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00:00:08
Hello and welcome to Liquid Margins. Our guest today, Remi Kalir, is now going to say a few words and then we'll turn it over to Jeremy Dean after that. welcome everyone it's really a pleasure to have you join us again my name is raymie clear good afternoon good morning whenever you may be watching this and again thanks to at least the 44 people who have joined us live right now um it's a pleasure to join hypothesis as
00:00:36
their inaugural scholar in residence i'm excited to talk about our initial projects our vision and i just want to thank my many friends and colleagues who i've been working with at hypothesis for a number of years now for creating an opportunity to advance consequential research that can really support both educators and of course students particularly in the current context that we're in so i'll leave it there for the moment
00:01:01
it's good to be in conversation with jeremy and all of you through the chat welcome to our webinar this morning hey raimi how you doing you know we're here we're in it when's the last time you went to campus um i i picked up some books actually i picked up some books about annotation which are all right here oh nice in august and that will probably be the only time
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i'll physically be on campus most of this academic year wow yeah well that's a nice nice nice real scholarly background that you have there i feel like this could be like the cnn interview with the scholar public scholar uh super psyched to talk to you today it's been a long journey man we've been in conversation for for years now and i was trying to reflect and maybe i have a terrible memory if you can help me remember like
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when did we first connect what was the context i know it was early on in my time at hypothesis i barely started i believe yeah so i began at the university of colorado in denver in 2015 and i think that just sometime in my first year there maybe like the very early-ish 2016 maybe you and i were in some kind of webinar together maybe it was a very educator-focused conversation it might
00:02:15
have been something like the teacher's teaching teacher session or something maybe through the national writing project in any case i think we both realized that we had a keen interest in collaborative learning and how people read write and make sense of text and ideas together and pretty shortly after that conversation we said we should get in touch and begin those conversations that was also um that i guess spring winter spring semester of 2016 was the first time that i began to
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really experiment as an educator with hypothesis and that really began our journey together it's been a very productive and pretty pretty robust four years now yeah and so first hypothesis was of interest to you for teaching absolutely not not immediately for research and can you talk about the sort of first experiences of using in the classroom absolutely you know i began you know
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like i think many of us as someone who was curious about learning technologies that's part of my disciplinary training but also for many people in higher ed where and how i was teaching i was teaching online or i was teaching hybrid classes and as is typical of many courses students are reading together they're making sense of texts together and in my training as a learning scientist and in my training as somebody who designs and implements curricula particularly for other educators
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i was very curious about how a medium-like hypothesis a tool like that the practices around social annotation could augment that work and as i began to experiment again in my own practice i began to also read literature about social annotation and collaborative annotation there's of course a robust literature that we might talk about today i began to think creatively and i said
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also think pretty critically about how this could be incorporated into a variety of course designs and pretty quickly my interests in hypothesis specifically but social annotation more generally translated into some research work and we actually began our first kind of informal pilot research project pretty early on in 2016 there was a national science foundation fellowship that was specifically looking at how to
00:04:19
use learning analytics in online and kind of digital rich learning environments and i was named one of those fellows and i began kind of my first and scholarly interests in researching how our learners in digital online spaces marking up texts replying to one another talking to each other through social annotation and then how do we begin to understand
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patterns and discourse and knowledge construction in those kinds of processes that's great and at that time what did the landscape of the research look like i mean when you when you started thinking about these what was that well you know it's interesting jeremy because i don't think i was as aware of the breadth of the literature at that time in maybe 2016 or 17 i'm certainly a little bit more fluent in that in that landscape of literature now
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and here's something that i can appreciate there has been decades now actually 20 plus years of research on digital annotation or annotation occurring in online web-based computer-supported spaces and notably enough uh hypothesis is perhaps the tool that has been researched the most even in just the last four or five years uh nate angel our
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hypo you're of course your hypothesis colleague you know our dear friend recently sent me an article from 2016 where an educator was using hypothesis in their class surveying their students gathering information about how individuals are collaborating which is again all to say that there's now been quite a few years worth of pretty dedicated research across disciplines really interdisciplinary research about how hypothesis as a form of social
00:06:02
annotation does support student learning but again there's really decades now of social annotation research research about this type of collaborative learning in online spaces but no tool in my reading of the literature has actually been used as extensively and now researched as extensively as as hypothesis has and i think that's really a testament to the organization a commitment to open technologies the kind of flexibility
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with which now hypothesis can be used across a variety of learning environments and then just some of those social and technical affordances that really do productively aid students and their learning can you talk a little bit about in terms of some of the research that's out there what kind of questions people are asking what kind of angles they're taking in that research uh some of the conclusions if they seem that they've become i don't know
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sort of ratified as claims that we can make about uh social annotation absolutely so there's been a lot of research about how students perceive how they value the use of these tools and so whether it again it's hypothesis or a variety of other social annotation tools some of which are created for a single research project and then kind of never get used again researchers are very curious about how do students
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like use find you know comfort you know comfort in using these kinds of tools and so that for me broadly falls under a category of student perceptions there's a lot of research about student perceptions of uses uses of social annotation and i will say that i've also contributed with a dear friend and colleague um juan pablo alperin in his his research lab at the at simon fraser university up in vancouver some of that research and
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there are some benefits and there are some drawbacks to how those student perception surveys are are designed that is to say though that largely students do perceive value in their use of these kinds of tools they like using social annotation they find it it aids their learning in productive ways it helps them for example to see other people's perspectives to share resources
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to interpret or elaborate on certain points in a text again whatever that particular text may be and again it can and there is some evidence that social annotation can also contribute productively to a sense of community a sense of feeling connected to peers in a class so that's one very large body of research about social annotation actually there's another really interesting body of research about social annotation that concerns language learning
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and things like reading comprehension again for centuries annotation even when written by hand has been used to translate words provide an interpretation of a word or an explanation of some term and of course social annotation tools have adapted those century-old practices and there's actually quite a lot of of literature in the language learning space around the use of digital annotation tools to support student learning that's a whole other area of research
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that's pretty pretty exciting and productive i would also say that there's another really robust area of literature here around how students use social annotation to then either construct their own knowledge again making knowledge from their conversations with one another or or make meaning and there's some there's a little bit of a synonymous interpretation there between meaning making and knowledge construction and i don't want to necessarily get too caught up in the
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weeds of that but a lot of researchers again across disciplines have studied how students together when they're reading a text and then discussing that text through annotation they're learning from one another's interpretations they're extending lines of logic they're working through perhaps conflict they're finding consensus and negotiating around key points or key ideas and these
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can all be seen as knowledge construction practices that students engage in when they read together and then also when they annotate together that's another area of social annotation research i've rambled a bit so i just want to say one more thing and then i'll just kind of you know say that there's actually been less research and i think this is a real opportunity particularly for hypothesis and others to really kind of continue to lead the field there's actually been less research connecting what educators are doing
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with what students then learn through annotation there have been some nice kind of descriptive cases of educators actually particularly in k-12 settings around how they may design a high school english class to support annotation practices there have been some useful kind of descriptions of educator practice but from an empirical perspective there's actually a very
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small and really i would say underdeveloped research literature about saying here's how as an educator i'm designing for collaborative and social annotation here then are the kinds of activities and practices that students are participating in and then pairing very intentional pedagogy particularly in digital and online spaces which are now what we know to be the productive student learning practices that are supported by social annotation
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that's really cool right i mean i think actually over the past few weeks we've we've talked on this topic and i hadn't totally gotten what you were talking about until just now and i really appreciate it in terms of you know obviously there's the one question of is is social annotation uh efficacious in various ways but i love the focus on the practical in that last category especially as it's something we might be working on together in the coming months and years in terms of really focusing on what are the types of activities because
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that's just something that aside from a claim you can hand off to an instructor and say here are some best practices in terms of actually doing this um i have to ask you one question though uh because it's come up and we haven't had a chance to fully have this argument yet but like social annotation or collaborative annotation you prefer social annotation i do i'm in the habit of using collab of annotation but of course i'm the vendor
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and you're the scholar so why is it social annotation why should it be or what's the difference so that's a great question jeremy i see collaboration or collaborative learning as a description of practice many things can be collaborative learning right and there are many ways that we can participate in collaborative learning whether we're building with legos we're solving a math problem together or reading a text together there are many ways that i might understand how learners collaborate with one another
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and also how an educator and a learner might collaborate in a variety of ways and to me collaborative learning references from the research perspective some important work that's been done over quite a few decades now around what can be called computer supported collaborative learning and some really important advances in how we understand the nature of collaboration particularly in digital and online spaces as supported by things like computer technology and that is even as distinct from
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cooperative tasks or other kinds of individual uses of technology and so i approach collaborative learning in a particular way of understanding practice and what learners are doing together that being said now i also understand social annotation as a specific we might call it a genre of learning technology and here's why i understand social
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annotation is a genre of learning technology there's great precedent in annotation of course being a technology that's been associated with of course manuscripts books again all kinds of web browsers you know the very first web browser had annotation built into it right and there are of course many social annotation technologies again hypothesis really i think being
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the vanguard of how one designs and develops and shares an open social annotation technology but again there are others um that have been used in a variety of spaces and including education contexts and so i understand and i think that the the literature is really kind of coming together at least in the last few years to use the term social annotation as the descriptor of the genre
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irrespective of the tool that's being used and i would give an example there was a paper that was just published this year in the journal computers and education by a team from a university in hong kong and they designed their own you know entirely unique digital social annotation tool and in their description of this technology
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they actually give it an abbreviation so and social annotation which is interesting because there's a pretty broad literature now there using social annotation just you know the letters s a as the abbreviations all just to say that there's a kind of a shorthand now of social annotation being referred to as this kind of genre that is specific to certain technologies
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another really nice current lit review in the journal information learning sciences has a nice again review of some social annotation practices and technologies looking back over the last few years of research so that's how i distinguish social annotation to me it's a genre it's associated with specific technologies and then it enables collaborative learning and it enables a whole
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repertoire of collaborative learning again maybe in an online context in a hybrid context with this type of learner with this type of teaching practice etc but we can continue to debate that jv if you want to keep going back and forth so but is it is it then possible for there to be something that is a social annotation but not necessarily collaborative i think that's interesting right the question is like how does one begin to define
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collaborative learning in a way that is that useful in regards to my own research for example i looked last year at an example of hypothesis annotation to try and better understand the qualities of collaboration particularly in the context of open learning so this was a study that some of my grad students and i analyzed data wrote it up and in short there's been i think some ambiguity around for example what does collaboration mean
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what does collaborative learning mean in the context of something like open education and open learning that term collaboration often gets thrown around as a descriptor it's more of an adjective then it's used to really specify particular practices and so i began to identify these very specific group level again kind of group level epistemic kind of knowledge oriented
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moves that social annotation enabled um and so i don't want to suggest that again it's always synonymous but i think that it's very useful as you're suggesting jeremy to be very careful particularly for talking about research and to you know be able to create really empirical claims to say if we're saying that social annotation does enable collaborative learning what are those qualities of collaborative learning what are those particular practices of
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collaborative learning and what do those look like particularly among groups of learners that's great thanks for that remy so this is very exciting that you are now hypothesis's first scholar in residence and i do want to just give a shout out because we've always worked collaboratively with a lot of other folks and there's a great group of people who are attending today who many are doing their own research and
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this role is meant to you know enable all of us as a community of folks interested in this space um to to work together and build together but tell us a little bit about this scholar in residence program and and what your your goals are for for the program yeah well again i just i really want to thank hypothesis for you know as an organization supporting this new
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emergent and to some degree still being defined uh you know adventure that being said i want to make it very clear that you know i've been involved in a variety of of initiatives and research practice partnerships over the years and i think it's really important to emphasize that that positions should not be associated with an individual i again i'm honored uh to be the inaugural scholar in residence
00:18:04
and i fully anticipate that in future academic years other scholars from a variety of disciplines will sit maybe not in this particular chair but in their own share in their own residence however this current context shakes out and help to lead this work forward and so actually that helps to define part of my role now and actually one of the big goals for my involvement as the inaugural scholar in residence
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is to help hypothesis develop research capacity that then will support other scholars other universities and other programs and advancing their work and so i just want to be really clear that this is not raymie's agenda this is very much a collaboration that is allowing hypothesis as an organization to now not only be i think really the vanguard technology
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is enabling student learning with social annotation but to be the vanguard organization that is pushing the field forward the field of research about how social annotation in a variety of forms and in a variety of learning environments can support students and educators and institutions and so i will see it as a mark of success in this year if i can better facilitate the future research
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of other scholars so what does that mean that means doing a few things this year um it means for example surveying the field and getting a strong sense of like what's the state of the art in social annotation and so one of the concrete goals that we have in the beginning of this year this this academic year is to publish a white paper that really brings together in a concise um easily understood and a very kind of
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like audience friendly way for a variety of community stakeholders a way to communicate what do we know about social annotation and how is it really supporting student success and so that will be a very concrete deliverable that we will be able to share again with a variety of stakeholders to help again educators the research community technology leaders to really make further investments whether that is an investment in a
00:20:12
research project or an investment in courses in teaching to use this uh these these technologies and social practices that's one thing but again part of my job in this scholar in residence capacity is to help other scholars and so that means developing things like um an easily accessible knowledge base of research about social annotation where might other researchers turn to to
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get easy access to many many resources pertinent to social annotation we're for example putting together right now an open zotero bibliography so that anybody else who's writing about social notation can go there figure out what they need to know in terms of the literature figure out how their study perhaps relates to the broader field and use that as again an easy scaffold for their own scholarly work
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we're going to be putting together some publicly accessible research instruments these may be survey tools these may be interview tools these may be again things that other researchers can essentially pick up and then bring into their context as a way to again create more robust usefully empirically grounded research and then some consistency among the fields so that's going to be another thing that that we can
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we can do and then the other so then begin to initiate and lead research projects with partner institutions and of course i don't think it's going to be a surprise to now the 52 people at least on our webinar right now that there is an incredibly robust annotated coalition of institutions k12 and higher ed who are using social annotation in their
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courses in some way and we look forward and really this is an invitation to say if you're a researcher at annotated partner institutions and if you come from whatever disciplinary background whatever field if you're curious about whatever particular theoretical orientations or methodologies whatever your curiosities may be about social annotation and learning how can we
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hypothesize how can we through this new research initiative support you and your work let's begin that conversation and let's develop the tools and the processes to make that uh research possible all right that was awesome uh especially that last part i know i have a backlog of people who have been asking me i think i sent you something this morning where somebody was asking for a list of research and i was talking to somebody on the phone yesterday who said you know we're
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interested as we continue using hypothesis to start doing some research and i said well we have something in place uh to help you out there i do think nate can correct me if i'm wrong but i do think you need to put a little emphasis on the ed so it's annotate ed it's not like annotated and they got annotated to sort of anyway um we can investigate that later but um one of the things i really appreciate about the way that you
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uh and nate and all of us have put this together and i think it's largely been led by by your um philosophy in this regard is the way that the research program at hypothesis is set up with uh you know i guess some ethical guard rails or just a real attention to the ethics of research um around transparency and openness can you just talk a little bit about some of the values that you try to you're trying to instill from the start
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about how this research should be done in a way that is most helpful to students teachers the public um i thought that was a really cool aspect of the program and is articulated in the blog that people can can go and check out as well absolutely again i see that nate's sharing it in the chat now i would highly recommend that people you know look into that you know i guess i could start this from a few different
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perspectives i could say one could consider that there has been ongoing sometimes controversial conversation around how technology organizations engage in research maybe it's exploitative maybe it's not partner driven maybe it really doesn't respect again the privacy of students for example that's a whole conversation that some people may be familiar with i could also approach this conversation
00:24:18
um by saying that again i'm a former classroom teacher and i still teach day in and day out i have incredible students some of whom are actually i believe in the webinar right now um and as an educator i would never want to in any way compromise my relationship to students particularly in the context of research and i very much value those types of relationships and so again when one introduces research into teaching and learning context
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one needs to be very clear about how one does that again in an ethical and a kind of partner-driven way and i think that again that will resonate with many many researchers i could also appreciate or excuse me approach this conversation by saying that i officially wear a hat as my school of education's representative on my university's social sciences irb committee i am the cu denver school of vet representative on the university of
00:25:08
colorado's panel s so i've been trained pretty extensively in how to engage in ethical human subjects research that respects all participants that minimizes risk that really makes sure that if we are engaging students even if they're over the age of 18 even if they're of course adults that we do so in ways that really do
00:25:32
ensure the highest standards for for research and so those are three different ways that i could approach this conversation all of which is to say that again hypothesis as an organization has always been committed to and again if folks on the webinar now are not familiar with this i would also highly encourage you to check out the kind of core values that has always grounded hypothesis as an organization but
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notions of transparency notions of integrity have always been very core to the organization and so it strikes me as entirely consistent then with the vision of hypothesis to then continue to engage now in formal research around social annotation in whether it's k-12 or university contexts that abides by the highest standards for
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ethical human subjects research and then of course that is also driven by the needs of partners by the opinions and the expertise of those partners and that really responds to local problems of practice and again that vision is articulated in our really our research vision that we published earlier this week i appreciate that uh raymie and i think it's true that dan whaley and everybody from the started hypothesis has sort of really tried to
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to be very aware of ethics as we move forward in this space but uh it's also true that it comes from partners uh keeping us in check reminding us of those values um and so i thank you for that i think the the blog post and just your approach to this partnership and the project that's before us um is incredibly helpful in that regard well jeremy you're thankful but i would also
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want to emphasize that you know not everybody not every and not every organization can take this turn i should say i don't want to kind of go off the rails too much here but i will say that i think that we're seeing right now in this particular moment for all kinds of reasons a lot of dairy cult like values washing where organizations are making claims about their work that perhaps don't align with previous actions and i'll just leave it there and people can read into that what they want to read into that
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but again for an organization like hypothesis it has a very clear track record from its founding about what it values in terms of again the development of technology the sharing of knowledge it just i think again it extends that kind of lineage of work to then conduct research in this way and i would also add to that another core commitment to our future research is one of open scholarship and open research
00:27:57
and again our research vision document our blog post has that articulated but i think that perhaps some people who at least i can i can see on our attendees list are pretty familiar with processes that support the open production of knowledge um aspects for example of dissemination of open data if possible or open research tools or certainly making accessible open publications and we are very much in
00:28:25
this partnership aligning our work to supporting those open scholarly and research processes thanks for amy i think with that i want to because we have such a distinguished crew of attendees and there's been a great conversation in the chat um that i'm sure nate and franny are moderating i sort of want to open it up to others to uh
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share uh their own work or or ask raymie uh questions yeah and i i guess i'll just say like while those questions and comments come in i am just so um personally just honored that that i recognize so many friends and colleagues um in the attendees list today that's really to me um there are a few things that bring smiles to so to my face at least these days and i just really want to say if you can hear me and you can watch this and and you know me
00:29:16
thank you so much for for joining us that really means that means a lot to this whole project and process so i'm gonna uh i did collect a bunch of questions for the chat from the chat really quick great questions and a couple from the q a and so i'm just going to ask you as many of those as we can get to in the time we have remaining and if we go over and folks can hang out and raymie you can hang out that would be the hanging i'm here let's do it randy this is great
00:29:41
okay great so the first question is from just i'm sorry if i get anyone's name wrong um but philip piety that's how i'm going to pronounce it um how much of social annotation research involves web web artifacts compared to traditional texts like textbooks that's a nice question um because one could suggest that some flavors of social annotation have
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existed you know in print books you know in in you know in victorian england you know people would write in books and then pass them along to their neighbors as a way of sharing their thoughts with each other and that was of course happening hundreds of years ago so you know one could interpret social annotation in a variety of ways specific to our work and this research agenda much of the social annotation research is of course social annotation of digital resources
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and that's a key distinguishing feature of how one might define that again genre of learning technology and so when we speak of social annotation as a genre whatever that tool may be we're talking about the annotation of open textbooks or of blog posts or of course scholarly articles or book chapters and so predominantly then because it sounds like the question was how much of
00:30:57
predominantly the social annotation research over the last few decades has looked at than the annotation of and the interactions or the conversations associated with documents that are that are living online documents that are digital in some way i hope that's a useful response i think that's great i'm picturing like that was um you know the prototype for texting your neighbor just to write in a book and
00:31:23
give it to them that's right oh absolutely there's really well documented history of that it's pretty fascinating actually it's really great okay uh next question is from johnny allred is web meditation different from social annotation yeah that's a really good point johnny i i would actually say that yes web annotation for me is a slightly even broader umbrella because there have been some pretty notable examples of web annotation
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and again as i mentioned briefly the first browser mosaic had web annotation built in so that readers of whatever folks were reading on their browser again decades ago now could annotate the web and there again actually there's a incredible list and i think that hypothesis may still maintain it i've at least seen it a few times of this incredible lineage of web annotation technologies and so in this case we're talking
00:32:13
specifically about technologies that are not only enabling an annotation of a document on the web but then these social and interactive practices again it's allowing for things like a reply from one person to another there's aspects for example of perhaps research resource sharing and there's again in the context particularly of teaching and learning ways in which these social annotation
00:32:38
activities are designed and facilitated for social engagement and for students to learn from one another and to learn from their texts that's a really important point i really first of all grateful thank you so much john it's great great to have you here thank you so much for the question yes we're really talking about again a kind of genre of social annotation technologies while understanding that there is a very rich and long lineage now of technologies that can essentially mark
00:33:04
up the web can i follow up with a question that from my former colleague and friend jim brown uh in the q a here um he says you mentioned the history of annotation and the attempt it relates to this uh conversation about web annotation right you mentioned the history of annotation in the attempt to build annotation into mosaic how much research do you see happening about the history of web annotation and how contemporary tools fit will fit with that history and i would add
00:33:31
or don't fit with that history yeah that's that's a great question actually um you know there hasn't been let me yeah there's there's quite a bit there um there's been some really notable examples of i would say not not an empirical study but perhaps scholarship from a variety of disciplines about forms of digital annotation or annotation on the web
00:33:58
if i if i don't mind kind of turning around and taking a book off my shelf here there's this great book called book was there um that was written that has some really lovely examples of like early web annotation kind of digital forms of annotation that were maybe um not only social in any respect um there's not been as much of that
00:34:24
research honestly and and you know much of the research is again driven by uses in particular in this case teaching learning contexts which leads to more grounding in the social annotation space i hope that i hope that makes sense i just want to add one thing to that which i think is an interesting way that i've talked about this with some users who sometimes grapple uh struggle to understand how hypothesis
00:34:50
works especially with the browser extension i don't know if it totally relates jim but it's the difference between you know annotation as a tool a webination as a tool or a platform something that's a destination that you have to go to you know it contains the text it contains the functionality around the text or some tool that contains functionality and is more distributed in nature and can be used in various platforms or locations across across the web but um i would love to
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see uh research from jim in that regard great uh digital scholar uh there uh for any any other questions that you wanted to surface yeah there are a bunch more actually um this is from karen labonte and again i'm sorry if i mispronounce your last name um does collaborative annotation imply articulated shared purpose so i i i'd like to actually hear more from karen about what what she may mean
00:35:44
um by articulated shared purpose um so i might answer from a few again a few different perspectives many let me see this as an educator for example i would not maybe have my students just open up a text and start reading it like why why are we reading this text you know what's the purpose are we studying rhetorical moves are we looking at about how evidence is used are we learning about disciplinary methods
00:36:09
again i think in many course contexts for example professors provide a reason for why a certain text is read and then a reason for why students might discuss that text including the fact that maybe not all texts need to be socially annotated some may some may not so my hope actually may be more of a hope is that when students and teachers when individuals
00:36:32
engage in social annotation practices they do so with a particular purpose in mind and that that type of engagement with the text and engagement among readers is done so for a particular reason again that reason may be meaning making that reason may be critique so that's helpful but i'd like to i'd actually i'd like to know a little bit more about what that karen how you uh are approaching understanding that that concept and i
00:36:58
would also say that there are some other really amazing again colleagues friends and researchers you know in the webinar today who may uh have some other really useful things to say about that i i think in the chat um karen said that you answered it so she says oh you've done it so i think that means that's answered um this next question is from bo dong chen who also wants to say thanks for
00:37:24
the inspiring work raymie and so excited about this partnership that's great and then asks what are your thoughts on possible roles social annotation can play in formal classrooms in this post-truth era we are in that's an awesome question i'd love to hear the answer to that too yeah that's a that's a really so hold on again so great to have you here thanks so much i appreciate the comments of course um some folks know that my dear friend
00:37:50
and colleague ontario garcia and i have a forthcoming book titled annotation coming from the mit press we actually address the challenges of the post-truth moment in the conclusion of our book and we talk a bit about how annotation can be leveraged for social good and i don't want to suggest in any way that annotation is a silver bullet and in fact we say so um but i think that there are a number
00:38:16
of initiatives now particularly in civic media spaces that are beginning to identify some useful strategies around fact checking around the ways in which people can engage productively in conversation and have also in some cases actually engaged in things like crowd-sourced legislation you know developing ways to actually have civic conversations together and then inform actual civic change and
00:38:41
we again we articulate a few of those examples in our book so i don't in any way particularly because so much of what can occur particularly in the social media space is of course actually quite dangerous and misinformation and disinformation are rather rife i do not want to in any way suggest that somehow social annotation is going to you know create a more robust democracy i do want to suggest though that that the social annotation
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practices in certain contexts can contribute and may be useful as a kind of broader toolkit in finding ways of of perhaps making more viable socially useful conversations and again that might come from media fact checking and we already see that in the media again whether or not you may trust source a versus source b after many
00:39:34
large speeches or events transcripts of comments from politicians for example are often annotated as a form of fact checking which is for me one example of the way in which there's some promise around social annotation contributing to a more again informed you know again productive public discourse but i don't want to again pin the hopes
00:40:00
of a more of our democracy on social annotation it's a tool and it can be useful i hope that's that's helpfulness in this current context yeah i just say as a well i don't know if it's a follow-up question or not but i mean i think about how it and this is not proven but a lot of people put this out there that it increases critical thinking skills so i think that would be a subset of what you're saying um probably but can you talk a little
00:40:26
bit about that absolutely and and i think that we've seen some really you know useful examples of the annotation and this perhaps is where there's a useful distinction back to johnny's question about you this useful district between web annotation how people can markup the web and have access to that as opposed to social annotation where maybe everybody is invited to jump into the conversation uh you are seeing again media outlets
00:40:51
pretty in my assessment reputable news organizations who annotate again transcripts documents legislation where multiple experts are sharing for example the evidence that backs up a claim they're sharing related legislation or resources they're fact checking by pulling in other quotes or statements but they're
00:41:18
making available through their expert opinion that that information and this is where reading expert annotation actually is very productive for learning it may also be productive in a civic space but there is an important difference between someone participating in social annotation and someone who has access to expert annotation of a text
00:41:45
both can aid people's learning and both can really be useful and so i think we are seeing now in domains beyond formal schooling experts who are making their annotations available to help inform publix for example that's a great example of using digital resources and annotating them on the web and having access to that compared to
00:42:12
social annotation that maybe anybody can join or a class may be doing as some type of an activity i hope that's helpful for annie yeah definitely thank you um this was this is from kristen whitmore uh and she wants to know what you believe is the biggest advantage to social annotation and then what is still slash
00:42:36
what is still slash if there is one the biggest challenge that's awesome so first of all i see kristin's a current current student of mine and so maybe one of the biggest benefits is that that kind of curiosity leads to these kinds of connections uh you know here's here's one of the things i really value christian and others is that social annotation makes thinking visible and my thinking is not always precise my thinking can be flawed
00:43:00
my thinking can have blind spots or biases my thinking may simply be wrong for example and so one of the things that i really value about social meditation is it makes people's thinking visible to others and that then can lead to all kinds of potential change uh all kinds of aspects again of learning where kristin if i have access to your thinking your ideas may challenge mine if i have a serious blind spot in regards to my understanding of an idea
00:43:26
or some other real bias you may be able to notice that in my rough draft thinking made visible by social annotation and then you can engage me in a conversation around that and for me and again i know there are a lot of actually learning scientists in the call right now and a lot of folks have some pretty serious training and learning um when i think about notions of of of distributed cognition of cognition that
00:43:51
is stretched across multiple texts multiple people and that really exists beyond the mind of raymie you know my thinking limited in my head is really rather insufficient when compared to the thinking that exists when i'm having a conversation with you kristin and with johnny and bodong and jim and many of the karen and all the other folks who are chiming in now
00:44:16
our thinking together has far more potential to be consequential particularly teaching and learning context and social annotation makes that distributed cognition viable and pliable and it allows us to work with one another and our texts in very consequential ways and that's one of for me the real one of the real exciting things about about social annotation um as for its challenges um many of the challenges that currently exist
00:44:43
with for example aspects of talking online do we know if individuals are present how much might people participate how do we invite people to share those thoughts even if it's in a private space or a semi-public space um there was a related twitter conversation last week about what makes for really effective online discussion and particularly in the context of things like conventional
00:45:09
learning management system discussion boards and people talked a lot about aspects of access and equity who participates whose voices are welcome whose voices may be hidden even in asynchronous online discussion and i think that many of those dynamics are also present in social annotation do people feel comfortable having a presence in this kind of medium can they share in a way that
00:45:33
reflects again their rough draft thinking you know with others that can be a real challenge from a teaching and learning standpoint kristin and i hope that that's that's useful and again thank you so much for coming it's really really a pleasure to have you here today yeah and i just want to say um we are past the end point but we'll keep going but i want to invite people invite people to leave it's an oxymoron but um you know if you have to go go but if
00:45:57
you'd love to stay stay we'll answer a few more questions and we'll just keep going and the recording will be available either later today or on monday um so look for that on our website and because you were here today you will also get an email from us with a link to the recording and to other um artifacts from the show and i just want to
00:46:20
for those of you who do need to leave thank you so much for being here and everybody else thank you for being here too and again hang out if you'd like there are a few more questions but i think i'll do my my bookend here and just say thank you to everyone for joining liquid margins today and thank you to our guest remy and thank you to jeremy dean for moderating i just want to add one more thing which is as
00:46:47
as raymie mentioned uh before this is the beginning of something remy is our first scholar in residence and part of remy's work as a scotland resident is going to be support other scholars working on annotation and we're going to be supporting projects and supporting other individuals and groups doing research so for everybody that joined today you know please be in touch please reach out to us we can start covering conversations and collaborations
00:47:12
uh because this is a program that is now launched and we want to support all of you all in this space yeah absolutely yeah but yeah i'm happy to hang out so let's just again keep the conversations going yeah great um so this one is from marty liu um are there sub-genre sub-genres of media manuscript video annotation with particular practices and
00:47:35
forms that are disciplined or domain specific yeah marty it's so it's so nice to have you here and to reconnect um you know there has been some really important you know research around discipline specific uses of social annotation and again you might turn to for example composition and literacy studies has always been a home for annotation we're also seeing some i
00:48:00
think really important studies that have come out of the sciences now we're seeing some really useful work around how for example the annotation of primary source scientific literature through a project like the science and the classroom initiative has really strengthened for example undergraduate students learning of discipline specific methods vocabulary etc and so i absolutely actually as part of this
00:48:26
research effort really i'm hoping that scholars with deep expertise in their respective disciplines are eager to find ways of applying social annotation insights and practices to their course contexts to discipline-specific projects and you know moving that forward so that's my that's my brief answer there but i'm i'm actually very much heartened by
00:48:51
discipline specific research and uses of social annotation particularly now in online learning contexts it kind of seems like there's really any discipline that can be um that can use social annotation i think um even math i mean we had a math show absolutely yes absolutely um we've got another one from johnny um what i just call him johnny
00:49:16
now because i've seen his name sometimes i feel like we know each other what advice would you give to a teacher who struggles to get their students to engage in uptake to really explore ideas together what structure would you give to social annotation activities to avoid the isolated one-off annotations to which nobody replies yeah well so you know here's the thing johnny you know i've got things that have worked in my teaching and in my courses and get
00:49:42
having one of my current doc students kristen in the call maybe she should answer this question and see what she says i also want to say that my own pedagogical preferences may not work for all educators and so you know i could say things like well maybe you shouldn't grade annotations or maybe you should specify how many or maybe you should seed the text with these kinds of questions but what i actually would want to say johnny is there has been an incredibly robust archive of these liquid margins uh
00:50:08
webinars and if i'm not mistaken this is episode 11 and the 10 that's the case the 10 prior episodes there are some really again even discipline specific um examples of educators who are really i think honing their craft finding ways of engaging their students and so i guess this is my you know levar burton you know you don't have to take my word for it moment to say i've got some things that have worked for me over the past number of years of
00:50:33
social annotation when it comes to engaging students but again it might not work for you or in your course context and so maybe finding an educator whose course design or whose discipline is a little bit more aligned with maybe your particular classroom context may be able to provide those really practical strategies that are going to help your students to fully embrace and engage with social annotation there's a whole community of
00:51:00
us certainly is it's growing um do you want to keep going with a couple more questions oh i'm great i love this and the fact that folks are still around is fantastic let's just keep rolling and people can keep chiming in and yeah um this is from terry elliott it's an easy wonderful what digital institutions and behaviors are arising from the use of hypothesis for example what social expectations are raised
00:51:24
by reciprocation as an institutional value yes let's forget great to have you here terry thanks thanks so much for joining you know i'll just speak from from my perspective in regards to research was to say that there are again now i can say over a hundred hundred maybe you know quite a few institutions that are part of this annotate ed do you get that right jeremy annotate ed coalition and when it comes to then research we really
00:51:52
want our research initiatives to be driven by partner-driven collaboration and commitments so that means that again i don't have like a back pocket you know like set of burning research questions that i would like to research in context a or in context b rather as we move these collaborative research projects forward we really want to
00:52:16
listen to researchers at a particular institution we want to listen to the problems of practice that are germane to a particular set of classrooms we want to know how social annotation is or is not perhaps working effectively in this context and then from those institutional and contextual dynamics we will shape our research to
00:52:40
be again responsive and of course respectful to those particular research partnerships and so i just want to be really clear that when it comes to this new again research vision and you know the forthcoming projects we really want to be responsive to context and to partnership as guiding values excellent um and then here's another one from
00:53:07
philip piety when social annotation when are you left out of word when our social annotation tools wait a minute when social annotation tools are used for assessment so i think you must know when are they used for assessment that's a great question you know i've actually been going back and forth a little bit with someone who's still on right now inside i actually recommend that you connect with daniel hickey he's a professor and learning scientist
00:53:32
at indiana university with deep expertise in assessment and has really been developing i think some pretty important insights about various assessment practices and then the particular role that social annotation may use so the first thing i would recommend is from this conversation you know connect with dan um and we can facilitate that connection if that's welcome and useful as well um but i would say this you know even in
00:53:57
my own teaching but also reading of the literature first i would want to be curious about what aspects of assessment one is for example looking at there are for example in my courses and i've there are some important examples of this peer-to-peer feedback or peer-to-peer assessment has been kind of used alongside social annotation and so of course having peers read one another's work comment upon it provide aspects of
00:54:23
feedback to improve the quality of writing again whether that's in argumentation use of evidence whatever that may be rhetorical moves social annotation can again help to facilitate some of those practices um there has been less work that is for example looking at social annotation as a form of like summative assessment um but again that's
00:54:48
perhaps an open area of inquiry that could certainly be looked at but i think that again i would want to begin that conversation by getting a sense of what are the assessment perhaps practices and desired outcomes and then what is then the role of social annotation in supporting that process yeah and thank you johnny seeing you in the chat there and um definitely connect with dan he could certainly um
00:55:11
deepen the conversation i think some really useful ways it looks like we've got um two more um this one is from karen barowski and we'll be introducing hypothesis very soon and i'm really excited about it yay um is there a difference in how effective annotation is with undergrads versus grads
00:55:36
and then she also wants to know that first year students in particular yeah that's a good question um you know the first thing i would do is i would direct you to looking at again there's some important literature about undergraduate learning and graduate learning although studies are often not um i should say i've not come across a study yet although again if someone's aware of it please send it my way that has compared those two there is quite a bit of research that
00:56:04
concerns graduate students for a variety of reasons again a lot of research around societation at least recently has been done in teacher education context and so grad students in those courses social annotations being used to study that um there of course is certainly an important research being done in you know at the undergraduate level i was again really honored to join um again juan pablo perein and his uh
00:56:29
colleagues up at simon fraser and we just did a a uh ongoing set of studies but the first papers out that looks at undergraduate students and their again perceptions of social annotation for learning and so you know saying that it's more or less effective between undergraduates versus graduate students i don't want to say that it's more effective for group a and it's less effective for group b i think that studies that involve
00:56:54
graduate students and studies that involve undergrad graduate students both show that social annotation does again productively aid learning again perhaps in slightly different ways given again maybe the context of the class but if you're working specifically with as you say first-year students i think there's a lot that a lot of research that i would say that does support broadly speaking the use of social
00:57:18
annotation with for example college freshmen um wow they the questions just keep coming so um so this is from juan pablo alperin um what do you see as the role of social annotation for encouraging better civil discourse kind of touched on that already but um is there a secondary goal of social annotation with the primary being learning and community building
00:57:45
or is the learning secondary and better civil civil discourse the primary yeah that's awesome one is first of all great to have you here and so so much appreciate the question um you know this is where i see back to an earlier response social annotation as a genre and it enables a whole variety of practices again for many of us as educators as researchers of of teaching and learning
00:58:10
we can say that social annotation does enable productive collaborative learning but social annotation of course enables many many other things and so we could point to for example a project like climate feedback which if folks are unfamiliar is a group of scientists volunteer scientists from around the world who essentially peer review the news when journalism is published
00:58:37
concerning climate change these scientists will go in and they will publicly annotate using social annotation tools like actually hypothesis specifically these news uh media reports and then essentially provide that reporting with a grade you know with an evaluation of how scientifically valid the reporting is um and there have been some really interesting outcomes from their work and so i think that's a
00:59:02
great example of seeing social annotation enabling more scientifically accurate journalism which of course we might say has a broad kind of social good and this is why i and actually i should also mention briefly that there's a new related effort com right now coming out around covet 19 research and reporting as well with scientists also publicly annotating
00:59:30
for more informed really civic and public discourse uh research about coven 19 and our current pandemic so that's to say juan and others that i am i've always been really curious about social annotation because it can afford so many of these kinds of practices in again a whole host of domains i should say that perhaps i see it as maybe primary because of my work in
00:59:57
education and as an educational researcher and as somebody who wants to design for and research learning but maybe a climate scientist volunteer who peer reviews the news would say that the primary purpose of social annotation is to hold journalists accountable to you know a high standard of journalism in order to you know make reporting about climate change you know more informed and effective so maybe it depends upon
01:00:23
upon your role and your and your professional responsibilities yeah that's great yeah thanks so much great to have you here that makes me think that we should probably do a show with um like people who teach climate science you know and kind of talk about all those issues that would be very interesting um and so lastly this is the last thing it's not really a question so much it's from tuka al-salani
01:00:48
and well actually it is a question but it's something that will probably is out beyond our scope here but how would social annotation be used as a research tool so not research into it but how would we use it as a research tool and you know if you have something to say about that that would be super helpful yeah you know i would just say like very briefly um there's been i think some really important developments in this
01:01:12
regard and the example i would point you towards um is the annotation for transparent inquiry initiative which is essentially using hypothesis social annotation as a kind of backbone to making research evidence more open and accessible in broadly social sciences research i believe we include a link to let me just quickly double check here
01:01:37
annotation we do so if you go to our our new research vision blog post we actually include a link to the annotation for transparent inquiry project that again it uses hypothesis and this is i think an important distinction between here's an initiative that is essentially using the power of we might say now web annotation through hypothesis to make research in
01:02:01
this case on a whole variety of social science topics again more accessible again their name is you know annotation for transparent inquiry whereas this research agenda and initiative is looking at how social annotation as a practice can support aspects of again teaching learning shared knowledge construction etc i hope that's a useful distinction
01:02:25
and again there's a link to that resource um in our blog post well that was excellent um and i wanted just to say again thank you remy you're an amazing guest today of course i expected that you would be and i want to thank everybody else for being here and we're going to end this now but again the recording will be on our site and you will get an email with a link to it
01:02:52
um i'm super excited to watch it myself because even though i've been here you know we're not i've been paying attention to the chat which was also amazing and thanks for all the great questions and the links those will also be available and with that um would you like to say a few words of departing i just want to say thanks so much you know again we have quite a few people here we still have a few folks hanging
01:03:17
around um i just really want to appreciate the fact that this is a community you know driven initiative um the folks who are here the folks asking questions of course it looks a hypothesis you know none of this would be possible without people the technology is very exciting the kinds of social practices that it enables are also again very exciting but this is very much about the people who make this happen and a lot of those people were here today um i i am just honored to call a lot of them friends and colleagues
01:03:43
and so thank you so much for just being involved in this work and again contributing to the broad uh community it wouldn't it wouldn't happen without you that's great thanks for me thank you everyone and um we'll see you next time
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