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but we're gonna move on to our mini keynote now from analyst Espinosa I'm just gonna briefly say something as ramie comes up to introduce his colleague that I've been working for the past couple years on an LMS at at hypothesis and I think it's a it's a key piece of tool you know a key piece of our toolkit for working with universities but it's a very limited one
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the LMS itself is limited and what hypothesis can do within the LMS is limited in terms of what hypotheses can do on the web and what hypothesis can do for learning in more complicated spaces both physical and social and I think I'm looking forward to hearing how Manuel is using it so the range is going to talk more about nano um and Manuel talk to us yeah it's lovely to see everyone both
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both both here in Denver and I know that we have quite a few folks who are joining us online so thank you for everyone who's with us I just want to very briefly introduce a dear friend and colleague dr. Manuel Espinoza who's an associate professor at the School of Education human development here at the University of Colorado in Denver I met Manuel early in my career knives Bennet see you Denver for five years now and certainly found a
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kindred spirit there was only though in the last few years that that my interests in annotation and thinking about how to use collaborative knowledge building processes or perhaps resonant with some of the work that he's been doing for years it was about telling you about and through just the fortune of being able to have honest and inspiring conversations together we found I think a very novel way of thinking about the
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use of hypothesis outside of necessarily a kind of more traditional classroom but for I think of very inspiring use in the broad fields of Education and so Manuel is here to inspire us to tell us and some stories about his work and to again as Jeremy was just mentioning provide a bit of a kind of counterbalance to how we might think of the many uses of collaborative annotation for the I think
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the kind of core purposes of Education so having said that briefly is really an honor and a pleasure to welcome my friend and colleague manhua Spinoza please hello everyone my name is Manuel Espinosa I'm an associate professor at CU Denver and I'm here to talk about the right to learn undergraduate research collective in the role that hypothesis plays in our work maybe I'll take ten
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minutes to talk about the history of the group and then 10 minutes to talk about the work but on the train here I was it hit me that I was um I never spoken this sentence before in this particular I've never spoken the sentence the sentence that's about to come out of my mouth I never spoken it before but really I guess what I want to talk about here is the role that hypothesis plays in human rights work for us we tell you about right to learn undergraduate research
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collective where we now have four generations of undergraduates who are part of the group 12 years the first four years we didn't even have a name because we didn't know what we were doing and when I say we that's stretching it a bit because it's me and one other person me and another another young woman who is uh she was a migrant student that that I met when she was 17
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years old going into her senior year in high school and she visited my office after this after the summer program that we offered in 2006 she was undocumented at the time and she said what what is it that we can do about this and it wasn't she wasn't just worried about herself she wasn't just worried about how she would get a scholarship or raise the funds to get to college she
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was worried about what is it that we can do about everything with respect to spreading this idea that education is a fundamental right of personhood irregardless of the person's social or legal status right that's really what it means at the Human Rights level there is no qualifications and there's no exceptions my virtue of the fact that you being human you are entitled in the
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broadest and most noble sense to an education that matters that meaningful education so she would come to my office and we would talk and we would leave confused and leave more worried we knew that for us that the solution was not to put on just another summer program which was a good thing that we did we did that for 10 years helping 35 to 40 students every year get college credit regardless
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of their social or legal status but we wanted a larger scale change and we were at a loss for how to do that at some point I can't tell you how many times right to learn over the last 12 years has almost died it's been it's been it's been on the respirators you know it's been in hospice everything and it's always recovered and I I'd have to give credit to this young woman her name is
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sinusoidal Valenzuela she's the heart really of the right to learn group but over the years we needed more people so we would get them from you know the various classes I would teach students would become interested in the kind of research that we were doing and they would ask can we help can we join you I said I don't have anything to offer you I don't have any grants you know I can't offer you a wage I can give you books to read and buy you a sandwich from time to
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time and then they would say that's fine and that's fine and they would follow because of the question they would follow because of the purpose and the goal that we were after and at first we didn't know what the goal really was it emerged really really crystal clear I'd say about four years ago that we were trying to we had it in mind that we needed to not just put forth the idea
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that education was a fundamental right of personhood but also seek change within the Colorado Constitution for its protection and if you're familiar with the Constitution of Colorado we have an education clause like all the other 50 states right it's not a there's nothing in the energy and nothing about education in the Federal Constitution it's a matter that's left to the states so what we have in Colorado the mandate is that the state
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of Colorado provide a thorough and uniform system of three public schools that's from 1876 and what that meant at its best its most ambitious or most charitable read in 1876 was that every young person would be able to have 100 days of schooling in 1876 outdated to say the least now in 2019 right so we thought that's what needs to change like it's that normative framework that means
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to change for that we needed an argument so we said about the task and it became clear to us that what we were doing all those years those three four generations of right to learn and undergraduates that we were becoming dignity scholars and we needed to know what this term meant legal terms and in moral philosophical terms in poetic terms we needed to get better at it than anyone
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else so we started on five by seven cards this was like the this was pre hypothesis you know we were borrowing a method that was used in and in the research leading up to the Brown v Board of Education case it was inefficient to say the least it was rich but we would spend the first 30 minutes of our of our
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bi-weekly meetings simply trying to catch up on what happened in the interim and it was just like you know we would take we would take a step forward but it was a very laborious step doctor clear and I and end up having a conversation about how hypothesis can help and you're familiar with it you know it's you know you can it's the ability to read socially to archive and to curate and to
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really disperse the mind to make the mind truly social in a way that you can see right way that's tangible in some ways so our goal was to become dignity scholars of the highest order with my undergraduates and we said about to study I'll give you one example we wanted to see how it was used its content and its criteria in landmark cases to see you again write its antecedent uses because we had other
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ideas for in education but we had to get very familiar with how it was used in previous landmark cases so we took one case the we studied a couple but here's also I'll talk to you about Tennessee versus Lane Tennessee versus Lane is a case from the 1990s about on a man named George Lane who was summoned to court in Tennessee he was a yellow got a subpoena to appear and he was also in a
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wheelchair so he gets there and there's no way for him to get to the second floor so the guard offers to pick him up and take him up the stairs and he said it's like hell you will I'm not gonna be picked up but I want to I want access right I don't need charity here so this ends up becoming a dignity case right that that very act of offering to pick him up or not even you know somebody and him to court and then not having the means for him to participate in
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government was an act of humiliation from the part of Tennessee from the state of Tennessee to the person George Ling so what we did was we acquired here the court record in Tennessee versus Lane from the district court all the way to the Supreme Court and we said we're gonna read all of it all 1,700 pages and everywhere that we found the word dignity we would try to figure
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out what it meant and even where it was not found right because there's this right there there are equivalent terms let's say equality my equality is like if if dignity is the mother term or the mother value equality is the daughter term or the daughter value right this is the it's an equivalent expression so even where dignity those seven words seven letters would not be found
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we wanted to understand how the term dignity its content its criteria its equivalent expressions in those two cases probably close to at 3,000 pages of documents right interviews oral oral oral testimony amicus briefs district court findings oral arguments at the Supreme Court we needed to understand whenever it came up what was its content was criteria provided for its usage and
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are they were they're equivalent expressions that we could then use to make this argument for education as a fundamental right of personhood toward the end of amending the Colorado State Constitution so let me show you where we're at right now if you look at all our annotations in in the first go-around which lasted about three three two about four months that really is just the tale of how
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right to learn got smarter how we got how we came to be intelligent as to the use of dignity in these two court cases especially Tennessee versus Lane what we're doing now is that we're putting together the handbook have you ever seen a concordance a biblical concordance it's the same kind of thing right whenever you see it hear it Greek well here's what it means in Hebrew here's what it is in English in the King James / King James Version right we're doing
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the same thing when you come across this use of dignity in Tennessee versus Lane here's what we think its criteria its content is right here's where you see how it compares to the use to the use of dignity in another case like Lobato versus Colorado which then helps us understand how plastic and how malleable the term is it's um it's hard for us to even think about you know dignity is a
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normative planetary fact you know it's persistent it is also contested all right so it's still an information it's it's very well established but it's also very much contested on the daily level and we're trying to get good at it for the purpose again for this very practical argument what we have in the Colorado State Constitution is the mandate to create thorough and uniform
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system of free public schools but what if you could replace it you know with a clause along the lines of that the state of Colorado shall provide an education that is in harmony with the dignity of the human person an education that is useful to the person that would change the the I think the playing ground for legislators for parents for teachers and for the students themselves if they walked into school knowing that what it is that I'm getting here is not in
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accord is not what is coming to me it's not what I am entitled to you have different kinds of resources in order to make an argument and to have an argument in our world if you can make an argument about this my sense is you can also make an argument for your own existence right it becomes easier to do that and for us hypothesis I wrote it down because it was like I said this I hadn't thought about it in this particular way that hypothesis were playing this great role
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and this human rights work that we have Dignity is what makes our argument comprehensible and intelligible. The human mind makes it possible. But Hypothesis makes it realizable. It helps us to organize our thinking and to archive and curate it and carry it on. It allows us to see what conclusions we have reached. It allows us to learn from our past actions and in the steady expansion
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of our collective mind. And that's what I had that's what I had for you all so I'm really happy to be here and I'm so sorry that I have to head back soon I have class to teach like in two hours but whenever hypothesis comes calling and I I respond because they've been good to us you know me it's hard to imagine our project doing what it is that we're doing now without this particular tool so it's a human-rights tool for us thank you
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and from hypothesis I'm a curious if you in the course of doing this work there are undergraduates annotating correct and have they taken the kind of annotation practices they've used as a part of this project and move them into other parts of their scholarly work yeah they have like mini hypothesis groups
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because we have a couple English Lit majors and it's lends itself really perfectly to close readings of the text so we have a couple that do that and I know it sighs the question I just know that sort of by happenstance but I I would like to ask the other ones other yeah I have seen it at least it's something that has come up for us you
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know we have part of the strength of right to learn and also part of its I wouldn't know if I wouldn't say it's weakness or anything is that we've been single-minded right for 12 years that we needed to create this argument and certainly that we have all these sort of affiliated ideas like wonderful ideas for making it more more public outside of our group it's just that the the
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study that we have to engage in you know it's so intense we have to understand the constitutional law we have to understand the dignity literature at the International Human Rights level the anthropology and sociology of learning itself it's just been if you can put more hours in the day brother we have multiple different private groups we also know so there you could have a right to learn more troops than
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readable by members of your particular use coupons you guys can browse and kinda see whether and use your annotation treatment because of the branded focus members set of members that are doing network yeah I like it I like the idea bring it up at our next meeting in two weeks yeah yeah hey Janet
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page a bit I was wondering how you came up with the how much time did it take to sort of set up the tags months and months and months the hypothesis for us is if you're if you're like if you read Piaget to reap Akatsuki those lines of thinking right around human learning hypothesis for us was a valuable
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mediational artifact right and what it allowed us to relate in a different way so the way that we get there is by this process of bidding we make bids we had to reach consensus so a person would make a bid like they would highlight a portion of text and say I think this portion of text emphasizes the way that this particular jurist explains the criteria for dignity right why is why
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it's even possible to even use it in this particular instance and then they'd have to get four yes votes right and there'd be a lot of disagreement as well too but they'd have to get four yes votes for us to come to a consensus and then we would then we'd be able to say okay at least now we can say that we have come to this understanding with respect to this particular portion of text and it falls in this major category it's about content criteria or in it or
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is it an equivalent expression it just took months for us to work it out but now we have I think that for us was the gold you know that's how we became we became a one mind that did not necessarily have to agree on everything and that for us was invaluable thank you for questioning
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