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greetings everybody i'm nate angel from hypothesis you may have seen me around the event already um and i'm really really happy to be here today with a couple of different uh folks
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i'm just gonna uh i'm just gonna mute cheryl for a second there she just arrived and so just getting her audio sorted out um so uh really happy to be here i just wanted to set the stage a little bit for what's
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happening here this um educator office hours are meant to be a really kind of informal casual session where we've invited a couple of educators who have some you know deeper experience with
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social annotation to just come have a casual conversation with um other folks who um who might have questions or thoughts maybe talking about pedagogy a little bit um every day we also have a
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separate hypothesis 101 session that where you can go for like kind of deeper technical questions so maybe the idea here is to talk a little bit more about practices educational practices and stuff but hey it's casual so anything is all right
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um and i just wanted to say that i'm joined here and thank you so much for coming by holly benson who's at muskegon community college and also cheryl swain um from temple
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university i'm a big philly fan so um really happy to and i i don't want to i don't want to disregard muskegon at all but um i have a personal connection to philly so i had to say that um
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so welcome to both of you i'm really glad that you could be here and i'm thought we might just kick things off just so people can learn a little bit about you if we could hear you know just a brief introduction about
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you like where you work what you do and then maybe like how you got involved with social annotation and what you've been doing with it and i thought if it's okay uh holly we might start with you sure hello thank you for having me at
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this i annotate conference i teach reading and college success seminar at muskegon community college so i typically have the students who are the least prepared for college when they come
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and before the pandemic i started having students annotate everything they read for reading class and i just found that it made a tremendous difference because one they actually had to read it because they had to show me something
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that they'd written down but then also they were engaging with the text so when the pandemic hit and we moved to remote in march of 2020 i tried to carry on with that and had
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students take pictures of their annotations and submit them or email them to me which was really cumbersome and then as i was reading about what other educators are doing around the country i read about hypothesis and i was so excited
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um and then they had the where we could pilot it so we piloted it for a semester and it went great and then i convinced my college to subscribe to it so i'm really excited that we're continuing with it
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and for reading and college success seminar at the same time we were considering going to an oer text and so i thought well we're doing all kinds of change anyway with the pandemic
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so let's just do the oer too so plus we wanted to help students because it was tough financial times for everyone so buying a book was just another issue for them so it worked fantastic with the oer
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we would take each chapter and i would save it as a pdf and put it in blackboard and then students could annotate right on the text and i used that to replace a lot of discussions and i'm now teaching my classes i think
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i'll continue to do hybrid because i love hypothesis for that interaction with the text whereas before i thought there's no way with deved that we can do online and i really like
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doing the synchronous online about two-thirds and then asynchronous online using hypothesis to replace a lot of discussion boards for the other part of it so i'm a big fan wow that's really great and i want to
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come back to that open obr for college success too because that's near and dear to my heart as well um well let's let's uh get an introduction from from cheryl then and like hear a little bit about you and how you got involved with social
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annotation and what you're doing with it sure so um i'm an associate professor at temple university and i'm also the associate director of the intellectual heritage program at temple i teach in that program as well
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and it's a humanities core text based course uh that had you know is really reading intensive uh to be frank and and some of the reading is quite challenging in fact i was just hopping from a professional development program
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that i'm i'm working on with our faculty on marx and capital and the communist manifesto and i also have been teaching online for several years prior to the pandemic asynchronously
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primarily and then during the pandemic synchronously and i found my way to hypothesis through rap genius so i'm a longtime annotator who uh along with jeremy and a bunch of
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other folks kind of hacked a rap genius where uh you know music lovers were annotating rap lyrics and used it uh to annotate things like the dao da ching or anything else that was in the public domain
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uh so i was of course you know first really sad when when lit genius disappeared and then extremely happy that um hypothesis came to be um so yes full disclosure i'm a big fan and
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a long time stan and um you know like holly we are we did a very kind of mini micropilot um i've hypothesis last semester in the intellectual heritage program
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and i met with great success and i am currently trying to talk to the powers that be at temple which is a very large uh research university to to adopt it uh university-wide but if
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not then at least program-wide um in our courses there are seminar-style courses uh you know 20 to 28 students moving to an online space either
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synchronously or asynchronously provided a tremendous amount of challenge and especially with all the zoom fatigue out there i found that hypothesis was a really powerful
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social space for shared knowledge to occur and my students agreed i have to say never before have i had so many students confessed to doing all the
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reading and enjoying it as they have since adopting hypothesis and holly like you in the past i had i've always been a believer in annotation and i used to have students um i would do like pop quizzes i would
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you know they'd come in and i'd say okay now just take a picture of these five pages of your text let me see your annotations and um we're in fact in in our professional development um program this week uh going to be doing a whole
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session on hypothesis and social annotations so um i i think that's probably enough said wow that's so great i'm so happy to have you both here um
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and uh thank you to jeremy for rounding you up and convinced strong-arming you hopefully not too much to to join i really appreciate it um i'm just going to add a link
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um i think to what i believe is the program you were talking about at temple cheryl um and i also added one for holly there so folks can see a little bit of
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your institutional backgrounds um so uh i am gonna just keep the conversation going until someone from the audience um kind of chimes in with a question or comment or something that they'd like to
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steer the direction of the conversation toward i i noticed that alex had uh was kind of responding to holly um talking about uh you know how the learners reacted to to the move to social annotation um and
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i i guess i wanted to i know you answered that a little bit in chat holly but i i kind of wanted to follow up on that because it i've always felt like student success is really
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not to indoctrinate people but it's such a great time to um you know put people in touch with practices that may help them out um as they're moving through their college you know
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experience overall and you know as somebody who believes that social annotation can really help you in a variety of different environments i've always felt like college success is the maybe the single most important place to get it going
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and so i'm wondering um so you're a hero of mine obviously and so i'm wondering um did you find that um that uh that
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uh when when your learners were coming into the environment were you finding that they had already had experience with any kind of annotation activity before or was it pretty much is it pretty much new to them and if so
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does it seem like it's something that i don't know maybe it's too early to tell but it's something that may be aiding their their forward path in college success in general so sorry my dogs are working if you can hear them and there i don't stop that's
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all right that's not true yeah okay um many of them have been exposed to it actually it's you know i'm trained as an educator i taught k-12 before so i like i knew all
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these strategies and taught them to students but then you get to college and you kind of think like well students already know strategies so you don't want to treat them like kids and you know and try to teach them sort of different strategies and my daughter
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um she's now just finished ninth grade but in her middle school they made her annotate everything and i thought oh my gosh why am i not making my students do this still it's such an excellent strategy how could i have sort of forgotten about it you know um
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so i think they're doing it more in schools in michigan at least now but students may not have heard the term annotation so um they always are intimidated by that and they
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like stumble over pronouncing it particularly in the reading class and our college success seminar is required for students who test into two or more dev ed courses so um they feel intimidated but once i
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you know point out well a an is ad and note is notes so you're just adding notes to the writing and it's really a conversation and i model it for them then they're more accepting of it and we start right out with the syllabus and i
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add some annotations to it to begin with you know like i have my name and i say please call me holly and you know about contacting me i really am good about getting back to people so setting that friendly tone for them to
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get them going um and then they they're pretty receptive to it and then they get nice conversations going too so that part i think works really well and then i definitely
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find that by the end i have them do a reflection they talk about how it really is a strategy they'll keep using and i know in the beginning they just think i have to do annotations and i actually have to read it
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you're going to make me read it and um but they really do by the end like it now of course i can't say that every single student just loves it by the end and they're you know great great readers who like it but
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they um they understand the importance of it by the end yeah i think i i have some learners in my house too that are seem to have been forced to do some annotation that's much more like um
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it seems like busy work to them and it doesn't have that well welcoming kind of conversational aspect that you're talking about it doesn't it's more like a you know the kind of annotated bibliography kind of move that
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seemed like a really onerous you know highly academic task as opposed to some sort of like shared conversation around the text um so that that really resonates with with how i've seen it and i think that that setting of the stage
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that you talk about must be such an important part of it i want to share all of you did you want to riff on a little bit on what holly was saying i thought i could see you i'm doing a lot yeah i mean it sounds like we you know we
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are kind of taking uh you know same approach uh i think that especially with the syllabus you know syllabus day uh whether it's in person or online is maybe the most dreaded
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day of all uh professors because it's so flat and unengaging and i found um asking my students to annotate the syllabus uh by putting questions in by i you know i always identify the learning
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goals for the course i asked them which one uh was most meaningful to them what they they hoped they would gain uh what's missing from the course what's surprising about it and and it really set an
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amazing tone from the beginning that was very different from how that first day uh can sometimes go especially in an online setting so um you know i've found across the board that
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the the and especially just the kind of beautiful light interface of hypothesis allows for a kind of free-flowing conversation almost like a back channel which students are so comfortable using as
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learners and it's something that i don't think we fully tapped into as educators yet um in a positive way you know they're always texting or in a group me or hear even you know everyone's on the chat i see you out of the corner of my
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eye on the chat people um and that's a good thing right and so um social annotation or hypothesis almost becomes a kind of uh it had a back channel vibe at least this semester it was a place where
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students uh were being very real and authentic in their conversation uh with me and one another and even in their reflections um that seems like it could get really
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interesting especially if the reading is you know das capital or something yeah i mean you know and i've found to uh in order to kind of nate speak to that issue of
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annotation as busy work um i do think you're right that it it really is important to be intentional in the ways in which you're asking students to annotate and uh sometimes and sometimes in leaving it
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very open so that they can kind of make their own connection and negotiation with both the tool and the text in each other and for me i i kind of
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balanced the semester out where you know one one we had sort of um a routine or ritual with annotation for the first round through a text and then um
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usually i tried to do something kind of innovative or different uh the second time that we engaged with the reading whether i was asking students to revisit old notes of their own or to find something
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that a classmate had uh noted that we wanted to pull into a new text uh to making contemporary connections and adding you know gifts and or chips i never know it's both i think
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i think it is both yeah so um so and at any rate the the biggest takeaway i've had is that i feel like it really humanizes uh both the text and the educational space instead of
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um being a kind of busy worker alienating task i love that idea of it humanizing the text i mean obviously humanizing humanizing the classroom is awesome as well but that you know
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books they can come across as so dead sometimes right it's like written by a dead person well and hallie i wonder if this was if you if you experienced this but um you know i was working i work with a a wide range of types of students at
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temple from first generation college students to um you know non-traditional aged learners to uh honor students in what amounts to an honors college and
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um again one of the things that i think can be so powerful about digital education that can sometimes get lost in the brick and mortar space is role modeling and also a kind of
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sense of belong building a sense of belonging and the thing that i noticed about my our use of hypothesis in the class is that it was very affirming for students uh you know if if i if i said you know on this round of annotations
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just identify the things that are confusing i don't want you to try to figure out why they're confusing or to try to help each other even at this point just what's messing you up where are you getting stuck stuck uh and and for
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for learners to see that they're not alone um or in the inverse for them to see that oh wait i think i got that part maybe i'll be able to help this person again it's really it's it's powerful um
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to be a little bit transparent uh on where you're stumbling you know because sometimes i think the the biggest challenge with reading especially with difficult reading is to not be able to identify you know
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what's causing the lack of comprehension yes that's a good point cheryl i have noticed that too and i do have a higher level reading class for students who have met the basic competency but
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are trying to get into our nursing program which has a higher level and this semester it's been delightful that students feel comfortable asking questions when they don't understand something in the text and then i can go right in there
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and answer them at the basic concept or paragraph or sentence level which in the classroom you wouldn't really get that because i think they would be too embarrassed face to face to say i don't understand what they're really
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talking about with this term but in there they can do it and it's public and other students see it and they may answer it or i may answer it too so i do love that aspect of it um i did see a question in the chat from
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michael about um the balance of informal interaction with requirements and you did adjust address that a little bit cheryl i do the same where sometimes you know like the syllabus it's more getting to know you and i tell them it's
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to become familiar with what's expected because i never want to surprise them with anything that they didn't know they were supposed to do but other times it is more that they need to identify specific
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things in the text so i think setting the stage first for the the safe space and a comfortable space is important and then you can get into more of that but actually i'm going to pull one of
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them one of the questions that came to q and a right here on stage um from alex because i think it really pertains to what you were just talking about holly you know about the degree to which uh ana social
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annotation can make the the process of reading and reading in a class more inclusive not only across this divide of of being in the classroom face-to-face versus not which you just mentioned right so
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there's a kind of inclusivity of space and time and mode that can happen but also for different kinds of people i i wonder if yeah i don't know who to ask first but do you guys have thoughts about that holly you want to go first
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[Laughter] no you can go ahead i have to think about it for a second okay well yeah absolutely you know i think that one of the things that this pandemic has kind of laid bare for us are the the
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ways in which we can always do more to design inclusively for a range of learners um from uh thinking inclusively about uh the digital divide in terms of
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socioeconomics to uh cultural divide to learning differences um and you know i've just found that the more modalities that i can imp employ
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uh the more inclusive the space and what's nice about social annotation is that um it does you know in terms of access first of all make things really wonderful for
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students they thanked me across the board for keeping costs down and providing access to either appropriately you know legally portioned excerpts of
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text or full text where where it was available you know in the common domain but then also i think that students and i think i mentioned this before you know zoom
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is fatiguing and um it can be a difficult space for students to participate in conversation with one another uh because of issues of social anxiety
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um or something else and so the hypothesis space allows for those types of inclusive moments in a way that discussion forums don't as well because
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um discussion forums are difficult to set up where you feel like you're clustering around a moment or an idea and you know the hypothesis allows for that
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space uh also the fact that you can do you know some really clever searching using hashtags can allow students who need to organize information differently
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to do that um it can you know they can search for a particular term or concept um so i think that there are a lot of applications when we think about
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inclusive design that we can find a tool like hypothesis to be invaluable i agree cheryl and using the oer is like the first huge step forward in
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inclusivity because we always had students who did not have a book no you know and you you know there were some who would come to me and they'd say i just really can't afford it like my other even though ours was inexpensive they
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would have other ones that cost more and they would say well i really have to buy my own biology book first which is a hundred dollars and or 150 dollars so i'm waiting to buy this book and you know i would have an old version but it just wasn't the same so
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making sure they all have the text right there i love to eliminate excuses i'm a you know very understanding flexible person but eliminating as many excuses as i can is something i love to do
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um so having that right there for all of them is great i also so much prefer hypothesis to discussion boards i really only use discussions when it's something very specific where they have to write more about their own experience or something else
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so they don't have to take something from the text and carry it over to the discussion board and then try to create a discussion about it and explain the context and all of that also although we want students to write really well
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and be really literate it also removes a lot of the judgment because it's more like texting where you can do just a short annotation and that's okay and i always cringe for students who you know they're doing a discussion board
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and their their writing is just terrible um and it's out there for everybody to see but they can still have intelligent thoughts and engage with the text and share with other students so i like that aspect of
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it too yeah and i think in the chat alex is bringing up something that is kind of a pet project of mine which is helping students really see themselves as a type of public intellectual and i found that their writing and their
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thinking and their critical analysis as it becomes more authentic and as these these activities are enacted for a real audience who matters
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rather than just for a grade or for a teacher behind some kind of wall whether it's submitting it through an lms or handing in a typed paper or whatever it is you know it matters more to them as well
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and that learning becomes significant uh and and something that they then are able to to take outside of the classroom space which is so important
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so yeah i'm really i'm i'm loving this conversation too i i probably jeremy designed this but we really have the you guys together are encountering the full range of at least college students right all the way from
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people just really starting out who maybe even aren't fully prepared for college level classes yet all the way to folks grappling with you know some pretty heady advanced stuff it sounds like in your work cheryl
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and i i love this idea that i was hearing when holly was talking a little bit about you know breaking down the act of reading and therefore of writing you into just little nuggets that could be that will be informal to start with
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maybe which is how we think right like we don't unless you're british maybe you don't think in perfectly formed paragraphs with proper punctuation and citations at least i never have been able to and so i i this idea of lowering the
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stakes so that you know your reading process and then therefore maybe your writing process too can be a bunch of little nuggets strung together as opposed to some gigantic you know
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project that has has yet to be done and is that is that it sounds like that's what holly what you're finding in your practices is that that informality enables people to kind of climb up the
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scaffolding to something else does that make sense definitely and i'm sure that i have some students who before would have been too intimidated if they had to read something and then write a discussion board post about it
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but if they're really struggling i can meet with them individually on zoom and we can go through it together and you know they can share screen or i can and we go through and we add some annotations together and they do a few and they're like oh
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this is easy i can do this um where they you know first they're just being asked to interact and instead of like you said having to form some huge fully developed thought that they have to share with the world in finished form
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yeah i just sorry cheryl i just i can't believe i never thought of this before this idea of sharing screens and being like let's annotate together for a little while first like that's brilliant i don't know why i never thought of that
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no that's okay it is it is brilliant i don't think that i don't think that we did that i i haven't done that i've pulled the annotations into zoom in other words i'll share my screen and
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we'll use we'll say all right you know here's where the interest was this week and i might ask a student in zoom to you know students to talk about you know something that interested them and if you're met with silence then you can pull up
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i'll say well let's just let's see what you all we're talking about in hypothesis and um and then we can go there and and showcase and highlight some some of the ideas and discussions that are going on and pull them
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uh into the live classroom and i do plan on continuing that in face-to-face class as well sharing sharing a hypothesis screen um you know continuing the conversation pulling it into the brick and mortar
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space um i can also say for me as you know in teaching difficult texts that it's been wonderful to get a sense of where understanding breaks down
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before having to step into the classroom you know to kind of really tailor the conversation the supplemental context you know whatever it is students need
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i'm really meeting them where they're at now rather than where i perceive them to be um and i think that that is another kind of it wasn't really something that i was considering
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when adopting using hypothesis how as a tool it would really help me also get insight into my students thinking but it has so it's it's really made the classroom
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time very valuable almost like a flipped space in some ways just to circle back i during the the first class session i always pull up hypothesis in on share screen and zoom pull it up
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and have them get in and annotate at the same time then i can say oh i see that cheryl added this good job cheryl you got an annotation in there oh there's nate's you know and um talking them through it and making sure they get them in there
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and showing them and then also i too have found that it really enriches the classroom discussion because i can look and i can say i noticed this is something you were talking about or if no one's talking i could say well cheryl could you say more about what you
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put in the annotation about this and so yeah and that that really you know then going to the inclusive design um piece again you know then we really are leaning into
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um the power of you know our introverts right the individuals who aren't necessarily going to be the first to raise their hand and just start talking or sharing an idea um like our extroverts will but the
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the synthesizers and the the thinkers who are really kind of taking their time to come to an understanding or to share an insight and hypothesis allows for that whereas in a
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50-minute class whether it's on zoom or face-to-face you know that isn't possible for some students so yeah that's i mean we came up with this phrase it's really jeremy and i in
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conversation about how social annotation makes reading active visible and social and you'll see we see we use that a lot because we really felt like it distilled down like three of the
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superpowers that one gains with social annotation you know that the way that reading stops becoming that kind of passive solitary act and then um how there becomes a trail of it right
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and then um then how multiple people can kind of join onto that trail um and it's everything i'm hearing you guys say just kind of comes back to resonate with that um uh really enjoying the discussion here
00:29:52
there's a couple more questions that have popped up if you wouldn't mind switching gears a little bit but i don't want to interrupt if somebody had more to say on that thread um okay so um another question that we
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have up here and this is really really shifting the gears a little bit is around um it's actually from our our colleague remy collier about we've been talking a
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lot about what's been happening here you've been talking about your practices during this last pandemic here so here we go here we go into a new school year possibly with differences uh are you thinking of using social annotation in your courses in the fall
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and i don't know maybe cheryl you want to start um with that just so that i pick someone yeah sure yes absolutely hands down so um i i absolutely will be using it i
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think that um i'm also really i'm nervous to do this but i'm trying very hard to embrace ungrading principles as much as possible
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um this coming semester uh just after how my university was addressing some of the issues during the pandemic and i i found that students really were exhibiting more
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of a growth mindset in an environment where there were no stakes not just low stakes and um and so i do plan on using it my my hope is that i'll have it set up so
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we'll again have maybe two or three passes through a text using a hypothesis uh per week or per per two week cycle depending on the reading whereas the first touch will probably
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be a little bit more traditional um where i might begin by having a few prompts for students to look for sort of specific things in the text and and share what they find
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to a second pass-through where i might put them into groups and ask them to kind of function almost like a literature circle if people are familiar with those where one group might be focusing on um
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difficult terminology and finding definitions or applications one group might focus on character and character development one group might focus on making connections to our world today finding articles in the news
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or in popular culture and then a third more reflective uh type of annotation where where students will have the opportunity maybe once every two weeks to go back and look through their annotations to kind of map
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their growth or see what kind of interests are developing for themselves are they noticing that they they tend to kind of always focus on a particular type of annotation or a particular theme or topic
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so um those are my off the top of my head my ideas in terms of uh annotation annotating rituals or rhythms for the semester um it might change but right now that's
00:32:46
where i'm headed interesting what about you holly what thank you for default i'm definitely planning on using hypothesis again i'm the coordinator for a college success
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seminar course so i build like our basic shell and then people can customize but we are planning on having them read and annotate every chapter of the oer text which just as a side note related to reading um
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i had students at the end of fall when i asked them what did you think of the the book several said to me we had a book so at first i thought oh my gosh that's bad they didn't know they had a book but actually i think it's
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probably kind of good because maybe they saw it as less of this huge insurmountable task to read a whole book and it's a massive textbook that we started out with it's the openstax
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college success book which we're now on like editing the third version and customizing it more for our college um so i definitely plan to use that and then i've shifted to integrated
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reading and writing instead of just developmental reading separately so i love the flexibility of finding what's appropriate for the students to annotate so i don't have a like a
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single text that i'm using for that when i'm pulling in appropriate things for the students which the flexibility is awesome and really largely because of hypothesis i'm planning on even when i'm back face
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to face doing hybrid for all of my classes because i mean that's really quality learning time when they're in there socially annotating and so when you say integrated reading
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and writing does that mean these are courses where students are kind of working on both of those skill sets together just make sure i have that right okay got it um that's that sounds great because i mean so many i've heard so many people report
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that um that learning how to read in a different way then the very next thing that it does is empower your writing right and that that jump from reading to writing is is
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really the missing link in a lot of a lot of people's work because that does that that sounds like where you're headed yes and i'm this past year i did it as a an exploratory course to see and we're
00:35:00
working out different things at our college with placement because this is a complete aside from hypothesis but when you have your whole placement structure set up for reading and writing separately and then you add an integrated course that sort
00:35:13
of throws a wrench in the works so we're working on all of that across departments to figure it out but i think students benefit a lot more when those skills are together you can't
00:35:24
really isolate them yeah well are you guys ready for another swerve because i could take this in a whole new direction from an audience audience remark so i'm gonna bring this one up um
00:35:39
from chris and so i don't think we've exclusively been talking about annotation inside an lms because i get the feeling that at least some of cheryl's work is is outside the lms um but and i'm just going to
00:35:52
start off with the caveat that hypothesis knows that we've created a little bit of a monster here in the sense that the first thing that we brought into the world was this calling it a web application right where
00:36:04
anybody can go create an account and start annotating the web either publicly or in a private group so that's outside the lms on the open web we sometimes say in the wild right and there's all sorts of things that can happen there but there's also a
00:36:16
lot of friction in getting that going and having it work and you know um also navigating levels of privacy that you might want to have with a class and then maybe not have later or something like that
00:36:28
and then of course as we all know many colleges and universities and k-12 schools as well you know use lms's and have very um strong desires around using them in particular ways
00:36:40
and so it wasn't until we actually made an lms integration that we started to see uh usage really explode even more widely than it was because it made it easier for colleges
00:36:54
and universities to adopt some teachers and students to start to use it right but there's things that are available out in the wild that aren't available inside the lms like the tagging and searching features that cheryl was talking about
00:37:07
aren't as aren't yet as readily available in the lms um but headed there and then there's this issue too of sewing it together like maybe you've done some work in a classroom environment inside an lms but then you want to expand that
00:37:20
out and cross the boundary to another class or across the boundary even outside of your your uh your learning uh experience into your quote unquote real life and so where
00:37:31
it is our vision to try to sew those experiences together so that people can actually have the inside the lms experience when it's appropriate but then also take that outside when that works too so
00:37:43
that was a little preamble to this to give you guys a little time to think about it too but i'm wondering cheryl if you might this i'm thinking this might resonate with some of the work that you've done this question from chris and so uh maybe not but i'll let you i'll let you riff on it
00:37:56
well it did i mean prior to you all building it in the lms i you know like i said from a long time ago i was i was using um you know the genius platform um and then as soon as as soon as a lit
00:38:09
genius went away and i got a little note that there would be an extension that you could add to your browser and you can create groups and put students in those groups and and um annotate the web that way yes
00:38:20
absolutely we were doing that i was doing that more um more so uh in in a course that i taught that asks students who ident students to identify uh social you know big social problems or
00:38:34
messes that we're facing today as a society and um and then uh kind of connecting the text to those masses so it was almost an inverse annotation we weren't annotating text but we're
00:38:45
just like life you know um and now that it's in the lms i you know because of privacy issues i do feel more confident and comfortable using it robustly in the classroom
00:38:58
whereas before it was really kind of a light touch use because of my nervousness around uh digital fingerprints and and student privacy um i don't know if that really answers your question um
00:39:11
so so next semester no i'm not i'm not doing i am just sticking uh hopefully with hypothesis in the learning management system unless our university doesn't adopt it and then i have to go
00:39:24
some crazier space then we'll see what happens but um for now i i think um i like that i for those of you that have been using hypothesis or thinking about it in in
00:39:37
the lms i know one thing that my students were frustrated about for a little while was that they did want to have you know easy access to their annotations um and i sometimes wanted to aggregate them
00:39:50
um and so there are ways to do that i've learned that you can hit i think nate command p to kind of save annotations as a pdf on a particular
00:40:01
text and i think hypothesis is working um really hard from what i was told on making that kind of uh data and information more accessible for
00:40:14
students to kind of hold and take with them yeah there's um definitely um there's all sorts of things down in the weeds here but they're so important too um so the the need
00:40:27
to like when you have that text in front of you and all the beautiful annotations and the highlights and everything and the need to try to capture that in some way actually turns out to be one of the most complex problems that we're
00:40:38
faced with um especially i mean to to do a kind of screenshot type thing like you're talking about cheryl is probably the only really feasible way to do it right now because to bring the text and the annotations which are really
00:40:52
separate entities living in separate worlds that are just kind of on top of each other temporarily together into some sort of permanent thing or possibly printable thing is actually pretty hard except to the degree that it could be captured
00:41:04
as an image right so that's that's a real problem and i can't promise any magic there but on the other thing that you were talking about which is you know outside in the wild
00:41:15
every hypothesis user has their user profile page right where all their annotations are collected together and you can search and navigate not only your own annotations but other annotations that you might have access to that are either public or in groups that
00:41:29
you belong to or whatever and there's tagging and there's all sorts of features there um we are just kind of experimenting with them putting the finishing touches now on the start of that experience for inside the lms
00:41:40
oh that's exciting so but the only thing there is that once again inside the lms the experience is kind of you know within the class the class and the classroom so it's it's a narrower in that sense it's not the whole universe of annotation
00:41:54
it's the universe of annotations within that class so um that's that's at least a start um but chris is right i mean my students are kind of addicted to it now so that they'll you know email me and be like sally and
00:42:06
i want to annotate stuff i'm reading this summer you know what do i do like how do i yeah so and that's the other thing i was talking about right where it's like maybe they have a independent account but that their
00:42:19
independent account and their temple account could see each other as the annotation yeah so that is the future thing that we also want to enable but that's a little bit further away so that was that was a long i'm making a lot of like hypothesis specific comments
00:42:32
here but um but holly so are you are you primarily working inside the mlms or is it outside inside and that being when i first learned about hypothesis and i learned that we could do it in the
00:42:44
wild as you call it i considered it but i quickly rejected it and went for the pilot and can and then convince the school to subscribe to it because when i used outside websites for
00:42:56
students for things before i spent so much more energy than i wanted to working out issues with the thing outside of blackboard and so having it in there was controlled and there wasn't a separate login
00:43:08
and and i can troubleshoot is just so much better um so and also particularly for developmental students or those who are just getting used to college i think having things out there for the world would
00:43:21
would not really be a good thing for them yeah yeah i've seen it in i don't know if you folks know the work of amanda la castro who's another kind of um educator who annotates a lot and talks about it she's
00:43:33
now at penn so nearby to you cheryl you guys should hang out um she uh she used to be uh stevenson i think um but at any rate she um in her practices she
00:43:45
has often scaffolded things the way you're kind of thinking about holly maybe where your first set of annotation experiences might be in a very private closed structured environment even if it's that one-to-one
00:43:57
zoom call you were talking about right to kind of get used to it to get your feet wet and to start to understand what it looks like and then as people kind of advance through their practice then she takes them out into the world
00:44:08
and they get empowered with their own personal hypothesis account that they can take with them when they leave and but the two worlds are still kind of separate but she treats it as a kind of as a kind of scaffolding in her work i
00:44:21
don't know if that kind of fits with and obviously if you're just dealing with a developmental stage you might only do the first part of that um but then hopefully by the time they're getting to a class that cheryl might be working with they would be ready for you know the
00:44:34
more advanced stuff well and even in my class i do the one of the first things i do is is show students that they have the ability to have private and public annotations within the lms space and i encourage them
00:44:47
to take as many private to make as many private annotations as they want and and and let them know that they aren't going to waste because at any moment they're they're able to shift those to become a public-facing um annotation
00:44:59
to the rest of the class and we talk a little bit about the kinds of private annotations that they might want to be taking as they're moving through the text versus the more
00:45:10
directed public annotations so that i think that that's a important point that you know you want to help them feel safe and have a sense of mastery to
00:45:24
a certain extent although i still think it's important in in the community of the classroom to showcase a little bit of vulnerability in their
00:45:34
in their annotating from one another so i just have a comment about the private annotations versus public um i actually have not encouraged them
00:45:47
to use the private ones very much and they often confuse it and probably part of it is just their whole outlook on education and not wanting other people to see their thoughts or feeling like they're not worthy um but it took me a while to figure out
00:46:00
that some students were annotating but they were making them private because they thought i could see private ones and you know not the class and they don't want other people to see that um and then finally i figured it out and
00:46:12
there were some who you know they kept saying i know i did it it's there i can see it on my screen and then i couldn't see it on mine and so that's just something to be aware of if you start using it to be really clear students about what private and public
00:46:24
means yeah absolutely yeah and i just found myself talking to someone on twitter about this too because you'd think that private would be a separate thing from being in a group but as cheryl was sort of describing
00:46:38
it's like inside of every group there's the possibility to have it private annotations that you can then toggle to be visible to that group that doesn't mean it toggles them to full visibility if the group you happen to be working in
00:46:50
is the in the wild public layer then yes they would be fully public but anytime you're in a private group um you would just be toggling them to visibility within that group like in the lms or outside of it yeah that's i think that's i've seen
00:47:03
both cases right where people it's like i entered a bunch of annotations and nobody ever saw them and i'm confused like you're mentioning holly but at the same time cheryl it's like people can use it as a way to draft some first thinking
00:47:15
and then maybe later expose it when it makes sense yeah or or you know one of the one of my goals for students is to really feel like these these these books are theirs and and that they they can have a special
00:47:28
private relationship with the text that isn't necessarily um connected to a performance of any kind um and and so i want to make sure that they
00:47:41
have that option uh where if they want to kind of practice or rehearse or or make comments that really are just for them um you know that that space is there
00:47:52
as well yeah and i see um is it over uh making a comment in the text about wanting the students to see themselves as experts of their own thinking and meaning making
00:48:06
and really to own the book too right in a way not not necessarily in the physical sense but in the intellectual sense right so they feel like their relationship to the book is something of their own making as opposed to something that
00:48:18
the teacher handed them or whatever or isaac newton handed them yeah well you know that actually makes me think that um i want to make two little plugs here for a couple of other things that are happening
00:48:30
here at i annotate um one is this i see going through the chat this kind of conversation around like you know what counts as an annotation right and getting people engaged in the idea of annotating does it always have to be a piece of formal text on another piece
00:48:44
of formal text or something and um as i'm sure you've seen on thursday oops i have to get it right in the camera um raymie and antero will be having a conversation um at noon on thurs noon eastern on
00:48:56
thursday around their book annotation and um this book does a really good job of i think starting to unpack the idea of annotation and how it can be many different kinds of things
00:49:09
and they've also been holding a really great twitter uh a hashtag kind of conversation on twitter around this where people are hashtagging um uh tweets that represent
00:49:21
annotations of some kind maybe they're a picture of something or something else you know something out in the real world like you were talking show kind of reverse annotation that ends up being an annotation itself or anything from a tattoo
00:49:32
to sky writing to graffiti you know there's just so many different ways that the world presents us with opportunities to add an extra layer of meaning on top of it and i think this book does a great job of kind of helping unpack that and they're going to talk about it on
00:49:45
thursday at noon so we should we should um think about that there and then the other thing i wanted to mention is i make a plug for tomorrow's keynote where um a couple of really special people i mean everybody here is special but um
00:49:58
near and dear to my heart um manuel espinosa and um and frida whose name i'm blanking on right now and i feel really bad um because um frida silva will will be here from the right to dignity lab
00:50:10
and this is a project that folks might not have heard about that might resonate with some of your guys's work where um manuel is a is a teacher at the university of colorado denver and he works on a program called the right
00:50:23
to dignity lab where he actually brings together students in um sort of cohorts and groups and their goal they have a goal and that goal is to
00:50:35
amend the colorado state constitution to make education a human right so the purpose of their class or classes is to do that and they use annotation to
00:50:48
do it um in many ways and you'll hear a lot more about that in the keynote tomorrow but it's just an incredibly inspiring practice of bridging that real world uh kind of
00:50:59
work into the classroom using annotation as the bridge because they're addressing a real world issue but then also using it to advance their own kind of intellectual pathways and take ownership
00:51:12
over their own scholarship in a really um eventually hopefully public way and so a big plug for both of those i i hope you guys will be able to attend them are you going to are you folks going to be able to attend more of these sessions
00:51:24
they are being recorded too though i'll have to hit the recording because i probably will be at that moment um helping my faculty with hypothesis and social annotation so sadly
00:51:38
that seems like a good priority to have though yeah and i'll be teaching my students and discussing annotations okay you guys are going to be hard at work what happened to that whole thing where teachers
00:51:50
supposedly have the summer off and it doesn't exist right yeah my husband keeps asking me that yeah well you know uh we've been um reacting to the audience here we've heard from you guys and i'm wondering holly and
00:52:05
cheryl do you guys have do you guys have kind of questions or thoughts that you might have for some of the other people here about about anything that has been
00:52:16
working under your skin or v's in your bonnet think about it for a second you don't have to well i did respond to it in the chat some there was the side conversation about
00:52:31
students annotating and whether we use models of you know famous geniuses and that sort of thing um i think one of the the great things about annotation in general and making it social in particular and
00:52:44
hypothesis as the tool for it is it really um is not just telling students but showing them that their thoughts matter and their thoughts are important and they're worth sharing with other people
00:52:56
um and for some of them that's a new experience so i i really like that um and i think i've only ever uh kind of shown them medieval manuscripts and marginalia
00:53:10
and the doodles and and commentary uh there to help students to reinforce the idea that that reading is a conversation and that annotating is a is a kind of
00:53:23
way of bringing that conversation into a physical act you know to that you're not talking out loud to the book like you maybe sometimes you do when you read i know i have um or certainly to movies i've watched
00:53:36
talks out loud and screamed like no don't go in there and again if i imagine a kind of ideal reading practice um it's one that is engaged you know in an embodied way
00:53:48
and um that allows there to be a conversation not just to publish students ideas with one another to show that they matter but to show that they're they can have a conversation with the
00:54:01
author that the author isn't necessarily an authority uh but somebody um kind of presenting ideas that they want um their readers to challenge
00:54:13
uh or be challenged by and so if i show annotations by anyone famous it would only be to kind of exemplify this is a conversation um not this is how they do it or this is
00:54:28
how you should do it yeah i was amused i think it was yesterday in yesterday's office hours with um lissandra i think that's where it came up we were talking about how it's kind of nice to read dead authors
00:54:42
because you really feel like you can talk back to them because they're dead even though the canonized authors may seem a little more intimidating so you know if you're gonna annotate isaac newton who has come up in the chat
00:54:54
maybe that's intimidating but um maybe annotation can be a way to empower empower you as a student or or a teacher right do you have you guys used annotation in your own kind of
00:55:06
you know professional and scholarly practice outside of the teaching and learning part of things do you mean digital or do i like analytics either actually yeah i mean either way
00:55:20
annotation annotation annotation i'll give you a visual hold on all right i mean you know outside of hypothesis i have sticky note annotations right so i'm always annotating um to i don't know if you can
00:55:36
see it here you can yeah there's a lot of stuff stuck in there yeah a lot of stuff stuck in there so um you know certainly for both for both teaching and scholarship um that practice is important
00:55:49
whether it's through a digital tool um or analog yeah but i've been i'm sort of stuck on this twitter thing i kind of can't get my mind around it i it never occurred to me that twitter is
00:56:02
a type of social annotation but it totally is and i don't my mind's like a little bit been a little bit blown for the last 20 minutes wrapping my head around that so i guess that's another way
00:56:14
professionally yes that we annotate i i don't annotate things that i read for pleasure but things that i read to learn i annotate a lot and just last week as part of customizing
00:56:28
our css text we're including student stories and writing some of our own and so i wrote about how when i went to the university of michigan after being in a small high school i didn't have good study strategies and
00:56:40
no one taught me to annotate but i naturally started doing it for my spanish literature classes because i would write translations and questions and that sort of thing um and i'd like to say that i just immediately went oh my gosh i should do
00:56:52
this for all my classes but i didn't it took me time to learn to do that as a really good strategy so i always tell my students this is why i'm teaching you this now it is so helpful and so important and i
00:57:04
do show them my books and how i still do it today yeah that makes me want to plug our world languages um panel that's going to be on one of these days i need to remember which one it is too
00:57:16
where we're actually going to discuss annotation of text in different languages and annotations in different languages as well so i can certainly understand that also as a former spanish literature major
00:57:27
myself hearts out to you great stuff well we've taken up a whole bunch of your time and i know that i mean sounds like you guys actually still have a lot of work to do
00:57:39
so i don't want to keep you too late um any parting thoughts i'm holly before you uh you go back to lovely muskegon no just thank you thank you so much how about you cheryl
00:57:52
no but feel free anyone you know email me i can share my email here i'm happy to um share assignments prompts help you
00:58:05
think about a way to use hypothesis um in your classroom i'm i'm you know a big a big big fan and i am always looking for new approaches so
00:58:16
um be in touch that's very generous of you yeah love you both thank you so much um and i would definitely um holly i'd love to hook you up with i don't know if you know the folks over at monroe community
00:58:29
college in rochester new york who also um went down the pathway of customizing oer for college success i think that if i don't know if you have other colleagues who are you've met who are working in that space but i'd love
00:58:41
to connect you and i can do that offline if you want and cheryl i okay great um and charlotte if you want to i could put you in touch with um amanda lacastro at penn too if you
00:58:53
would like a local buddy yeah um she's fantastic she now works in the libraries at penn so yeah she might know i have a colleague who's does instructional design at penn who she might know too so that i would love to network with
00:59:07
her she's just i think she's just moving physically houses now as the job is new but um i'll put you to touch them we'll see what goes from there thank you well thank you so much for for coming today this was fantastic
00:59:19
i really loved the conversation i learned a lot um and i really appreciate you guys hey time to come today thank you yeah absolutely thank you everybody for the chat and your great questions
00:59:38
you
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