was this close um but at any rate um i'm wondering would
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you say that there's something special about the culture at your school that um that made it or particularly right for the adoption of social annotation that's a really really interesting
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question um i think there was something special about the college of liberal arts as opposed to some of the other colleges um cla was the only one that agreed to do the pilot
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um a lot of others were very had other con had more concerns and i think we were like let's try it and see what happens um and the faculty who jumped on i didn't do any advertising of this it just kind of went by word of mouth the
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faculty who jumped on board were also just it was something very new to them and they were willing to just take it take a chance and try it um and maybe that's liberal arts i don't
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know i'm not sure um i will say we had really um we did some student evaluation and faculty evaluations and i'd love to talk about that at some point about the reactions and the responses that we've
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gotten sorry typing in the chat and um talking at the same time is not something i've mastered um as you can see from the typo uh and um i'm actually curious um i might bounce a
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little bit off this this chat conversation um started uh started around other tools other social annotation tools because first of all this ionotate conference isn't really just about hypothesis i know it may seem
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like it is sometimes but it's really it's supposed to be organized around the idea of open annotation and we define that fairly broadly in thinking about especially tools that have openness in other ways like they may have open
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technologies with apis they may be open source tools just being free on the web doesn't necessarily count as open in everybody's book um because of course being free on the web has other uh things writing on it
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um but i'm kind of curious and we've we talked about hypothesis at your institutions but i'm wondering do you guys know of other uh social annotation tools that are in use in your campus and you have any experience with those
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i don't i don't know who would answer first i'll go to the brady bunch view go for it well i have a couple of examples maybe um so and maybe i'll go a little bit deeper into the summer support model that um i talked about
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earlier so um it's going to be hard to explain but we have about 900 faculty in our undergraduate college at wake and oh sorry undergraduate and our
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graduate school excluding our professional schools in our med school and our summer support model kind of put everyone into like a peer learning community so we had eight faculty members um
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sorry eight development people of which i was one uh each of us created a peer learning community for um i think there was a group of 64 faculty that went through our program in the summer and then those
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64 faculty turned around and created peer learning communities for their own and the key piece of it was that we demonstrated social annotation in that initial initial cohort of 64 faculty members
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and of course that was through our first integration of hypothesis but we also showed examples of that through like comments in a google doc for example um just showing people that it's possible to have a document that's more than just static reading and that it could be
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engaging and dynamic and just showing people that that is a possibility got them to integrate that technology into their own peer learning communities that they offered to faculty and their disciplines
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and then many of those faculty having been exposed to it then use that technology and their classrooms in in the fall um so yeah i could talk more about that later but yeah those are two examples
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um and then i've also speaking of the university of minnesota we recently um started a pilot with manifold um so it's an open source publishing platform from minnesota so
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it's uh it has its own built-in annotation tools so we're looking at using that for more digital scholarship projects scholarly publishing kinds of things and you could use that in a like a course group
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context where if there's a set of texts you can create a course group and they could annotate that text within that platform so it's not like an lms integration or anything but it's another kind of exciting example really interesting dana shawna um
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other examples of and i really appreciate kyle also um addressing that sort of exponential model that you had for publicizing i like how it seemed like everything was working in power sub two you know so it's like eight people doing
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this and then 64 doing that were you purposely um using that kind of like binary exponential i think we figured like how how small we wanted the resulting groups to be in the end um and just kind of work back from there
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but yeah and i think from that program i think we reached something like 90 of all the faculty that taught in the fall um were exposed to that program not all of them were exposed to social annotation but they were
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part of those peer learning communities right wow that's amazing like exposing i mean exposing 90 of your faculty to anything seems pretty dramatic um i see some thoughts from from dana
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and and shawna um so what about dana and shawna do you go is there are there other social annotation tools at use in your schools um yes i think google docs has definitely been
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um a tool that some programs have used i know that's been actively used um we do have some using perusal and um the manifold is something that i don't actually know a whole lot about but i
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know that's something out there we have a couple people using a handful of other tools um but i think it's very um it's just very hit and miss and so what i i think what we've done
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with the hypothesis pilot is really work pedagogy and really work on how do you use these tools well and i i the peer learning kind of what you said about peer learning is really exciting to me and i'm going to
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that's something we've seen as faculty really want to connect with others who are doing this um and get ideas and share um surrounding hypothesis but yeah others who are using um google docs i think would be the most
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common one that i see used yeah and it does seem like i mean google docs is easy right because if you can cut and paste something into a google doc i mean frankly their social annotation in the google doc is pretty well done
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it's pretty powerful it can be a little too flexible sometimes but it does work pretty well it's just um uh though it i think the trade-off there and one of the very different um models
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than the one hypothesis uses is and uh perusal uses the same model as google docs it's like you have to bring the text to their tool in order to annotate it whereas hypothesis sort of works the opposite way right
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where you bring the annotation to the text wherever it happens to be living so there's there's those two different models kind of going back to what are the differences between different tools um that are in use like that um uh dana
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what about you do you have other other social energy annotation tools going on at santa cruz yeah i would echo the same thing as the previous two of course we use google docs um for collaborative work especially i
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personally haven't seen it used too much as a as a social annotation tool i just really i'm not a plug i promise it just there really doesn't seem to be a lot of a good substitute for hypothesis
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the way that it integrates with our lms with canvas and um just the culture of hypothesis for instance i haven't used many other social annotations tool for instance i haven't heard of this um
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do you go thank you um i don't know if that's right that's how i say it that that sounds right to me that's how i'll say it but um i know that when i have something i have a question about hypothesis i know the hypothesis team
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is going to email me back and work through the problem with me i don't know about these other tools um the fact that hypothesis is also free and open source um is also an important factor for
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us using it or at least for me personally using it and the other thing i would say is um i really appreciate how hypothesis also has a very public-facing road map um i asked them about we
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an instructor had asked about perusal because they were interested in video annotation and i emailed hypothesis of like hey is this on your roadmap and and i don't know if i'm allowed to say this but they did have a proof of concept am i allowed to okay about doc drop and
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the proof of concept was fantastic so it's uh when maybe when it becomes more available i don't know where it is and proof of concept versus like official drop but um hypothesis is
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really receptive to um additional features um other other ways to um engage social annotation that's not just how we've been using it which is digital text oh yeah thanks so thank you so much for
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bringing that up um anna because uh you know in mentioning doc drop and then also the you know the support that you guys that you guys have all mentioned the support that you've worked with with hypothesis so thank you for that and there's
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quite a few of my hypothesis colleagues here in here in the crowd i noticed that come to to bask in your praise i guess um but just to clarify a little bit on the cost thing right so like a lot of tools offer free
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web experiences right and hypothesis maintains uh a free and open what um hosted version for in kind of individual use although many institutions use it in an institutional way
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but it's not fully supported for them when they do that right just like any tool that you go grab for free off the web isn't really supported for you and so institutions like wake forest and santa cruz and minnesota college of liberal arts
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designs is at um at the twin cities campus of the university are all using uh hypothesis at a scale that they really want that full support kind of you know relationship
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and so that's that's the um relationship between hypothesis and these schools and money is changing hands and that is the money that goes to pay for all the great support that you all receive and the development of further
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features and so that's that's sort of how it works and so there's you know every software offering kind of solves the sustainability problem in a different way um and so there's you know um there's
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different models for that and this just happens to be the one that hypothesis uses um and to the note about doc drop i'm actually wondering if i'm looking at who
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is here in the crowd from hypothesis um because we were just talking about doc drop which i put a link to in in the chat there
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and doc drop is our sort of ex it's a little bit of an experimental area that our ceo dan whaley kind of started to kind of try out some new things it's like a little lab area and what dana's describing there is it
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has the ability you can drop in any youtube url and then you end up with an annotatable experience um where the transcript of the video becomes an annotatable document but linked to the video in a way that you
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can kind of work and see through both together and we can even play around with it if we felt like it here um but uh that we were just taught the reason i'm dwelling on it um at infinitum is that
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we were just talking about it internally this morning actually and the degree to which it can also already um play in the lms integration and so i don't have all the details on this which is why i was hoping that somebody else
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from hypothesis might be able to pop in and talk about it but my understanding is that there is now the the ability to use doc drop hosted material in the lms which didn't used to
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be true but one of the issues is that youtube videos won't come through in that experience um for a whole variety of actual security reasons um so it doesn't it won't pop in yet as a
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completely like as the video editing transcript editing experience that you get outside the lms but that is um hopefully in the near future so i don't know the full story yet but it's like you can feel it creeping
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towards something and that would be amazing because you know hypothesis has long been primarily a textual focused annotation tool and then granted this is still on the text of the transcript but once you start to be able to
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interact with other kinds of um you know content forms i think it starts to become really powerful and that kind of raises another question for me although i'm happy if if any of you wants a riff on any of that maybe i'll chime in really quickly yeah
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sure like that the conversation around the differences in the tools you know maybe peruse all has this feature or maybe diigo or some other tool has you could annotate in a certain way one thing i really appreciated about
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hypothesis is all of the different conversations i'm able to have now with faculty right so why is an open source tool preferable to other tools that are supported by advertising or whatever or are
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have really close integrations with um you know corporate textbook publishers where you know hypothesis doesn't have that really formal relationship like that and what does that mean
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um so i'm able to have so many conversations with faculty about um about edtech that are more philosophical in nature and i think that they walk away from those conversations with
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a deeper appreciation for the choices that we've made at wake forest like why we went with hypothesis in the first place as opposed to any other tool and are really valuing that
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we are taking those things seriously right you know student privacy and um and things of that nature are incredibly important and incredibly hard to get your
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to wrap your brain around these days um and i think that a relationship with a hypothesis is um kind of a mark in the sand that we're on the side of students and that we are
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you know thinking about those things more long term and also things like um i don't want to bash any um competitors or anything but certain tools are organized more around the like transactional nature of
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education where everything is built around a grade book right i could even criticize the lms for that but other annotation tools have like really deep rich grading capabilities
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and what i've loved about hypothesis is i mean there are really deep rich grading capabilities built in with speedgrader but in canvas but it's just as easy to leave an annotation assignment ungraded
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and we've been having a lot of conversations on campus about the nature of grades and the kind of emerging ungrading movement as a result of the use of this tool and so it's it's allowing us to have more
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pedagogical conversations too so that's those are a couple of things that i really appreciate i have to win on this kyle i couldn't agree with you more um we you know faculty come to us saying they need this particular functionality
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and i need that little thing that that tool does and so when we can walk them back and look at what is it you're really trying to do and then hypothesis has been such a great example of exactly what you said talking about student privacy and why
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that's important talking about open source and why that's important all the things you just said um and i you see eyes opening like oh there is more to what you all do than just make my life
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miserable making me learn a new learning management system um and the pedagogy conversations i've had around annotation i don't know that i've had those around anything else
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any other approach and i'm really excited as we roll out of our pilot this year um i'm a little terrified for what's coming for me in august when we do this training because i don't want
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people just using this because they think it looks cool or it looks great i want them using it well so students have a positive experience and um anyway that sort of takes off in a different track but yes i agree the
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conversations that we've been able to have around annotation have been wonderful and i really appreciate it that's really cool stuff i i'm slowly moving the figures around moving
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us back to brady bunch maybe we'll just stay here for a while and see if there's some some talking heads i'm really i feel like our audience is a little quiet and i'm wondering um i'm wondering why nobody wants to come up on stage with us and
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uh at least get me to shut up and talk to you guys um with a different voice um this this whole question of i i was really thinking a lot about uh
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this topic that kyle brought up around the different kinds of conversations that you guys have been having and i i don't think we should say thanks to hypothesis because it seems like you guys have a really um considered practice about how
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to have conversations with faculty about pedagogy already and so it's like can hardly hardly blame it or credit it to hypothesis but um uh i'm i'm curious the degree to which
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uh there's a it seems to me that there's always a tension between tools and practice right and i feel like a lot of times in the edtech world there's this over reliance on the idea
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that a tool the adoption of a tool will generate either a set of practices or a set of results like student success that um that that's why the tool should be adopted
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and i like the idea of reversing that right where we're focused more on the practices we want to enable and then which tools will best support those and i wonder if that i see some naughty heads i'm wondering if that resonates with you guys at all and thinking about it in
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that reverse way yeah absolutely and i'll i'll shut up for a second because i want to give dana and shaina a chance to chime in um then yeah i think hypothesis is just a really great
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introduction to a practice and it's one of the best tools for this practice of annotation um and i don't know a better way to put that right it is a tool
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but at its core it is a practice and until you're able to experience that firsthand it's really tough to understand what social annotation actually is and why it's useful in your teaching um
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so yeah other tools do it but i think those tools are tools first practice second because they come bundled with textbooks or something like that so anyway i'll show them now
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i see dana and muted so yeah i'll second that i'll say that um all of our instructional designers at my campus are very far more focused on um finding a tool that works for you as opposed to
00:31:01
making the tool work for you um i think the experimenting is also good too i we had a recent one change challenge that we asked our instructors to do and uh it included a lot of things but
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you know one of those things might be trying out hypothesis trying out flickr trying out this new tool and i i think it's okay if it doesn't work for you in your course i think that's totally okay um a lot of these tools are really
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dialectical you know you can have a relationship with it and come back um but i think a lot of hypothesis is um just trying it out and using it and um i uh all of the instructors that i've
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had worked with hypothesis so far have continued to use the tool each quarter that they're using and i i think the pandemic for all it has done for good and for bad um one of the things that we've seen is
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a lot of instructors want to continue using canvas and of course want to continue using these tools that they've had to use to to make bridges and connections for their students and i think hypothesis is going to be on that list as well even if they've
00:32:06
returned to in person there's just something about annotating a text socially digitally and making reading visible that i think instructors are going to want to continue to do with their students
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yeah i totally agree one of the things that came out this happened pretty early in the pandemic was a couple of faculty came to me and talked about how surprised they were to see some students that you know they were physically in class for a few months and then they
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went online and the differences in how students behaved the ones who were physically in class and then once they were online and that some of the students were very quiet in class were actually quite eloquent in the asynchronous spaces
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and so that's one of the pieces we really want to carry forward and when i ask faculty if they want to use and this is not to dis on any other tool but do they want to use the canvas discussion or do they the ones who have used
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the canvas discussion and the in hypothesis they look at me like and they don't even think that they're even the same and so they all go for reading you know the hypothesis because it takes students
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so much closer to the content into their reading um and i i'm hoping they're all going to keep using it even in an in-person space because it does allow that asynchronous reflection that's very different for
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students yeah i'm kind of wondering about that the future is you know what what are the fall plans that your institutions are are you all headed back like sean are you
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are you headed back to more face-to-face environment um at twin cities yes it's what did i hear um 80 in person there are i think i heard we had 120 courses out
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of 2000 or something that will be remote or online so it's a very small percentage um there's a whole lot of other conversation we could have about that but sure yeah it's mostly in person
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um but i do think all the faculty that i know that used hypothesis in this last year have they've been emailing me do you know anything yet about next year do you know anything and so they're they're very anxious to keep keep moving ahead
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how about how about uh at santa cruz dana are you guys you're headed back i know you spoke about it a little bit but you're headed back to more face-to-face right yeah we're headed back to more face-to-face in fall but we'll still have some
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mixed modalities as well and um some sessions will still be remote much to the chagrin of some instructors so you sound like you're a little sad about going back to face to face um i'm not it's definitely mixed feelings um
00:34:42
i think again the pandemic has done a lot of bad but also a lot of good uh again it's interesting to hear the the comments from instructors about what they want to keep um since they've had to use a lot of these technologies
00:34:55
um like canvas um so it's it's gonna be an interesting fall to say the least yes i i think of nothing else the pandemic has it's it's highlighted so many things
00:35:07
it's brought so many things you know emphasized many things that are good and many many many things that are bad also and it's just given us a chance to i think be more intentional maybe about how we think about some things
00:35:20
i know we had to do it in a bit of a rush but like just the idea of remote delivery like everybody has had to sort of grapple with it maybe in a way that a lot of folks didn't have to before and you guys have of course been on the front lines of that so i should shut up now
00:35:32
what about what about at wake forest kyle are you guys you're headed back tomorrow face to face too yeah it's i you know knock on wood but i think um they're hoping to have fall be as quote unquote normal as possible um and in a normal
00:35:44
semester we would have very very few online or even blended courses at all and i i don't think they're going to revoke faculty preference if they want to teach fully
00:35:57
online i don't think they're going to disallow that but i think departments are really pushing heavy for um pushing hard for as much face to face as possible so yeah it'll be different for sure and
00:36:10
i'm i'm anxious to see what that's going to do to our hypothesis usage once we're back and you know like i said earlier we have very small classes and you know that seminar style discussion is one of those things that hypothesis
00:36:21
allows you to do in an online course um but when we're back in a our room right are they going to continue yet well an interesting thing came up and i think it was yesterday's featured educator officers and i think shawna you were there too so
00:36:34
maybe you remember but we were talking about um the degree to which uh students pre-reading and pre-discussing in hypothesis before the synchronous sessions that
00:36:46
might be face-to-face right was actually um doing a couple different things one was making the discussion that finally happened when it was synchronous better um both enabling the teacher to
00:36:58
focus on some things that had come out in the discussion but also meaning the students had sort of gotten some of the preliminaries out of the way maybe and we're ready to dive in on some particular parts more deeply and then the other part that was new to
00:37:10
me and interesting was talking about how um uh social annotation was also making grading take less time uh which i thought was a really i'd be interested to hear your guys's take on that because um the
00:37:23
instructor was saying that um she felt like because students were um sort of more engaged in the reading because of the social annotation assignments
00:37:34
it improved their overall kind of um success in all the assignments like in the writing assignments and so she felt like she spent less time grading the assignments because she wasn't focused in on some of
00:37:47
the basics more and it was more like they were grappling with the real ideas that she wanted to grapple them with and so i'm my fingers are crossed that we can bridge this gap to face to face and go back to that more without like
00:37:59
losing the powers that we discovered when we were remote i guess that was more of a statement than a question wasn't it because i'd love to talk about student student and student perspectives and
00:38:13
there's a question in here about students suggesting hypothesis and i think i haven't seen that but i we did we did some i did evaluation so i did survey
00:38:24
we got a hundred almost 200 student responses and um then focus groups with faculty and the interesting piece about what that was the faculty saw much more of an impact of hypothesis on
00:38:36
things like discussion and papers and that the students weren't quite as enthusiastic but i don't you know we'd ask them did you read closer and they're like nah we did it the same and then i would ask faculty the same thing and they're like
00:38:50
oh yeah they were reading closer so i just thought that was a fascinating disconnect between what the students thought the impact was and what faculty were saying so um yes
00:39:03
different points of view dana interrupted you were gonna oh no by all means no it's an interesting point because we haven't we don't have a lot of student feedback on the tool yet more general comments but it is interesting talking to the
00:39:16
instructor's reactions from what they think they're interpreting from their students and i don't know about making grading easier although it doesn't surprise me it's very interesting but from one of our strongest users of hypothesis he said that
00:39:28
it's been more interesting for him to see how their annotations change throughout the quarter because our quarter is ten weeks and he had a reading assigned every week so from week one how their annotations change compared to week nine and week
00:39:40
ten has been really transformative in his uh methods of teaching as well so i heard that too same thing the student results have been fascinating to me
00:39:54
to see where they um the things they liked the best and i should have pulled them up before i came the things they liked the best were knowing what other students thought and i there's real value in that
00:40:06
that i think they say oh someone else has that question so i don't feel so stupid asking it you know where they would you know they would say hey i know the answer to that so they would jump in it felt i think it was very empowering for students at least that's what i'm reading in the
00:40:19
data that was the number one thing and that they were able to reference their notes during discussion but that knowing what other students thought during the readings
00:40:32
was the biggest that was the biggest takeaway that students gave us and i i think we we hear that from other folks too like um i don't you know if you remember back to
00:40:45
um i annotate 2019 vintage i annotate um before the before the pandemic um when uh juan pablo alphareen uh gave a kind of uh a talk and i could
00:40:57
find the recording for folks who are interested about some early um sort of quantitative quantitative and qualitative data that they'd collected at his institution about student student perceptions of of what social
00:41:10
annotation ended up doing for them um and a lot of them did focus in on that um that uh you know being able to see others read alongside them as being in power um and
00:41:22
uh i think one thing that has come up in some of these other office hours is this idea about how social annotation can kind of in a way lower the stakes of reading at the same time as making it more intentional because
00:41:36
it like it enables people to say things in the margins like i didn't quite understand this or something and as soon as you feel free as if you can feel free to exhibit that wonder and curiosity openly with your
00:41:50
classmates then that can unpack a whole flood of other possibilities of peer learning and you know different kinds of discussions that could fold out from that
00:42:01
and so i do you guys all have plans to do um sort of student data gathering or are already underway with some of that i don't know kyle you may have done some of that at wake forest
00:42:13
yeah we um had a full 2020 survey for both faculty and students and by the time we did it everyone was so surveyed out that we wanted to make them really concise um so i think we asked
00:42:27
um like some general usage information about hypothesis um on both surveys it didn't shed a lot of light on um like what they thought about it or you know what their attitudes or how it helped their learning
00:42:40
um so it was me trying to like elbow my way into a survey but it didn't really yield a lot of really useful results um i would love to know more about you know what they think of the tool just kind of anecdotally what i've heard from faculty is
00:42:53
i'll just echo what everyone else has said that you know it improves student discussions and it improves their reading um and i've even heard from a few students who i've spoken with anecdotally or you know my own students
00:43:05
in the course that i teach um you know do you prefer this over something like a canvas discussion and they're like oh yeah this is so much better yeah so that makes sense
00:43:17
dana are you guys doing student i know that hypothesis itself offers a a student and faculty survey that you probably may have all participated in and i can't remember exactly um but are you have you guys surfaced
00:43:29
any student reactions to using the tool data we haven't yet and i don't know if we have plans currently for doing that we did have the hypothesis survey that aaron helped coordinate um that was
00:43:42
interesting but it was really more anecdotal evidence i i wish we had more it'd be great to see um mostly my view is is from the dashboards from hypothesis which are also very
00:43:54
fantastic and helpful to see but of course that's just the analytics of of student interaction and student use so it's helpful to have the students opinions um i'd be interested to know yeah i echo
00:44:07
the um admiration for the dashboards it's been really um for a lot of the couple faculty who i've gotten to use them had it's been a game changer it's really made a big difference um i do what
00:44:19
we did my previous position i did program evaluation all the time so it's just a knee-jerk reaction for me to do evaluation so we did do the student surveys and the focus groups and i think it was
00:44:32
very instrumental in getting adoption um we're hoping yeah in getting adoption because we had that student voice and that student input on it um i hope we can continue it i've been
00:44:44
working with dr bodon chen who spoke led the research panel yesterday um and i'm hoping we can continue doing some of that research um and would love to coordinate nate with hypothesis on the
00:44:57
surveys that go out this semester um that we could so we're not double asking it'd be great to coordinate yeah i know we've we've had some tension over that and thank you for your thank you for your good will with that um oh no tension just let's
00:45:09
coordinate so we get you know we uh and um we have found two that we do the surveys and then if i uh we did focus groups of faculty as a way to get some deeper dive qual qualitative data and i would like to be able to do that with students if i
00:45:22
just put a call out to students even if we get you know eight or ten students on a focus group that's really good input so it's always hard to get students to do anything when they're so busy um i know faculty is also hard but yeah
00:45:36
see well that's the thing we had so many faculty willing to do the focus groups we had to turn some people away so that tells me something yeah we did i think we offered three focus groups
00:45:47
and we kept them small on zoom but we did end up with i think almost we i think we ended up with 14 faculty who did the focus groups which blue which i was really surprised at yeah especially in this timeline we've
00:46:00
all had too many zoom meetings right and and they were so and it sounds kind of like you experienced this too that the they were so excited to talk to each other about how they used it and they
00:46:12
learned so much from each other um and i asked some point i said do you want us to do like a community of practice around this and they all agreed so we'll see i really like that idea
00:46:24
especially since you know my job is instructional technology the specialist is like a look at all these fun tools you can use in your course but i think sometimes it comes off as a little like um i'm just trying to get you to use tools because that's my job is how to
00:46:37
work these tools i it's interesting to get faculty buy-in because i think faculty talk to each other and sometimes they're a lot more convinced if a faculty another faculty member has had such a great experience that they want to start using it too so
00:46:48
focus groups is a good idea yeah and the focus groups we did have questions but kind of i would ask a question then we would shut up and sit back and let them talk to each other um and that's how the word of it's all been
00:47:01
word of mouth they brought it up with other people and then um for the training i'm gonna do in august i'm going to use faculty more than me i'll also be reaching out to becky um
00:47:14
but i'm definitely going to pull in faculty to do that that's all great stuff and i uh i should learn from your practice and just shut up more and let you guys do the talking um one thing that i wanted i you guys
00:47:28
mentioned the dashboards and um we probably really can't show one off here because of student privacy issues but um uh just so folks in the audience may not know um one of the primary folks behind the dashboards
00:47:40
john noodle um my colleagues i think is here in the in the crowd um and so big kudos to john for having moved through that work a little bit um and we'll get to a question from curtis in just a second
00:47:52
but i also wanted to um post in the chat a link to um a study that's going on at indiana university that is really going to try to dive deeply both quantitatively and
00:48:07
qualitatively it's a multi-year study into the connections between student reading and writing and success and social annotation and so um that that's a really powerful set of
00:48:20
data that's just finished its first term of collection now and that will continue over the next couple of years and so we'll start to be seeing some i think scholarly output from that um maybe even informally starting this
00:48:32
summer and then and then moving on um but going back to those dashboards for a minute um the reason that they're not that not everybody has experienced them is again sort of like it was a doc drop thing we kind of developed them in a
00:48:45
little bit of a laboratory environment and have been working with folks like these folks here to kind of um figure out what what kind of data is going to be most useful both to you who are stewarding institutional
00:48:58
usage of a tool but then also you know at the instructor level and even at the student level and so we've been drawing some really good lessons from that and um i think i've really gotten to a place where we've um we've been able to produce a
00:49:10
lot of really a lot of data maybe too much in some cases but but in other cases some really interesting um i think insights have maybe come out of that we've been noticing some things
00:49:22
like connections between in certain classes there might be a high number of threaded annotations in the sense that there's a root annotation and then a conversation that happens on
00:49:34
uh you know out of that root annotation and in other classes it's the opposite it's just a series of kind of standalone annotations without much conversation attached to them and we don't know maybe why yet but there's these already these
00:49:47
interesting patterns of usage arising in different disciplines and and context and i think there's there's a really great future in um in exploring that and with the caveat that i think
00:49:59
raymie and and antero were guiding us toward in their keynote this morning of whose data is it and not not trying to turn it into a surveillance of reading on students but instead turning it into
00:50:12
like what can we learn as educators from the practices that already exist and what can we do to make them better and so i'm kind of curious if you guys have interacted with the data that's come out of the dashboards
00:50:24
in any in any sort of um kind of deliberate way yet or is it still just exploration yeah go ahead we haven't really okay yeah for us it's fairly new yeah
00:50:40
for us it's just been mostly um satisfying some curiosity and just poking around a little bit it's really neat to see those numbers um but we don't quite know what questions to ask of it yet i think i would agree it's been very exploratory
00:50:54
for us as well i will say that the surprise confusion or lack of understanding i don't know if that was the right phrase but um though that that has been the most interesting one for me to see yeah and it's i think it's um maybe john
00:51:06
could pop up here and explain a little better but i believe that it's a pretty simplistic uh uh thing that just looks for annotations that you know have certain kind of keywords and stuff in them that might express surprise
00:51:19
lack of understanding confusion whatever um and so it just tries to surface that in a in maybe a simplistic way but it's already interesting right and we can do i mean there's kind of a whole digital humanities
00:51:30
possibility standing behind this right because now we have a whole set of data about people interacting with texts that we didn't really have before and i think that could really lead to some interesting things um
00:51:43
seeing impulses uh so yeah john so and just to finalize this kind of conversation on the dashboards maybe um so uh institutions that are um working with hypothesis formally and
00:51:56
pilots or subscription have access to these um dashboard environments and so um and i'm trying to remember fresno state's um relationship i'm sorry i typically have these things memorized but i'm not sure
00:52:08
what what stage you guys are at with us but if you could reach out to your other um or i'll i'll follow up on the back end too and reach out to your uh my colleagues who are interacting directly with fresno state
00:52:21
but the basic idea is that um and uh and this is for institutions that are using hypothesis integrated into their lms um there's a way to kind of surface and externalize dashboard of data that can be read and
00:52:34
so um depending on how what your relationship with hypothesis is and how far along it is we can help hook you up with that um and then something else that comes with a supported pilot and subscription environment with hypothesis
00:52:47
um i did notice that there uh is uh john has raised his hand which could be really cool so we could bring him up on stage to talk more about the dashboards and then um maybe while we're doing that i'm going to throw
00:53:00
curtis's question up on the stage and you guys can address that while john is joining how about that yeah i've been thinking about curtis's question here um and maybe i'll just dive in so as i said earlier my team also handles
00:53:15
copyright questions for faculty we you know kind of liaise between our course reserves department um and help faculty better understand what they're able to do with techs in online environments
00:53:28
and this is another one of those areas where hypothesis has opened up opportunities for a conversation um and i am not a lawyer so none of this is legal advice but kind of where we've settled on this question is that if there's no other way to
00:53:41
access a text and the pedagogy relies on social annotation the use of hypothesis and the only way to get that text is through like an ocr pdf
00:53:54
then yes we're going with a fair use argument for that um and you know it's um not neat and tidy but i think empowering faculty to teach in the way that they
00:54:05
need to teach without feeling like they're constrained by copyright concerns um is really important now if this were happening in an open environment um outside of the lms we'd probably have a different attitude about it
00:54:18
um and of course we're telling faculty like you know don't go wild and scan your entire textbook let's have a conversation about that like maybe you can scan a couple of pages that are really central to the text and have your students annotate that um
00:54:31
but yeah going with that four factor fair use analysis and if you're not familiar with that you can google a four factor analysis um the the the quantity of the text i think is the the most important part here um if
00:54:44
they're reading a short article then they need to read the whole article and annotate that um but if you're scanning entire chapters of uh textbooks then that's gonna kind of jeopardize the the market for the book
00:54:56
so um yeah it's as with all things fair use it's a case-by-case basis but we want to empower faculty and that's the balance right um hey welcome john udell
00:55:10
you're here i am and and we can hear you excellent um just wanted to mention a couple of things real quick first of all we don't know what questions need to be asked and answered either
00:55:24
so what you see on the dashboard right now is essentially what everyone's asked for so far but we've had relatively little feedback at this point mostly from administrators
00:55:38
and especially uh not enough from teachers so uh and i think that the questions that we need to be asking are ultimately coming from teachers so you know kind of looking forward to
00:55:50
some more feedback the the the stuff that you see on the dashboard is kind of the tip of the iceberg and the real work that's gone into this is making it quick and easy to ask and answer
00:56:02
you know new questions so you know bring one and um and we will continue to iterate on this stuff john that's exciting i have a couple faculty who i know would be um very would love to talk to you at
00:56:15
some point about what they want if i put this idea in their head i'll ask them what they want um i'd love to connect with you on that great thanks and thanks for
00:56:27
thanks for coming up john um it's weird for some reason i seem to have lost my ability to move us back to the brady bunch view i don't know what the problem is um maybe it's because we're out of time
00:56:40
but i did notice that it is the top of the hour um and so maybe uh maybe we should bring it to a close there even though i'm sure everybody uh could talk all day if we wanted to about this really cool
00:56:52
stuff but i really want to thank kyle dana and shaina for for coming today you guys were just awesome it was really great conversation i enjoyed it immensely and i think that our our folks did too we did record it so we can also share it
00:57:05
um in an ongoing way as long as you guys are okay with that um and uh uh there's i want to just point out that there are um a couple of other things happening
00:57:16
here on both today and tomorrow at the conference that might be of interest to folks including sessions on world languages and stem with social annotation um and then in about uh
00:57:28
minus two minutes jeremy is going to be giving a kind of update on the hypothesis of roadmap so i'm thinking we should adjourn i will say goodbye and thank you and people can go attend these other events if they so wish
00:57:41
thanks so much thank you
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