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00:00:06
hey welcome to liquid margins uh the inside track hypothesis team members on social annotation uh we're doing something a little different today this Friday September 23rd in the year 2022.
00:00:19
um first of all we're doing this without my distinguished quality for any french who usually kicks things off and makes sure the right buttons are pressed on on the webinar and zoom and stuff like that I think I've managed to do that looks
00:00:31
like closed caption is going looks like recording is going looks like people have been able to get in so I think we're in a good place but hats off to for any for for usually running liquid margins but she's on a much needed vacation
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um the other thing that we're doing really differently today is we normally talk to practitioners of social annotation out there in the world at schools that we work with um to hear their stories about how to use an hypothesis in the classroom and this uh
00:00:55
locomotives are sort of taking an internal look um and having an internal conversation with our own colleagues um but one of the really cool things about hypothesis is that I think almost
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every employee at the company kind of blurs the line between being on the sort of vendor side of things or the school side of things everybody that we're talking to today has a background and has worked at a college or a high school
00:01:20
or university and that's through about almost I think actually everybody at um in the success and sale and the success and support teams at hypothesis which is something I'm very proud of we've hired a lot of former Educators
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and I think that's uh that's been awesome for building out a really great team but it also enables us to really speak authentically with the folks that we're working with and collaborate deeply
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um so you'll get to meet some of those folks today um I also think it's important to uh to see the people behind the technology right a lot of us use tools and we might forget
00:01:59
that uh you know human beings built those tools um just as sometimes the people the human beings that are building tools forget there's human beings on the other side so these are the human human beings of hypothesis uh today that we're going
00:02:12
to be sharing and I'm I'm excited to have that that conversation um finally I'm really excited to be able to Showcase some of the awesome people that I get to work with at hypothesis I'm really thrilled about my teammates as part of what gives me at hypothesis
00:02:24
and it's not a bad advertisement for potential customers a hypothesis to be like these are the awesome people you get to work with um they have really interesting backgrounds and they have really interesting things to say so that's what we're here to do the inside track
00:02:37
hypothesis team members on social annotation again my name is I don't think I introduce myself so I'll reintroduce I'll introduce myself as I'm Jeremy deed vice president of education at hypothesis I am a former educator a
00:02:50
high school teacher um English grad student and and instructor at the college level practitioner of social meditation in the classroom before going to work for a social orientation tool called genius
00:03:02
and then coming to hypothesis so I share some of my journey here because it has a kindred uh track to those that are here and I'll introduce them and then we'll jump into the conversation so I'm here
00:03:13
with Christy to careless who's a customer success manager at hypothesis maybe a month into the job or so something like that um one of the great well I'm not I'm not going to steal her Thunder actually I was about to tell her story forward I
00:03:26
want to do that um but she has worked at Rutgers and she's also I believe taught High School history is that right Christy yep okay so Christy's here with us today and
00:03:38
then there's Chris Diaz who's a customer support engineer at hypothesis just a couple weeks in on the job um and uh he comes to us from Northwestern uh where he was um when he
00:03:51
was a librarian and then Suzanne Miller who is also a customer success manager is with us today and uh she has worked in customer success with other companies but she also taught high school English
00:04:04
um I have a sweet spot for high school most teachers because I was one myself I think we have a few on staff and anytime I see that on the resume I'm like oh yeah we should definitely move that one along and this one we moved along um all the way to uh hiring her and
00:04:16
she's uh with us today for this conversation so um I'm gonna try to set myself up and jump in to hear more about you guys and so going in this order I'd love for each of you just to share a
00:04:29
little bit about your career Journey um I know none of you started in edtech and here we are I guess in edtech and we could question whether we're in edtech but I think on from some perspective we're all in Ed Tech on the industry side right now
00:04:41
um none of you started there how did you get here Christy hi everyone thanks for joining um so okay I'm gonna try and make this a brief story so I did start my career as
00:04:56
a high school history teacher um and when I started I taught at a title one school and I just felt like after my first year I wasn't really making the Deep connections with my students that I wanted to be
00:05:09
um so I spent that summer really trying to dive into edtech on Twitter and I started a blog like I was like really into trying to um find different Tech tools to uh get
00:05:23
my students more engaged with learning and um from there I decided to do my master's degree in instructional technology and that led me to transition
00:05:34
into instructional design and I was at uh Rutgers for about eight years as staff there uh in the instructional design and Technology office supporting
00:05:48
faculty and teaching online and trying to better engage students that way so I still kind of saw this thread going along in my career of I just want to help people engage students whether it's
00:06:01
my students whether it's you know faculty at Rutgers Camden trying to engage their students and um it was there that I also started
00:06:11
teaching online and I believe that um maybe it was in 2018 that I had heard of hypothesis and um
00:06:25
started using it in my own courses that Rutgers Camden um so I was super pumped about how it went in my classes and when I saw that there was a customer success manager
00:06:38
position here at hypothesis I was like wow that's a cool opportunity because it became one of my favorite Ed Tech tools to support because I felt like it was so easy to use and my students it
00:06:50
was one of like the most accessible tools that I was using in my class so here I am that's the the short version of my story I guess it's awesome we'll we'll get into other
00:07:02
details I will just say I've been on a couple of workshops with Christy when she's presenting to a school and it gave me goosebumps the first time when she sort of introduced herself and she's like I used to be an instructional
00:07:15
designer at a school that works with hypothesis and now I'm working as a customer success manager with you instructional designers and uh teachers that uh that are using hypothesis so that's awesome I think you're next Chris
00:07:29
hi everyone thank you for being here with us um so I before coming to a hypothesis I worked as an academic librarian for about 10 years at uh different schools
00:07:40
around the Midwest um and through that journey I worked in a variety of different aspects of the library reference instruction collection
00:07:53
development uh scholarly Communications open education um and sort of the the main like thread that has stayed with me throughout my entire
00:08:06
academic librarian career was focused around the use and promotion and support for open content I my first job as a librarian was
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focused on promoting Open Access publishing to faculty um educating people about copyright and different experimental
00:08:32
ways to facilitate peer review and that's actually where I heard about hypothesis to begin with was from the scholarly publishing peer review side of things I remember when I started at uh
00:08:46
at the University of Iowa in like around 2013 there was kind of a lot of excitement around the idea of both uh open peer review and post-publication peer review and hypothesis was one of
00:08:59
the early tools available to sort of facilitate that sort of discussion around uh pre-prints or Publications on on websites um
00:09:11
and so I've always like known about hypothesis but I think what kind of brought me out of libraries and into educational technology proper was my uh
00:09:23
love for and interest in open source software so um I got really excited when I saw this support engineer position at hypothesis I thought it would be a really great way
00:09:37
to learn more about the technical side of educational technology I really love that the organization is committed to Open Standards and open source software um and it was a good opportunity for me
00:09:49
to kind of Leverage my experience working with and supporting Educators in the library so so now I get to work with uh um users of hypothesis at Colleges and
00:10:03
Schools around the country and around the world and I get to see a different side of uh sort of educational Enterprise from my advantage point which is really interesting so that's kind of
00:10:15
where where my background is and what what brought me here that's awesome Chris I just have to share one anecdote which is when we interviewed you for the job a member's side chatting with Dan the founder of
00:10:28
hypothesis and we're like okay yeah this guy could definitely do the customer support engineer job but on top of that he just sort of so clearly shares a DNA with where a hypothesis comes from um especially in terms of that
00:10:39
commitment to openness and and code and and content um so really glad you're here all right Suzanne how'd you get here how did I get here
00:10:51
um well I started my career as as Jeremy mentioned teaching English teaching high school English I'm actually kind of bookended my my 24 career 24 year career
00:11:03
in um uh public education both in Florida and now um here in North Carolina and so uh played a few other roles in between
00:11:15
um but uh my my last uh my last few years were teaching high school English before I came to the other side of the table um mainly as
00:11:29
that customer success manager but mainly because um I was a huge believer in engaging uh with digital content with my students having them think critically uh through
00:11:42
what they were reading and so I found myself embracing multiple tools that did just that um and so this kind of answers that question that's probably going to come
00:11:55
later about my commitment to hypothesis but it very much aligns with that you know I guess philosophy that uh you know that digital tools edtech
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um K-12 higher education that you want students and teachers taking more of an active part um in the education not so much being
00:12:23
passive in in that process and so hypothesis stands out in that area as well as the other tools that I've supported over the years you can name them it's okay
00:12:39
we're not this isn't a you know uh uh another great thing of course is that you came you're you're part of the family because Michael our uh customer support engineer uh was working at
00:12:52
actively learned when you were a customer back to me learning and recruited you to actively learn uh because you were such a great advocate of for the tool and for the not just the tool but the pedagogy surrounding a tool
00:13:04
um and uh then he came here and then you followed him here a few uh years later and we're very very happy for it so I think we are you guys bled a little this is the problem with sharing the questions beforehand so people started achieving start to answer the second
00:13:17
question which is uh I believe what Suzanne and uh and Chris have done I mean Chris you're through line for you is openness right in terms of your career my next question was what's the through line in that Journey right I've switched careers like you guys have
00:13:30
um but I feel like there's a consistency across teaching um and working in technology for me uh Chris's was openest um you can elaborate if you want Suzanne's yours was engagement would you
00:13:42
say or active Active Learning right it's kind of a through line for you and critical thinking after learning and critical thinking that's great and I think mine is probably engagement just I was always trying to get students engaged
00:13:55
um and now I'm still trying to get students engaged and keep students engaged but you know from the trying to the tool side of it Chrissy did you get to talk a little bit about the through line of your career yet yeah I definitely jumped ahead on that
00:14:09
and I still I stole your engagement because that is really what I was trying to do um when I was teaching high school and um in supporting faculty and then
00:14:21
teaching college classes as well is just figuring out way ways to keep students engaged and make them um to a bounce off of Suzanne active uh
00:14:34
participants in the classroom yeah and I think for me there's also like one step brother which I think you guys are saying too which is getting getting folks excited I mean I was a nerd and and throughout my academic
00:14:47
career I loved learning um I got excited about it and I think when I became an educator that was sort of one of the things to be able to be engaged to be active but also just to be excited to be passionate about it um it's something that's a through line for me
00:15:00
um so I also think you guys to me have jumped ahead on this one but let's go backwards a little bit and just see about you know with Suzanne first this time when did you first come across the idea of social
00:15:12
meditation doesn't have to be an hypothesis context but it could be hypothesis itself tell us a little bit about that origin story of first encountering this type of Technology um I would say
00:15:25
uh as I was um exploring not through the digital Arena but through just uh best practice in learning and education obviously
00:15:37
close reading became a huge thing um you know sort of Midway through my career and so I embraced a lot of uh close reading practices I kind of uh
00:15:50
considered myself on The Cutting Edge of what those practices would be and the idea that you know a digital tool could sort of simplify that
00:16:02
um you know in my mind make it more efficient um was something that I completely embraced um when I discovered the first few tools uh that I used including actively learned
00:16:16
um with with social annotations so uh you know and I think it very much mirrored the you know the increase in the use of social media and some other stuff and I think that that
00:16:28
um kind of dovetailed nicely with my my classroom practice which was nice yeah I'll just briefly share my I had a very similar story right I'd always been talking about annotation to students encourage annotation you know in these
00:16:41
analog formats and I started to explore digital Technologies and try to bring them into the classroom you know to be a hip teacher or whatever right a lot of stuff I use a lot of stuff I saw colleagues using I was like I don't know if this is really working when I first
00:16:53
started getting into juice and interested in using digital Tools in classroom people were using this platform called second life so it's sort of like a you know alternate world or something like that people have avatars and they're trying to teach composition
00:17:05
you know through a second life and I was like I don't know I don't know if I can get into this and then I saw social orientation tool and I was like that makes sense to me right that is a skill in practice that is not particularly new so you know been around for a while I've
00:17:18
been practicing it personally encouraging my students to but this is a new context maybe it makes it more efficient and it makes it more multimedia I'm not a drawer or an illustrator right so but with bringing in images into you know annotations like
00:17:30
suddenly can you know do do more in my annotations than I can in an analog context so um yeah very similar Pathway to you uh Chris social annotation I know we were
00:17:43
just talking the other day about you know social annotation and scholarly publishing I don't know you know when you first came across this concept you'd be interested to hear yeah yeah so it it first came I first
00:17:56
learned about it uh around sort of disrupting the double-blind peer review process and kind of making it more of an open conversation trying to um tie into other elements and like
00:18:09
movements in open science and replication and open sharing of data trying to just open up the conversation a bit more uh in like a scholarly publishing context um but uh you know so that was early in
00:18:22
my career uh more recently at Northwestern um I was uh really involved in the design and launch of an open educational resources program
00:18:34
and so that brought me uh into a lot of conversations around how to uh sort of Leverage these web Publications these open Publications with other sorts of
00:18:48
learning tools and I remember um a couple years ago I think I I was like on the other side of like a presentation that Jeremy gave at Northwestern about demoing uh hypothesis and it was like I
00:19:02
was brought into that conversation because there was a lot of uh potential there for um connecting our oer authors and oer users on campus with hypothesis and it
00:19:13
also kind of played in with uh sort of moved movement towards like flipped classrooms and asynchronous communication and obviously with the pandemic and online learning it just seemed to make a lot of sense for for
00:19:27
people to start using that at Northwestern um more recently so um so yeah it was kind of top of Mind towards uh later parts of my time at Northwestern mostly from like an
00:19:39
educational perspective other than uh scholarly publishing cool I think I want to hear from Christy and then maybe pause and try to connect some Dots here between you know Chris's background is pretty
00:19:54
different from Suzanne and Christy's right uh not a classroom educator but working at an academic institution thinking a lot about publishing and this has of course always been part of the history of hypothesis as we've always had some interest in getting involved in
00:20:07
scholar publishing um and peer review and things like that but uh also this classroom interest so I'd like to Circle back with everybody to talk about can we connect those two things but Christy you talked a little bit about your origin story with
00:20:20
hypothesis but rehash it a little bit for us how you first you know discovered social annotation so I want to say and I might be remembering wrong that
00:20:32
Maybe I did like Diego or delicious one of those social bookmarking tools also have annotation capabilities I feel like I was exploring those
00:20:45
um I wanted to oh even further than just engage my students more something that was has always been important to me is to have my students act as contributors to
00:20:58
course content so I've never wanted to necessarily be the only like source of knowledge or the only source of authority um in my classes and I feel like social annotation is a great opportunity for
00:21:10
students to you know contribute either their knowledge from other courses their own life experiences or their own like research on the spot and it kind of started with I don't think I actually used like the social annotation features
00:21:23
in whatever it was this ego or delicious whenever the social bookmarking tools were but even just like collecting websites together um and then when I did see hypothesis I
00:21:36
was like wait I've seen something like this before this could be a really easy way for us to kind of collaborate um and create knowledge together as a class I think that that starts to help to make
00:21:50
the connection right between me and Christy if you see a connection there between opening up scholarly production uh to be more horizontal
00:22:03
um with the sort of classroom horizontality of decentering the teacher that Christie's talking about wait did you say Christie or Chris I said both I think Chris do you see a kinship in terms of the scholarly
00:22:23
production you know democratization scholarly production with the democratization of the classroom that Christie's talking about yeah yeah because because like like I said a lot of the earlier criticisms of the
00:22:35
double-blind peer review process was that it's only kind of two voices giving feedback and kind of being The Gatekeepers of this um uh what gets published and what is
00:22:46
actually considered uh you know a valuable contribution to this course of whatever academic discipline we're talking about um and so the idea of open peer review and open
00:22:58
um sort of post-publication peer review facilitated by tools like an uh hypothesis would help bring in more voices that could also be um you know valuable uh something that
00:23:12
the the two peer reviewers were into a thought of you know there's a lot more ideas that could be um fostered within that does this resonate at all for you Suzanne either in your when you were
00:23:25
teaching and thinking about democratizing your classroom or supporting student Voice or the way that you saw actively learn kind of help democratize and and raise student
00:23:36
voice um a little different I think in high school but I I mean I I will say throughout my entire
00:23:50
career I move more towards a student-centered approach and giving my students more voice and choice um so obviously social annotation aligned beautifully with that goal
00:24:04
um that I had set for myself which you also talked about uh visibility we were riffing before the recording started you were talking about forget exactly how you said it make making thinking visible or something like that
00:24:17
um talk a little bit about the importance of real thinking was it that reveal thinking yeah talk to me about revealing thinking and then maybe we can go back and think about that
00:24:28
um transparency right openness democracy transparency these are some of the values that the core of hypothesis that we see starting to infiltrate um publishing practices as well as
00:24:40
pedagogical practices in the classroom so revealing thinking yeah so the idea of um again moving more towards the
00:24:51
formal to the informal assessments um throughout my career so I found myself relying more on formative um assessment techniques as I um you know as I move through my career
00:25:04
the idea uh that students needed regular ongoing feedback you know in the moment I always say that my students writing improves so much better through the
00:25:19
tools I was using like actively at the time because of that feedback that constant communication that was happening and some of it was obviously not just my feedback it was feedback
00:25:32
from peers uh so you know I all I can say is that it it it again gave them more of a voice it allowed them to give each other feedback
00:25:44
and allowed me to give feedback better and it just like I keep coming back to the idea just made it all so much more efficient to me yeah um I I think I don't know if this was
00:25:57
purposeful but the elegant elegant elegantly answered a question in the chat from Manny Fernandez around uh improving student writing through social annotation practices so you actually just touched on that I don't know if
00:26:09
that was intentional but um Christie's also doing double duty here being on camera and answering the chat and then responding to Manny but um I think that's what we're talking about Manny Wright is that student writing improves
00:26:22
um I want to say almost naturally um in the context of social meditation because the student is pre-writing ahead of an assignment so there's some work that's going on before but also feedback that Suzanne is talking about
00:26:36
um peers being able to comment on that writing push on certain ideas ask for clarity it's going to improve that writing and then of course the instructors there as well and Chris I think you were
00:26:47
basically suggesting this that the ecosystem of scholarly knowledge production is going to benefit from this kind of transparency and more voices yeah yeah and it and it's happening in
00:27:00
other elements of um sort of scholarship we're seeing it with an increase in reproducible research the increase in funding for replication
00:27:13
studies it's all about bringing in more uh sort of I like the idea of like making it more horizontal and top down in terms of the way that
00:27:24
knowledge flows through uh communities um Christian anything to share about this idea of transparency and making reading visible as we talk about it from your teaching
00:27:39
experience or supporting the tool um I think I put something in the chat about this but just um from my own classes I found that it's easier for me
00:27:54
to identify where student confusions are before they hit unit projects through the social annotations and I have a ton of formative Assessments in my class like every
00:28:07
week students are handing in some kind of like reading reflection or um like something like that but sometimes those aren't targeted towards you know everything that the reading is
00:28:19
hitting so social annotation kind of gives the students a more open-ended way to address the reading um and really helps me hone in on you know where is their interests where is their
00:28:32
um confusions uh what do I need to address before you know we're moving on to the projects and things like that thanks Christy apologies guys my my earbuds died so I've had to relocate to
00:28:47
a phone booth at my co-working space um that's the change of scene right here um awesome well let's talk a little bit about how you guys you know uh first discovered this job opportunity to
00:29:01
come work here and what really excited you most about when you saw that opportunity and you and you went after what were you excited about in terms of coming to the hypothesis and start with you Christy I know we've touched on this a little bit but
00:29:13
let me chop this up for distribution it'll all seem more natural I think that okay so like I said I was at Rutgers and I was at
00:29:25
Rutgers and 2018 um when I started using a hypothesis and I think at that point I connected with Jeremy back then to start to start using hypothesis at rockers so I believe that
00:29:38
Jeremiah Jeremy and I were connected on LinkedIn and possibly I saw the position that way so like maybe Jeremy shared it and I was just kind of scrolling along as we do and
00:29:51
um you know happened upon the customer success manager position and it really like I it sounds
00:30:03
almost like fake to me like how much I was like oh this is a tool that I actually like really love supporting as um an instructional designer you know we did a lot of uh Ed Tech like technical
00:30:16
support as instructional designers um it was one of the easiest tools to support which is you know never a bad thing um and I just saw how it worked with faculty and I know that I loved using it
00:30:30
in my own courses and my students had really positive feedback about it um so when I saw that it was just like here's a great opportunity to you know work spreading a tool that has
00:30:42
really positively impacted my own teaching and that just seemed like a really cool opportunity it doesn't come along that often um so that is what led me to apply and
00:30:56
it's again like it just sounds like how could I be that like corny about it but it's true but when you read that job description you were like yep yep can do that can do
00:31:08
that can do that that is me yes uh I'm gonna do it a different order this time Suzanne uh I know you sort of heard about it through Michael but tell me about what excited you about coming to hypothesis
00:31:21
we're gonna have to bear with me I'm trying to answer Sarah in the chat I don't know are we able to go off script a little bit to address Sarah sure of course she heads yeah
00:31:34
go for it um I always attentive to the users well it just she was talking about bridging that gap between how I guess vocal her students were in
00:31:46
um annotating online and then bridging that to in-class discussion and what I was going to share I was in the process of typing actually uh was the the idea
00:31:57
that I always tried to incentivize my students with payoffs for doing high quality annotation um and so uh oftentimes the play the
00:32:10
payoffs were we would have Socratic seminars um debates in class uh you know over obviously important questions essential questions
00:32:22
if you will um and so you know I think it had a lot to do with the tech selection obviously showing lots of different um opinions and perspectives and what
00:32:34
students were writing or reading and then telling them that they could use those to reference during those in-class discussions that were a little more
00:32:47
formalized you know to mean the idea of like a Socratic seminar is a little more formal than just a small group discussion um or having you know having a class debate you know where there were certain
00:33:00
sides I used to always say that I wouldn't tell my students which side they were going to be on so they had to be prepared for all of them and so I don't know that just to me they
00:33:12
saw a really deep connection to being prepared having those high quality annotations and using them for those in-class like like I said sort of formal discussion
00:33:24
um opportunities so I don't know if that answers Sarah but I wanted to do that before she had certainly was a valiant attempt I think she may have signed off uh oh she did okay make sure that we will connect with Sarah about those
00:33:38
questions not particularly the topic of this episode yeah we have lots of different programming and certainly lots of people in-house that can speak to what do you do after the students have annotated so somebody will reached out
00:33:50
to Sarah and continue that conversation and maybe we can have a look at margins episode about that um but I'll talk about how I came to hypothesis too sure all right you keep us on track yeah thank you yes
00:34:01
um you you mentioned you kind of gave the story of talking about Michael Works in support um I've had a connection with him for the last I would say five or six maybe more years
00:34:14
um and he's the first person that kind of encouraged me to take the leap into edtech and obviously we've stayed in touch and that's how I sort of I found my way here to hypothesis
00:34:27
and the idea is that hypothesis like I said very much aligns with my educational philosophy uh about having or making making it so students can engage and think critically through
00:34:41
their reading and have a little more voice and choice um and so yeah it sort of was a perfect marriage of you know my past experience
00:34:52
um to today it's awesome Chris we may have recovered we may have covered this already do you feel like you've covered your how you know what excited you about coming here
00:35:04
uh yeah I can I can elaborate a little bit more um I uh I you know I worked as a librarian for 10 years and basically having moved around the library in different departments
00:35:17
um sort of the there wasn't a lot of like the only place to move uh if I stayed in libraries was to go into like management and I wasn't really interested I don't think I'm like a good people manager I
00:35:29
just really wanted to like work on projects and learn more uh at the time I really wanted and still do really want to just focus on this new sort of path focusing on technology and so uh I
00:35:42
thought that this would be the perfect role for getting sort of feeling like I'm at the the start of a whole new learning path of uh you know technical
00:35:53
support but also uh software development um infrastructure operations uh security uh privacy um you know a whole bunch of things that would just be completely new so that was
00:36:06
really exciting to me um and uh you know what really sealed the deal was was the the organization itself I think is kind of fascinating because
00:36:18
um as I was learning about open source software for the last three three plus years a big question into open source software world is how do you sustain an open source project
00:36:31
um and I really I really like that hypothesis um has found sort of a business model that can be that can help sustain an open source product in the long run while also you know contributing back to
00:36:46
uh the global open source Community um and then contributing to Open Standards um so I really like the sort of commitment to openness while also having sort of a business model that that can
00:36:58
be sustained over the long run because having come from Academia I know that it can be precarious to you know rely too much on grants or on charitable donations so I really like the idea of
00:37:12
sustaining open source through a sustainable business model so that was also really interesting to me it wasn't easy it took a while to figure it out um all right I want to get a sound bite
00:37:24
in um for posterity here I'm going to ask each of your questions Off Script but I think you should be able to answer it uh what does social annotation mean to you I want to know employees of hypothesis what is social annotation meaning to
00:37:36
mean to you starting with you Christine oh man I get to go first okay well I think I kind of already answered this um social annotation to me is a collective way of constructing knowledge
00:37:50
so um we are all reading a text together but we all come from different places and we all have something different to contribute and have different perspectives and you know various ways
00:38:01
to reflect on it so that is how I would define it Chris Diaz former librarian current customer support engineer at hypothesis mean to you I don't have the best
00:38:16
empathy answer to this but I like the idea of um adding depth to to text I like the idea of like adding different layers you know that social annotation can bring so
00:38:28
you have like the sort of the source that you're working from but then you have a conversation letter on top of that and you have replies and then you have tags and it's just like it just creates a different sort of that depth
00:38:40
perception that uh wouldn't really exist um in any other context that I'm familiar with so I think that there's a lot of potential and opportunity there that uh is exciting ironically I feel like you answered that
00:38:52
question like an English teacher would um so I appreciate that that definitely resonates with me all right Susan Miller former high school English teacher current customer success manager at hypothesis what does social annotation
00:39:05
mean to you um well I feel like Christy and Chris kind of covered covered my uh my answer here but uh yeah the idea that
00:39:19
um you know students that didn't typically engage in in in-person discussion um you know the shy ones which I can
00:39:31
definitely say I was when I was in school um empowering them to feel like they can contribute and contribute thoughtfully um you know to to a text-based
00:39:46
discussion uh was really powerful for me um and I would say it probably is it still is to a certain extent yeah I definitely had an aha aha moment like
00:39:59
that when I was teaching with genius in a classroom where I had a student that was not doing well uh and and not succeeding in the normal ways that I'd set up to evaluate my students um and when I started doing social
00:40:10
annotation I was like oh wow I already knew that there was a lot more depth to the text and it's not that I didn't know that there was more depth to her but I hadn't given her proper place to share it or showcase it and suddenly
00:40:23
I saw all this depth come out of her um in in annotation that was pretty awesome and it was a struggling student that turned it around you know in in the margins of the text as it were
00:40:36
um all right we're going to conclude with one final question um what excites you about the future about education about social meditation about Ed Tech about hypothesis what's most
00:40:47
exciting to you about the future going to go into verse order Suzanne what are you most excited about in the future for the future so much more to explore um
00:41:06
uh the idea of you know continuously evolving um to to sort of meet the meet the needs of Educators and students um you know that's that's huge for me
00:41:20
um always feeling like you're on The Cutting Edge and just in edtech I think something that excites me um a great deal is the idea of
00:41:35
platforms and programs and tools like like hypothesis uh becoming better because of the feedback and input from educators I love that and I think you'll find that
00:41:52
that hypothesis that feedback loop is pretty tight we listen to our users students teachers administrators and really bring that feedback directly to our product and Engineering teams and as a success manager and as a support
00:42:05
engineer you're going to be a conduit for that so you're in a good place to hear that feedback Chris what is the future uh two things um it's really exciting to see a lot of
00:42:17
new partners signing on to use a hypothesis so the company is growing and expanding its uh user base which is uh great but and there's also been a lot of uh interesting new Integrations but
00:42:31
things like jstor and vital Source that's really exciting um more longer term um you know I am familiar with some some movement uh in the web browser Community
00:42:43
to add uh Native annotation capabilities sort of built into chromium which is what's a lot of web browsers are based on now and so I think that there's a lot of potential to
00:42:55
see this sort of get formal support in sort of the web browser standards and and technology so that I think that there's a lot of uh exciting potential
00:43:06
there that that that is a forthcoming Christine well I definitely Echo everything that Suzanne and Chris said because those are all super exciting things um
00:43:21
I'm just excited to see more faculty react and learn how hypothesis can you know change
00:43:33
their classroom without necessarily having to do a lot in in the in the way they um approach teaching they don't have to change too much in that you're giving readings already and here's a
00:43:46
different way that we can do these readings together um and kind of trying to democratize that process a little bit more and make it less of a you know isolating process
00:43:59
and more of a collaborative process um and just I've you know worked with a lot of Faculty that it it's really exciting when you know they do it for the first time and
00:44:11
um it just seems to work really well and you know they get excited about what the students are saying in in the annotations so I'm just excited to keep working with people and seeing that light bulb go off
00:44:24
I love it um I had a light bulb glove off as you guys were given your answers so I'm going to answer my own question about what excites me about the future and it's a it's a combination of y'all's backgrounds and your passions and your skills that you brought to the table
00:44:36
here um it's the fact that like Suzanne and Christy I've had experiences in the classroom with this type of technology that have been incredibly um empowering to me as an instructor and I've seen it be empowering for students
00:44:50
democratizing activating Learners um and what Chris is tying into is kind of the bigger picture here right the way that this technology uh is useful in other Industries and other professions
00:45:02
and in everyday life on the web and it's that connection between the work we do as English teachers Suzanne and his history teachers Christy that we're always passionate we want students to be thinking critically about text and thinking deeply and close reading and
00:45:15
and collaborating and the idea that that could jump out of the classroom and be part of how people start to interact and behave and relate to each other in everyday life on the internet in other Industries
00:45:28
and professions but also just in how they engage with the information and writing that's online um this idea that it's a tool for teaching and learning that you can adopt for a classroom but it's something that
00:45:39
goes beyond the classroom ultimately and I feel like those of us that were drawn to education always wanted to believe or thought we were doing that work that was gonna we're not training people to take tests or write papers exactly all of those things are means to a greater end
00:45:52
that's supposed to help society and one of the cool things is about hypothesis is that it's it's actually doing that it's not as uh uh it's not a disposable tool like many of the things one might use
00:46:05
um in education it's something that you can use beyond the classroom and it's its skills are useful beyond the classroom so that's what excites me about the future that uh the work we're doing with students and teachers in the classroom is something that's ultimately going to transcend that
00:46:17
um and uh Empower folks everyday folks on the internet so thank you all so much for this morning's conversation or afternoon for those you guys on the East Coast um or evening for those in
00:46:31
farther flung places I might be tuning in uh this has been a great conversation um I get to talk to these folks every day so it's going to keep going for me um if you're already working with hypothesis uh as a partner you might
00:46:44
have the opportunity to interact with Chris and Suzanne and Christy if you're not yet working with hypothesis what could be more compelling than hearing about what kind of awesome people we have on staff here that are working directly with uh teachers and students
00:46:56
and administrators at schools let us know if you'd like to get a pilot started at your school and with that I will say have a great rest of your Friday and a
00:47:08
wonderful weekend and go forth and annotate
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