Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:07
hey there welcome to liquid margins this episode is number 34. can't believe it we've had so many great shows and it's gotten to the point where i'm
00:00:21
starting to forget um which ones which topics we've covered because we've had that many shows so uh this one is orientation by annotation hypothesis
00:00:34
in first year seminar today's guess um cheryl sawin hopefully i'm pronouncing that correctly associate director and associate professor
00:00:46
intellectual heritage program at temple university jacqueline howard administrative assistant professor of technology and women's history at tulane university and heather walder assistant teaching
00:00:58
professor archaeology and anthropology university of wisconsin lacrosse and then our moderator today the inimitable jeremy dean vp of education at
00:01:12
hypothesis and i am going to stop talking now and turn it over to jeremy so again thanks for being here it's going to be a great show
00:01:26
awesome i'm super excited to be here with you all um to talk about this topic of social annotation the first year experience um i want to start off general uh looks like there are a lot of folks in the
00:01:38
audience who you know are teaching in similar programs um but i just want to start off general to sort of get everybody to talk a little bit about um you know what is the first year experience uh what is the
00:01:50
what are what are first-year seminars what is why are they important what are the goals what are the challenges and maybe just go around them talking about that very general idea of this particular type of course and maybe starting with you cheryl
00:02:03
oh my goodness all right so this is going to be awkward because the intellectual heritage program at temple university isn't a traditional first-year
00:02:14
experience we frequently do have sophomores in the courses and sometimes even transfer students with junior status however it functions very much like a first year seminar in that it is
00:02:27
typically students introductions to the humanities and to the liberal arts students coming from all different schools and colleges within temple
00:02:38
university tend to be pretty siloed and they don't oftentimes have the opportunity to participate in a seminar style course where they get to communicate with each other share ideas build knowledge
00:02:50
and really learn how to engage deeply with ideas and sometimes difficult texts our two courses are called the good life and the common good so students get to not only read works of ancient and
00:03:04
modern literature philosophy political philosophy from a diverse and global group of authors but they get to connect all of those texts and ideas to things that are going
00:03:16
around in the world today and to themselves and participate in a lot of self-reflection and self-efficacy which i think are usually key components of a first-year experience course as well learning how to be
00:03:29
a member of the learning community learning how to challenge one another respectfully learning how to take perspectives into account when thinking about your own position and where you stand
00:03:40
learning how to make claims and use evidence to support those claims and also hopefully have fun in the process and build community that isn't just focused on um
00:03:52
intellectual pursuits but maybe on social pursuits as well so it functions in that space but because of agreement associations with community colleges and uh the university's
00:04:05
commitment for students to graduate in four years we're a little bit more flexible when it comes to required first-year courses that was amazing cheryl thank you um yeah let's let's continue in that vein
00:04:17
and sort of understand from each of you the character of your particular first year teaching experience we'll use first year in quotation marks because maybe you know there's some diversity there which i think is great but there's clearly going to be a theme here with
00:04:30
everything that cheryl said but let's uh let's hear what it's all about at tulane from jacqueline hi um thanks for having me so at tulane we have a program called the tides program and this is a first year
00:04:41
experience program that pulls um instructors from across the entire university and it really gives us the freedom to develop courses based off our expertise and the reason that they do it
00:04:53
this way is they want um tulene wants um students to build deep relationships with faculty and so students can take courses that they're interested in and meet with faculty
00:05:06
and have a close experience with them another goal of this program is so that students can be introduced in a safe space to college-level skills so we focus on
00:05:18
close reading using the library but also using student services such as counseling services and other services that are available to students so we have a peer mentor in the course that helps facilitate that
00:05:32
we also have a goal of connecting students to new orleans with tulane being a where it's positioned in our community as a privileged mostly white university we try to create
00:05:45
intentional ways to get students involved in the new orleans community because often they don't leave campus and so we have field trips and things like that to help get students into the into the community and it's also about meeting local
00:05:58
leaders and having students have a better connection with new orleans that's amazing uh and i should say uh that we have a distinguished alumni of uh tulane university that's one of our
00:06:13
uh my colleagues here becky george who's i don't know if tides was i think tides was around uh becky's been very interested in connecting with tides as she started to be this customer success manager for for tulane and
00:06:25
recently made a visit there uh thanks jacqueline so heather how is the program at university wisconsin lacrosse similar different in focus from from tides and from the intellectual heritage
00:06:37
program at tulane sure um well thank you for having me our first year seminar program is actually very young we were in the process of developing it in the 2018-19 school year
00:06:50
doing some kind of just preliminary trial courses with a few faculty and i trained for the program and actually taught my first first year seminar in fall of 2020
00:07:04
so what we've been doing over the last few years is helping students adjust to college and utilizing similar content across all first-year seminars on campus where we
00:07:16
focus on modules like belonging or using library or other campus resources finding scholarship money and other kind of common themes and then each instructor who teaches a first year
00:07:30
seminar um also includes two credits worth of their own content so mine is myth busting in archaeology no ancient aliens here and professors try to choose topics that
00:07:43
they think will be discussion sparking and that will interest students to maybe draw them into the major but also give them a chance to discuss topics that are relevant and relate to current issues
00:07:57
each first year seminar includes a group project and this gives students practice doing collaborative work how to set up a google document but also how to communicate effectively with one another
00:08:10
and um the way that that project works across the seminars is really variable we have a lot of freedom in how we organize uh each of these classes as individual
00:08:22
instructors and um overall the goal is to just i think like jacqueline said give the students a chance to connect with a faculty member in a small class setting give them a chance to read deeply to
00:08:35
think about a topic that maybe they've never thought about before and help them get the tools that are going to be necessary for them to be successful on our campus that's awesome uh thanks heather uh well
00:08:50
tell us how social has been particularly useful in this in this specific teaching contest um why social annotation why hypothesis for the first year seminar or for a first year experience course and i'm
00:09:04
going to go in reverse order this time heather if you don't mind continuing to talk and then we'll we'll go to jackie and to jacqueline then to sheryl and also feel free to unmute and huzzah or um or even disagree with
00:09:16
somebody else and it doesn't have to be super you know structured in terms of i love this has become a conversation but great other why social annotation for uh for your first year experience program
00:09:27
well um so i designed the course initially as a completely online asynchronous course because that's the modality that i was teaching in in fall of 2020 in spring of 2021
00:09:40
and so i wanted to figure out a way to have students engaging really deeply with the content and so i was familiar with hypothesis i had heard about it in a um
00:09:53
digital pedagogy workshop uh years ago like in grad school and i was kind of digging through my toolbox trying to figure out a way to have those deep conversations while using an asynchronous format and that is
00:10:07
um i ended up using it that first fall semester and then was able to work with our instructional design folks to get it integrated in canvas for the next semester and then continued using it even when we moved back to
00:10:20
in-person classes because i really did value the level of conversation and students also indicated that they liked being able to annotate on the text being able to think before they spoke so to
00:10:33
speak um and came to class more prepared so um even though the modalities are completely different and i use it in different ways i found that the annotations were still improving the
00:10:45
level of reading and conversation that the students have no matter what way we're meeting that week i imagine that the first year experience teaching first year experience first year summer would be particularly
00:11:00
challenging during the pandemic and in a uh remote or even or asynchronous context because it is so much about uh coming together and and being together and working together um and getting that sense of belonging so that
00:11:13
must have been a challenge super interesting let's go back the other way and hear from jacqueline and tulane about how social annotation was particularly interesting to you for teaching in the tides program um so i started using social annotations
00:11:26
when i was co-teaching a higher level course and it really helped us be able to kind of get rid of the the bland reading response i feel like discussion forums
00:11:38
and those things are starting to become kind of cookie cutter and so we were in pandemic mode and we were looking for a tool that would be more interactive in real time um and then after we did some trial and error era and this is with my
00:11:50
colleague dr claire daniel um we created up some assignments over that and that i was able then to apply to my first year experience course um and so what we do what this assignment does is um it replaces the
00:12:03
reading response so students do a deep reading before they come to class to discuss the reading and what it helped with the first year experience is our students were experiencing a high level of
00:12:14
disengagement um during the pandemic and that's only gotten worse as the sum as semesters have um have moved forward um and so they this was a way for us when people when students stop talking
00:12:28
to be able to go back to the social annotations and start new conversation from what they've already started so it was a nice foundation point that not only helped them prepare for that hard
00:12:40
discussion but then also helped me sustain the discussion um later on when things were getting tough in the classroom that's great uh cheryl um wow so
00:12:56
very similar um motivations for using social annotation i i came to hypothesis uh as a dinosaur through rap genius and so um yeah yes so i i forgot about our history
00:13:09
there yeah see now it all comes back to you so um when when uh rap genius created lit genius and jeremy was kind of a spearheaded spearhead of that um i had students annotate the dow day chain
00:13:22
um it was a text that was very difficult to uh to parse even though it might seem easy to read and i see that i have some colleagues from our program on here today so and many of them are much
00:13:35
better suited to talk about that text and teaching it but um i found that students i know that both of you talked about belonging and the importance in the freshman seminar of feeling as though you belong and our students at
00:13:46
temple frequently feel as though they don't have the tools or the capacity to have original thinking about texts that are are unusual for them or
00:13:58
challenging and you know you always have those students who might raise their hand and say i know this is a stupid question but or they might in response to a question that you or a fellow classmate asks say oh this is a stretch
00:14:11
but um but i found that when when annotating in a social setting where students can see one another engaging with ideas it helps students very quickly recognize
00:14:24
that they can do hard things or that you know their question is a question that was shared widely by everybody else in the class not only does this help to increase engagement but it allows
00:14:37
students to have some a sense of authority or self worth uh when it comes to directly engaging with content what really whether it's um you know a two
00:14:51
pack song or uh you know the chapter two of the doubt itching or uh even you know an article from vice magazine so i find that the power of collective annotation uh is
00:15:05
you know magnifies engagement tenfold but also really is a tool that helps with this piece about belonging cheryl i want to continue and maybe kind
00:15:18
of start to open this up into more of a conversation in terms of that idea of um sounds like you know making students feel like they belong making students more comfortable you know coming to college it's it's
00:15:30
it's a new experience right new and difficult reading new and difficult expectations um and i wonder if we could just sort of riff on that idea of um the various aspects of the first year experience that are trying to sort of
00:15:42
prepare the student for the intellectual academic activities that are that are coming and how social annotation helps with that if that was too vague but can you riff on that cheryl yeah i mean i was thinking about
00:15:55
a sample assignment that i might be able to share with folks and this is not sexy at all but i do have students annotate the syllabus and especially as heather and jacqueline were talking about in
00:16:06
this kind of post-ish pandemic world and in some way you know so many students uh being shunted into online learning unwillingly and i'm a an online educator i love teaching
00:16:18
online especially asynchronously online pre-pandemic i'm not sure how you feel about it anymore but um students don't really know how to be students in in the college setting a lot
00:16:30
of times high school especially public high schools don't provide syllabi for their students so they don't know how to read it and that document can be pretty daunting especially as institutions require us to put more and more policies
00:16:43
and resources and statements in our syllabi all of which are very very good and necessary but students will just skim over it and you know maybe get to
00:16:55
looking at what do i have to do for tomorrow's class so annotating the syllabus is a great way for students to share some of what they're worried about or curious about
00:17:07
in the course and one of the most powerful things that i did kind of by mistake was that i asked students to identify one of the five learning objectives or goals for the
00:17:18
course that felt meaningful for them and to talk a little bit about why and what what they hoped they would achieve and accomplish and then at the end of the semester i had them go back to those annotations and revisit
00:17:31
the questions that they had and uh you know it was a little bit scary for me because i wasn't sure what would happen you know they might say oh i still have those questions or no this goal was never met
00:17:42
but it was really exciting to see the self-reflection and the ownership that they took um just through annotating the syllabus that's really cool
00:17:55
some of the questions i love that i mean i think it's one of the i don't particularly pay attention to this channel on twitter but there's always the like seasonal complaints of like oh the student came to my office hours and asked me this thing and it was on the syllabus it's like so you know read the
00:18:07
syllabus but not just you know know the syllabus there and read it but really dive into it think about the expectations of the course and that's part of you know i just love the idea of ownership that you talked about i think that's such a
00:18:19
big part of kind of becoming a college student is starting to own you know the work and then as you obviously you know move to more advanced levels to really become a scholar yourself um so i
00:18:31
love that yeah i can tell you that one you know i know i'm not you know a neurologist or neuropsychologist and i'm really interested to find out what is going on with our brains with all
00:18:45
this online screen time and while i'm a huge advocate of access to texts and i think it's fantastic that we have electronic texts it it can be i think also
00:18:58
really difficult for students um for all sorts of reasons for me too to just be staring at a screen for so long and to not be able to like manipulate it and so the same is true with syllabi especially
00:19:10
moving to online you know being able to highlight and to note and to ask a question to get a reply to you know add a funny meme to express your confusion you know these are all ways to kind of
00:19:22
make these texts come alive um in a very unique fashion and i think might be the key to helping students in an online setting especially but even in a face-to-face course where
00:19:36
they're using electronic texts um allow them to to to live and breathe you know together reader and and writer or you know text and audience great so the students are moving to to new
00:19:50
orleans they arrive on campus for school at tulane how does social annotation help orient them to what's going to be expected of them in the next uh four years or continue with the however you want from that jacqueline
00:20:04
yeah i think that it really helps them be able to understand what's expected of them when when a professor um assigns reading and what it means to be prepared for um
00:20:16
coming to class for discussion or even for lecture um i i use mostly discussion in my classes and so it really helps um get away from this mindset that you're going to be quizzed over information you know that there's a
00:20:30
right answer and a wrong answer and so it really helps them build an interpretation and nuance in while they're doing their readings but also it helps them incorporate other
00:20:42
readings together so i have this exercise where every two or three readings we go back and we look at the readings that we've annotated and we bring out common themes
00:20:54
um and then we will incorporate those into annotations so we're always revisiting our annotations and our assignments and adding to them as the semester goes goes on and that seems to help us draw
00:21:07
connections across multiple readings so it's not just every day is a different and by itself that we're drawing larger connections i don't know if you have that assignment
00:21:21
in a way that you'd be willing to share but that idea of of revisiting annotations if so the uh if you have some some kind of prompt that you use for that it's a it's a great idea um something i'd love to share with the
00:21:32
community sure i i don't have it with me right now but i'm happy to show you yeah that'd be awesome um and also give us feedback about the ways that we could develop the tool to better facilitate
00:21:44
that kind of revisiting and harvesting of you know the gems or the ideas um definitely my ultimate vision is that this is a way that you know your notes your conversations move in a direction of a theme or topic
00:21:56
that then can be leveraged in into maybe a final essay or some other summative project for a course and the more that hypothesis can do to sort of t the student up to have done that work and say well i've got this work i've got this body of work that i can now use
00:22:09
again that's sort of one of those those basic skills of college too when you get the paper sign you're like oh wow i should have been doing the reading i should have been taking notes i should have been having some topic around my notes because now i'm being asked to to go back and do all this stuff but with
00:22:22
hypothesis you've done that work right it's there it is to show you yeah it's there and so you can revisit it it's not just you know a graded assignment it's something that um is a tool
00:22:34
yeah an indisposable one i mean that in the sense of like you're not kind of doing something like a quiz i love your theme about the sort of disposable things like discussion forums cookie cutter and quizzes kind of disposable those aren't really not going to use that
00:22:47
but this is something that's in disposable sort of sustainable because you're going to hopefully continue to use it maybe even the tool itself and another course at tulane heather your thoughts on how social annotation helps orient
00:22:58
students to the college experience well um i do a really similar uh thing it's the idea that when we annotate we can read a text and get something out of it and then having the students return to
00:23:11
it is one of the things that i've played around with doing both in class and then outside of class in my course students have reflections that they put together about once a month for the course of the four month semester and
00:23:25
they're asked to think about the case studies that they've read about and you can actually see them going back to the readings because hypothesis will show in canvas that they've opened it again and it doesn't show me what
00:23:37
they've done and that's fine but it does show that they're going back they're looking up what they said or what others said and hopefully drawing on those texts pulling out details to then incorporate into their own
00:23:50
uh comparison and contrast reflections or other reflections on the texts but also on the concepts but i actually do a reading quiz i'm uh i i do have some like
00:24:03
um concrete questions that i like them to get out like teaching them to read to find a detail like um what's the evidence that ancient egyptians built the pyramids during the old kingdom what are the
00:24:16
tools and the artifacts that are found and so by having them search for those answers and then find them highlight them i we practice like when you find an answer to a quiz question highlight it point it out and
00:24:28
they can take the quiz you know a couple of times i think um and then they have all of this knowledge built up in the annotations and the answers to the quiz so that when they're ready to write their reflection
00:24:40
as you said it's all there um so we're building something together as we go through these case studies together that's great um so i want to there's been a rich conversation in the chat that i haven't
00:24:55
been able to focus on because we've been because i've been engaged with you guys but i wanted to make sure i gave every each of you a chance to sort of talk about some aspect of hypothesis social annotation the first year experience
00:25:06
course that you teach um that maybe i haven't been able to elicit in the in the questions and conversation um and maybe this time i'm just going to switch it up and start with you jacqueline and see like is there anything you were thinking about in
00:25:18
preparation for this um but you were thinking that this is one aspect of my experience that i'd like to share with this community sure um so i'm an editor of a guide called the feminist pedagogy for teaching online guide and i'll put that
00:25:31
in the chat um but this guide is really the basis of my pedagogy whether it's in in an online classroom or not and this is an intersectional feminist framework and it really what some of the key tenants is
00:25:44
this idea that knowledge is constructed and so i feel like the social annotation tool really helps to show that that that that tenant is um a big part of learning um it also encourages
00:25:57
cooperative learning and so with students engaging together but also treating students as agenda co-educators their voice is as important as mine in the classroom and i hope that by
00:26:10
providing multiple ways for them to share their voices whether it's through that social annotation tool or that gives them the confidence to talk in class um that we are you know sustaining that model
00:26:22
and it also creates self-care and boundaries so what maybe the student doesn't want to talk in class but they feel more comfortable on the social annotation tool and and something i struggle with too is sometimes students aren't comfortable with the social
00:26:34
annotation tool and so you know it's not a perfect philosophy but it is something that um you know i'm constantly striving and thinking about is how how do how do you leverage technology tools in a way
00:26:47
that supports pedagogy and what i believe in i feel like there's an article here for a social annotation and this feminist pedagogy that could come from you at
00:26:59
some point let us know if we can we can help in any way i would certainly love to have you blog about it one of the interesting things about what you said jacqueline is you know those some of those concepts where you can introduce them to students um and philosophically they may they may
00:27:12
resonate right but like what does it look like in practice right it's hard to like build and then outside of social animation like how do you make your classroom open to that you know more horizontal and um and really show that knowledge is
00:27:26
constructed not just read some theorists around and it's interesting to think that social annotation as a tool can help sort of see it in action as it were well it's okay it's okay to read old things right it's okay to read things that are outdated and i think the social
00:27:39
annotation tool helps with that yeah and i just also love the idea that like you're part of this you know like you're writing on the text you're not just reading you're not just being told what other people thought in history but you're contributing to that conversation
00:27:53
um heather let's go to you next anything that you were sort of thinking as you prepared for today that you want to share before we uh open it up to conversa uh questions yeah um one of the things that i really like about hypothesis is we've touched
00:28:06
on this a little is the idea that when we're dealing with one of these challenging texts um that it gives students a way to participate in a way that feels comfortable an example in my class is we talk about
00:28:19
an article called why the whiteness of archaeology is a problem because my discipline is historically very colonial and very western in its scientific perspectives and way of thinking
00:28:31
and even ideas like aliens built the egyptian pyramids have an undertone of racism as they imply that indigenous peoples around the world were unable to create these great accomplishments on
00:28:45
their own and that's a kind of a big idea for students to tackle and we are dealing with it throughout the entire semester but when they read the article on whiteness and its role in archaeology
00:28:58
it gives students a way to have a much better conversation than we could have just by talking in the classroom because they they want to choose their words very carefully
00:29:09
in dealing with the topic as as challenging as discussing race and racism so i really really value the way that they prepare for difficult discussions by annotating
00:29:21
in advance and do any of you see that i think a few of you mentioned this um do any of you seen that play out so like i might customize myself to sharing my ideas
00:29:35
with others via the asynchronous you know annotation and the time i have there but then do you see that start to transfer into other areas where students gain confidence and are able to um to be more confident sharing you know in
00:29:48
other contexts their their own ideas i see lots of head snotting they can get back i'll i'll just share that the students sometimes just will say like as i said in my annotation and then and that's fine because then they're
00:30:01
saying that this idea was so important that they wanted to share it both in text and then were comfortable sharing it verbally with the large group or sometimes in their small groups you'll hear that too um
00:30:13
so and that's that's great because then i feel that they're prepared to have that difficult conversation that's awesome all right cheryl we're gonna just hear from you about anything you want to share before we open it up for questions well i'll i'll just sort
00:30:25
of stay on that train um you know we have a lot of international students we all we have a lot of first generation college students we have a lot of non-traditional age students we have a lot of students who have disrupted their education and come back
00:30:38
we and and social annotation has empowered these students in a variety of ways that allows their voice to be heard inside of the classroom maybe through
00:30:50
this kind of sideways path and not only have students commented that by annotating and rehearsing and and then seeing their peers replying and responding to their ideas not only does
00:31:03
it bolster their confidence to um you know speak in in this class but it has had a ripple effect in their other classes as well um and they frequently say you know we wish we were able to use
00:31:15
hypothesis in our other courses um and you know my pedagogy aligns really strongly with with uh both heather and jacqueline's in that this de-centering
00:31:26
um of the text of the instructor um you know is is a powerful tool and one of the things that i think is really kind of interesting and again i would love to study it but i don't have the
00:31:39
background to do that is i think that something really powerful happens when a student doesn't necessarily hear their voice in class but but sees their ideas in print alongside the
00:31:50
text of these published authors if that's what you're annotating um and it creates a kind of leveling or decentering that allows students to be and i think i can't remember heather if it was you or jacqueline who
00:32:04
said this but sort of on the same journey just maybe a little bit you know just got started but but on the same journey as marx or on the same journey as okay jemison or you know on the center and um
00:32:17
you know that it liberates us from this kind of toxic belief that in order and maybe i just reproduced that by saying you know in order to have anything to say you have to already know you know um and and then that really does
00:32:30
diminish what's possible in terms of of um creative problem solving contributing to the you know world of ideas working on a very specific project that kind of thing um and then the last thing i'll say is
00:32:44
that you know in in the course this the courses that i teach a lot of collaboration happens especially from the midpoint toward the end of the semester and and so uh practicing these kinds of
00:32:56
collaborations in a way that is a little bit less threatening where students have the time to think on their own to select you know what in the text compels them or to ask for for help or pose a
00:33:09
question to another individual in class or to me does give them that low stakes rehearsing of of skills that are so important you know as they
00:33:21
move out of the college environment and work with folks you know in a collaborative nature so it's um you know powerful in that way as well that's amazing thank you so much um
00:33:34
well i want uh we got about seven minutes left and there's been a lot of conversation in the chat um and i just want to give folks in the audience a chance to i think you can raise your
00:33:46
hand or something like that yes there's a raise a hand button or maybe some of my colleagues that hypothesis saw a particular rich question that they'd like to to surface um but at this point i'd like to open it up to
00:33:58
to the audience to see what else they're interested in hearing about from our panelists uh so jeremy there are some questions um i've been um multitasking here so haven't been able
00:34:12
to completely focus on what's been said in the show i hate when that happens but it does happen sometimes so um if these have already been answered
00:34:24
we can maybe answer them more fultonly or move on to the next ones um hart wilson has asked are any of you using hypothesis in small groups and if so how does that differ from whole class
00:34:37
discussions i'm yes i so sometimes what i'll do is i'll actually put students in teams ahead of time and have them working on different type of types of annotations
00:34:53
so one might be working on making connections to things going on in the world today one team might be researching uh interesting you know key terms or ideas and uh providing
00:35:06
visual or or verbal embellishment or enrichment for those one team might be working on connections connecting to other texts that we've read other students annotations in those
00:35:19
texts and then um they'll do that prior to meeting in class if it's a face-to-face and per you know synchronous session and then uh they'll i'll scramble those
00:35:31
groups in class so that there's a sort of uh expert from each group who has a sense of what their team was working on and then they they try to connect those
00:35:42
ideas all together and um you know build a claim about the text that's that's one way that's another assignment cheryl that if you're willing to share i bet our i bet folks would be very interested in when you do that i imagine you're not
00:35:55
actually using like the the group functionality in canvas and hypothesis because you want students to see each other's annotations in that context yeah do you have them use tags for that so it says okay absolutely yeah so they have um you
00:36:08
know a tag for group a group b group c or or if the group has like a basic question then i'll have them post that question as the tag um i've been experimenting a lot with tags lately actually
00:36:20
cool well let's talk about that there's uh i want we want to build out functionality there to kind of go back and visit those different you know tags and themes um others small group work or whether it's private groups small groups
00:36:32
or um or using tags for groups like like cheryl these are small courses i imagine already so i have tried um having them annotate within their small discussion group so
00:36:45
that they can see who they're they already know who they would be talking to they've met these people in class and i often will then put the groups on the big screen uh in the classroom and
00:36:57
kind of point out the best ideas or like the most most thought-provoking or the ones that generated a lot of discussion from the small groups but i found that they like to know that i'm going to do that in advance so that what
00:37:10
they did share in the small group then doesn't become public to the large group so it's sort of a balance um i really like the idea of giving the groups different tasks
00:37:22
uh i do similar things where you can ask um there's a question in the chat how much and what kind of guidance do you provide students as to the types of comments and questions they can make and i give
00:37:34
suggestions like point out key terms or make a connection to the news but i've never given that as explicitly so that might be one way to do it without having to deal with the teeny
00:37:46
tiny groups and all of the extra work that can sometimes lead to okay um may i may i just jump in because i want to say that um cheryl has a hard stop at
00:37:59
um 9 45 or 12 45 where she is so um let me just it's two minutes up so i just want to say cheryl thank you so much for joining us today um and so um
00:38:12
sorry you have to drop off and safe travels thank you and i am absolutely happy i'll put my email in the chat anyone can ping me anytime for sample uh you know prompts and
00:38:25
follow-up but there i know there's a really rich and interesting conversation going in the chat around success accessibility and screen readers and i'm um i have a lot to to say and think about that too so i'm happy to continue that conversation with folks who are
00:38:38
working in the chat there as well on that topic and thank you heather and jacqueline bye jeremy bye everybody bye cheryl thanks um jacqueline did you want to add anything about this the group question
00:38:50
um we we just do um some primary source analysis where i'll put up three different primary sources and then i assign different groups to do different but i it's not as robust with tagging which i would love to learn more about so
00:39:03
this is a great conversation yeah i would love we have this in kind of dispersed form i'd love to bring together into a kind of teacher resource archive the different ways that
00:39:16
instructors prompt students in different contexts with annotations obviously perhaps maybe at a graduate school level you know you don't necessarily need to tell students like how to annotate and give them an academic article and they're going to know maybe what to do that's that's why
00:39:29
they're in grad school but there's a lot of steps along the way to get into that position you know what you might expect from a first year experience uh course or first year seminar new students at the college level like what are you looking for what activities that you're
00:39:41
performing as you read and really calling those out whether it's in a you know a loose prompt that says these are five things you could do you know as you added just to help them think about what they're doing or you say i want to do i want you to do one of these or eat
00:39:55
one each of these three things you know make a connection to the news make it connected to another text define a term um somehow whatever it is i think that stuff is uh can be a key part of you know structuring annotation for a first year
00:40:07
seminar so teaching students to read or guiding them to read at the college level um for any any maybe we'll just take five more minutes here to close out uh any other questions that we want to oh
00:40:20
we do we have yeah we have a handful more um roberto kill kenny i just want to say i love your name kenny what a great last name um has anyone had experience with a
00:40:31
visually impaired student using hypothesis and i know the document needs to be accessible what but what is the annotation part like thanks thank you roberta
00:40:46
i have not had that experience yet um and so i i would just i think it would work with hypothesis when that time comes with our rep there's been a lot of conversation and links
00:41:00
shared in the chat and we have an internal accessibility advocate um and and partners too at other schools that have um vetted the tool for accessibility helped design um accommodation plans and things like that
00:41:12
um so that i'm sure we could have put you in touch with other instructors in schools that have worked with students using various screen readers for example to um to access hypothesis to create
00:41:26
annotations and things like that um jeremy i was going to jump in there was a question for panelists from brett frasco in the chat um about how much and what kind of guidance you
00:41:39
provide students as to the types of comments questions that they can make on their readings i think i'd be okay hearing too about like what sort of guidance you're giving students just as they're getting comfortable with a new tool and having
00:41:52
those conversations uh and building that community with annotations adding my component to that as well i'm gonna add my component to the question too so what kind of guidance do you provide for the tool for their types of annotations and one question i have
00:42:05
is does that change over the course of a semester because i i've seen in some courses you know there'll be sort of one way that we're going to annotate throughout these are the types of things we're looking for and other times like for this assignment it's going to be different and early on it might be
00:42:17
different from a sort of more summative annotation assignment but it's great great suite of questions there so however you guys want to approach it maybe starting with heather sure um i have sort of like three or four kind of
00:42:30
discussion questions or guiding questions that go along with each reading and i post those in the sort of just um the first page note at the top of the page but then i'll also kind of go through
00:42:43
in some readings and ask them you know do you have experience with this or have you heard about this before right on the text so i'll actually put annotations in myself before it's open to the students so that
00:42:56
they have something to to respond to and they don't have to answer those um they can do something completely different they can ask their own question or point out a definition or something interesting or surprising but
00:43:09
i found it helps if i ask a few questions then they start asking those same kinds of questions later on and i don't need to do it as much as the semester goes on um
00:43:23
for my courses um we oh goodness i just lost my train of thought i'm so sorry um so how what do i how do i prepare them um i
00:43:37
um provide a little prompt at the for every single discussion that is the same and it's very it's more like a free writing exercise to tell them that they need to um write eight to twelve robust sentences
00:43:50
um throughout the entire article and then i give them suggestions about what that might look like and i do say throughout because a lot of times students will use this to only read half the article and so a lot there are a lot
00:44:03
of annotations in the front of the article and not so much towards the end and so you can kind of get a glimpse of what students are reading um but also some of the things i ask them to do is find the research question
00:44:15
find the author's argument find the methods look at the pr look at the citations and ask questions so those are kind of the things that i guide them through the reading
00:44:29
cool um and there's one more question that frannie's surfaced for me that we'll we'll put out there and then wrap things up um friend you can tell me who this is from but i often hear people have had students pre-read annotate text before
00:44:42
discussing the classes anyone had students go back and revise update their most useful annotations after the fact potentially as expansion into papers or other writing this was hinted at um but maybe we can end by
00:44:53
talking about okay you've annotated um what next what do you do with those annotations uh do you guys ha i know one of you mentioned i think uh go haven't seen us go back um and reflect on their anticipated might have been you heather but maybe we can just
00:45:07
sort of end by talking a little bit more about what do we do with all these annotations and do you have any structured ways that you're having students do that um let's start with you jacqueline um i use an entry and exit ticket system
00:45:19
so the entry ticket is the annotations that they do and the exit ticket is a reflection where they go back in and they can add to their annotation or they can add new annotations they can reply and
00:45:31
so it just kind of brings that discussion to an end and then i can use those annotations as a way to figure out if i need to address other themes for the next reading or the next discussion
00:45:43
so for me there it's a teaching tool as well as for them a reading tool can i just ask you to elaborate a little bit on that jaclyn so i if i'm seeing your class i gotta compose an annotation
00:45:55
to come to class then we have a discussion that's the entrance you get and then how does the exit ticket work the exit ticket works and this is something i learned um from note cards right they used to have note cards where you do your entry to get in your exit
00:46:07
ticket um but for the exit ticket i'll maybe give them a prompt with a discussion question where they go back in and they add that to the annotation or they can go in and revise their annotation or they can reply to somebody
00:46:20
and so it's just kind of to get a little deeper into closing that loop um from pre-reading yeah and are they doing that in class actually with hypothesis or is it something they do sort of as a second
00:46:33
homework assignment is like a one-minute paper you know kind of at the end in the last five minutes and we don't always get to it but we do it probably half half of the court half of the classes and they're actually going in with
00:46:46
hypothesis very interesting okay that is super cool um heather yeah the um the reflection that i mentioned is much more of like a one-page
00:46:58
written you know a couple of paragraphs which is again part of our first year seminar is developing just those um first-person writing skills which they've been maybe taught in high school that you're never to use i in your
00:47:11
writing ever ever and then i ask them to give an individual reflection and they they kind of start to struggle with that so i haven't had them go back and actually revise their annotations
00:47:23
in the process of doing that reflection but i wonder if it could even take the place of such a reflection paper i'm not sure if that would fit within our parameters of kind of how our first year
00:47:35
seminar program works but i think it's good to kind of push those boundaries and say why does it have to be in a paper could we could we make the reflection simply a return to the work that's already been done so
00:47:47
um yeah annotation as uh as formative and summative uh assessment or project love it um well i know it's midday friday for some folks and we're rounding the corner
00:48:03
towards the weekend here um i'm going to turn it back to frenny to [Music] close us out but i really enjoyed this conversation and this is a really important conversation and
00:48:15
look forward to continuing to have uh talk to you guys and collaborate around social annotation first year experience and beyond all right thank you jeremy thanks to our wonderful guests today
00:48:29
really appreciated your taking the time to be on the good margins with us heather and jacqueline um and um shout out to um chris aldrich for that last question
00:48:41
chris big fan of the show um almost always with us on liquid origin so we really appreciate you um and uh yeah i just want to say um have a a
00:48:53
wonderful rest of your june we'll probably see you again in july with the next liquid margins and once again keep annotating
End of transcript