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welcome to liquid margins i'm very proud to say this is our 26th liquid margins then we're gonna i know 25th sorry i'm already thinking of the next one
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uh but we're going strong with this it's a great show and this particular one i'm very excited about it's empowering student writing with
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social annotations today's guests are noelle holton brathwaite and she's assistant professor of english at farmingdale state college
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mary treister and i'm really sorry but i forgot to ask how to pronounce your name so i'm hopefully not bundling them merry christmas thank you assistant professor teaching
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of writing at the university of southern california and chris kravina she is associate professor of english at northern virginia community college and our
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moderator today is jeremy dean and he's a vp of education at hypothesis thanks franny i am super excited to be here this morning i
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have been working with mary and chris for several years now mary i believe we met at the university of california irvine for end of workshop i did you maybe helped organize that workshop and chris and i presented together um at i
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annotate several years back in washington dc so and no it's great to to connect with you and i know that you're a long time user hypothesis so i'm super excited to be here with this group of folks um i'm super excited because i'm a
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former writing teacher an english professor and so it's great to be with my kindred spirits um and there's one subtext to this uh conversation i just want to draw people's attention to which is there's a
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fantastic article that um that noelle mary and chris wrote about social annotation from the journal pedagogy a lot of my questions didn't come out from reading that article and
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and their teaching and the research they did so i provided a link actually i just didn't do it for any said i just did it to the host and panel so let me post it in there for everybody um so i'm excited to be here i want to
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start off by allowing each of you guys to tell us a little bit more about your specific educational context what type of schools you teach at what type of courses you use hypothesis in if there's any particular
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demographic specificity to your students um so let's let's start there and maybe we can begin with you noel um yes good good morning or good afternoon just for some of us um i i teach at
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farmingdale state college which is uh part of the suny pantheon uh of school state university of new york we are located in long island right in the middle of long island actually
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and i use hypothesis thus far i've used hypothesis solely with my first year composition students
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this semester i'm actually going to use it again with my first year students but i'm also going to use it in a journalism feature writing class that i'm teaching and i'm very excited
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about that yes chris you want to go next sure i'm chris carvina i teach at northern virginia community college which is one of the largest community colleges in
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the united states we have six campuses i always kind of have to count on my fingers to remember how many we have i teach at manassas which is
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the smallest of our our kind of main campuses our medical education campus is actually smaller but they're a lot more specialized um i have used hypothesis with
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my second semester composition courses i haven't taught that course in a little while um it has been i do need more more more fingers to count the campus estate
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uh it has been a couple of years since i've used hypothesis with those students because i haven't taught it since since the pandemic started and i'm looking forward to using it
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again i understand our community college system is getting ready to do a pilot and i have put my hand up for pilot integration with canvas which is our learning management system and and once that
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integration starts i'm definitely going to be using that with all of my classes because i do teach the first and second year or second semester composition as well as an occasional
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literature class that's uh that i think will be fantastic to use hypothesis with just a quick note i think you did more than just raise your hand i think you helped shove a hypothesis into the
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conversation there so thank you for that we're looking forward to getting the pilot off the ground mary hi everyone um yes i teach at the university of southern california which
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is in los angeles um it's a private four-year institution um i generally teach with hypothesis in my first year composition courses
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but i also teach an advanced second semester composition course which is typically for our juniors and seniors so those are the two contexts that i've tried the school out in
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um i think in terms of demographics usc is often ranked very high up there as far as a large international population um so yeah i think those are the those are
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the constraints i'm working with thanks so much i think one of the really neat things about the three of you and an article that you wrote the research you did even though you're all teaching similar courses you are in very different contexts with like a four-year private four-year public in a two-year
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public so i think that's really interesting that to see that diversity um the article that you wrote for pedagogy sort of frames the problem for your students as the kind of in the echo chamber you know of reading on the
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internet and not getting out of a bubble of information that may be misinformation um i'm wondering what other challenges you and your students face uh or face that led you to adopt a tool
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like hypothesis what were you seeing what were you seeing what were you feeling what were the pain points you guys were experiencing that said i need something that's going to help us read uh better and read together
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maybe we can reverse this time and start with you mary um such a good question yeah i think for my student population what i was finding when i first joined the faculty here was that my students
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would arrive at the university believing that they were already expert readers and i think what i was finding as i was evaluating their writing was that they were tending to use more basic
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strategies of interpretation so i'd see a lot of information dumping and a lot of quoting from other authors as though it reinforced my students own points where what we really want to do in our
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courses is stress critical reasoning and critical thinking and taking an original viewpoint and adding something to the discussion and so hypothesis i think what it what it helped me to do was really develop a
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pedagogy that would be organized around re-centering reading in the classroom and thinking of it as a kind of sequential process that they could
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you know practice different skills varying from simpler to more complex but really trying to help them think about what are other strategies available to you other than quoting and directly
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um summarizing and paraphrasing um so i think i think that's where i kind of started with it and how i implemented it chris you want to pick up there yeah and i think that i have used
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critical annotation in um in a number of of context even before hypothesis i started out as a high school teacher and in those contexts
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i started using a tool a web tool called comment years and years ago which was a web annotation tool um and i've also done it where i have printed out
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text blown it up put it on big paper there's the high school teacher in me i'm i'm the the office supply queen um big paper and said let's write on this together and think it through together
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for for me it has been a situation where i think that students often feel like they're the only one who is having some issues with understanding
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what's going on and they are a little afraid to question or to speculate but once it becomes a more social activity they seem to be more
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inclined to um to take a little bit more of a risk in their in their reading and to and to be a little bit more open i love that so much i really want to come back to your points there chris uh
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noelle what were some of the challenges that you were facing with students that led you to hypothesis and social annotation well interestingly enough my own
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background uh was a huge motivating factor when i learned about social annotation because i am a former journalist and i
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noticed in my own writing that when i when i collected information i interviewed sources
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and i sat down to write there was a huge difference in the ease of writing and the quality of writing that i was able to produce when i i simply
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i simply followed those steps without having conversations with other reporters with editors without engaging with with copy editors even
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and i i realized my writing was so much richer when i was able to talk through um the the information and sort of um really
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develop a perspective about what it was i was writing about and i realized that those conversations were key and crucial so when i landed in the writing classroom
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i would say things like writing is is a social uh activity um and and it's a myth that the writer just uh operates in isolation but
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there's a there's a difference between being able to say that and being able to to show it and even though i would do group work in the writing classroom um i felt that social annotation was a
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tool to take it take it back uh several steps and allow students to realize that that reading was key but but thinking and having
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conversations about what one is reading is i think really what pushes one forward in the writing process and specifically for my campus we have a largely commuter campus
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i would say probably 90 percent of our student body commutes to campus and most of our students have jobs and lots of responsibilities outside of campus and it's very very difficult for them to make
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connections in often um right when they're right there physically on campus so annotation gives them another opportunity to engage and to see what their classmates are thinking
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um and to to to see asynchronously what's going on and then i found that it really fueled our conversations in the classroom when when they could look and see oh yes i had the i had that same
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thought or i had some of those similar questions as i was reading that's great thanks uh your your answers to that question really are encompassed in the subtitle to your article uh digital annotation is critical community
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to promote active reading right i think mary's third talked about active reading and different form you know strategies for active reading and then we sort of slowly move towards the social as we as we heard you guys respond and i want to dive deep into both of those
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um but i want to pull back the curtain a bit because i believe it was in conversation with you mary many years ago probably at the genesis of this article when you were talking to me about and i
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think you're recording robert schultz at the time or something like that that the that reading is invisible um in when we teach often that we don't there's no visibility around reading and over time
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i think that that idea actually creeped into our own marketing at hypothesis it's one of the things that we uh say every time we are you know talking about hypothesis with instructors is that hypothesis makes reading visible and i
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want i was wondering if each of you could help me unpack that idea how does social annotation make reading visible and why is that important and mary since i think you're the genesis of that marketing slogan um
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maybe you should start what does it mean to make reading visible amazing um yes i remember i think that that article had such an enormous impact on us as instructors um just because i
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think in the context of that article school was schools was talking about you know we don't teach reading and we don't see reading and if we could see how our students were reading i think we would
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be horrified i think is the word that he used um so i think i think what hypothesis allows us to do is actually assign reading center it um in the
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classroom i think it allows us to see how students are reacting to the text when they highlight a passage and make a comment on it we can actually see
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what kind of operation they're doing in that moment are they summarizing are they remembering something else that they knew from another class or from their own experience
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we can see if they're judging the material or evaluating it we can see if they're doing some analysis or detecting bias so i think i think this idea that we can
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see reading is really about being able to understand a student's interaction with the text and i think i think the other piece is just giving that that spatial
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awareness of where students are on the page so there's something about that visibility of reading that's also coming through in the the highlighting itself
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so a student maybe marks up the page and it's becoming visible to them as well as to us um yeah um i just want to pause there because one of my favorite things about the article
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is the way you guys talk about that physicality of reading at the beginning and the move from paper um to digital and how in the paper world the material world we have more physical sense of our books and things like that right i can
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pull something off the shelf and somehow i have a sense of like it's about three-quarters of the way through gatsby the passage i'm looking for um but we really lose that physicality online and you guys have some beautiful language in article where you're describing just
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that physicality the page paves the way to one's personal reflection in the same way that a front path leads to one's home and then you talk about how annotation is a way of kind of forging a more physical path in that sort of you
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know ethereal digital world but back to the visibility piece um chris what are your thoughts on what it means to make reading uh visible and how social annotation can make reading visible the way i've always kind of thought
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about social annotation is having conversations about a text on a text so really grounding those discussions in textual moments
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as as students respond to the text and i always encourage them to respond to one another as well that was something that i felt very strongly about so that they could make
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those connections with one another and with their own experiences and on the text itself i often find that when students will read something they will
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make those connections but not be aware of those connections so those those moments where they can trace that out are valuable to them i think we all overestimate what we're
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going to remember or what the significance was but interrupting in some ways interrupting the reading to take those moments of
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reflection can be valuable as well so i think that for me is is is the conversations about the text on the text is key i love that know well anything to add on
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visibility and reading um nothing really to add but just to um echo what chris said i i i hadn't actually thought of it that
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way but that i realized that's exactly what's happening we're sort of leaving markers for ourselves breadcrumbs for ourselves and for one another uh so we can kind of go back
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and trace our thinking about the text and i know that that is so valuable uh to us in academic writing um and in professional
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uh communication professional writing and that's something that we're able to model for students early on in our in our first year composition classes um and even in our upper level classes
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really it really gives them a concrete example of of the importance of of doing that because if you don't leave those little clues for yourself exactly as chris said you think you're gonna remember you
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think you're gonna you think you're gonna have that same insight again but as we all know that may or may not happen so yes so sticking with you noelle
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can you tell us how you introduced this tool and prompt your students you could anything from giving us an example of assignment or explain why you're making them do this additional thing um how do you present this to students what you
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when you when you first introduced it in the course that's an excellent question well like chris i have a long history of encouraging annotation um
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in print in in previous um in previous courses that i've taught before i adopted digital annotation
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and i always introduce annotation in in general as something that is going to be able to in enhance students
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understanding of text but also their ability to write about texts there's so much anxiety among students about uh writing and they they tend to
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um as mary was saying see reading is almost the invisible link they don't they don't really make the connection and all the anxiety is is about this this product
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that's going to get judged and critiqued um and so i i i always stress how important annotation is in terms of um
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that that end goal that they're so concerned about um that without really digging apart learning how to to to dig texts apart and understand one's
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own thinking about the text that they're engaging with that that that writing all forms of writing but particularly academic writing gets to be that much more difficult so i try to
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introduce it as something a tool that's going to be very helpful to them and that will lower their anxiety levels once it's something that becomes um a part of
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their discipline a part of their writing routine uh so in terms of introducing hypothesis and in terms of introducing digital annotation
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it the our students are digital natives um at this stage in history and and um they they take very quickly to the tool
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uh such an easy tool to use but i i i spend more time up front sort of giving them examples of um an annotation that i've done i
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usually model my own annotation and and talk through the process with them and how it started with looking at various texts and how it ended up with uh my ability to be able
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to make connections between texts that's that's something that they they can concretely see oh okay this is exactly how this is going to help me
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when i have a writing assignment um yes great chris yeah i was going to say i i us also have brought in examples um
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of annotation and and annotation failures honestly i have a book from grad school that i took a picture of and have commented and we'll throw up a slide to talk about the death of the
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pink highlighter because i highlighted everything and so what's important i have no idea but when i go back to some of the texts where i started to write notes started to write comments i can
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still trace some of my thinking you know a couple decades later at least at that point in time um and i and i mentioned to them that and i will show them some of my textbooks
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where if i've taught something more than once i'll see different colors of annotation because i grabbed whatever pen was handy and added notes to my own notes
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so i do that uh to show them that even now my annotation and note-taking strategies are evolving and there's will too um i introduce it with some specific
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tasks for them to follow and and mention that those aren't the only possibilities with annotation but those are the things i want to make the connections to what we're studying at the time what are some of those specific tasks
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chris that you're suggesting might be part of what an annotation is um for the assignments that i used uh for the study we were looking at appeals we were
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looking at you know the classic ethos pathos logos to see if they could find those things um some of them were [Music] some of those assignments were
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what what's difficult what's hard right so making a note of what it is they think is going on i even will encourage them to define words if they don't know
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a word but i also encourage them not to make that their soul way of interacting with a text but i because i do find that sometimes students will hit a word they don't know maybe get a context clue that they think
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they know what it is but there's there's a there's a missing link there for them and i think for for students who want the right answer that definition and social annotation if they could be the first one to define that that gives them
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a foothold in the text that they might have not taken if it was not offered to them thanks so many i'm going to tack on to the end of the question of you know how
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you introduce this to students what are some of the specific things you want them to be doing or prompt them to do in those annotations such a good question and i think yeah while noel and chris you were talking i was
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just thinking about you know the way that my practice has evolved over time and the way that i implement the tool in my classroom has changed i think in the the original moment i was thinking
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you know about these challenges that we confront with the decline in critical reasoning with manipulation by fake news with you know we see this lack of critical summary in the papers
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that our students are writing and i think one of the biggest realizations that came out of studying student writing with this tool for me was just the fact that i was really focused on
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cognitive goals um accordingly i was really interested in helping students do more complex things with their thinking so moving away from those basic understanding and
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you know initial kind of moves of reading and really getting into analysis evaluation and comparison to other things they may have read before um but i think what i found when i started
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doing when i was doing modeling when i was asking students to produce certain kinds of annotations i felt like what was showing up in the margins and in you know in their hypothesis comments was that they were
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writing to me as their instructor rather than to one another as a community and and to me that was disrupting that environment where they were testing out
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beliefs and ideas and bringing their own personality and reaction to the text into the that initial encounter with new ideas um so i i think what's changed for me
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about the way i teach and implement the tool is that i've really tried to pull back from giving any specific instructions about what to do with the annotations and i do much more of that offline so
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i'll assign you know fact idea list or evidence and commentary list where students are encouraged to practice some of the specific skills about yeah define this term or
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come up with a you know an assessment of whether this is a biased piece of information but when i put them in the online environment and using hypothesis i've asked i've actually stopped giving any instructions
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just to kind of see if that produces that more free form ability to add multiple voices into the discussion um so it's been an interesting evolution but i think you know listening to the way you're talking
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about modeling and showing how you actually use them in the writing i i think i would like to bring that in more to my to my practice as well super interesting um one i was rereading the article last
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night from pedagogy and i sort of had a revelation i think when i talk about social annotation i and the benefits of it i'll often say it helps learn to read
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right it helps to teach active reading and critical reading practices and it's also good for social engagement and those are actually different things right like if you want your students to be reading more deeply and critically this is a great tool if you want your
00:29:00
students to build community it's a great tool but those aren't necessarily one and the same but when i was reading your article and it's in the title of the article right this idea of critical community i started to think about how
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critical the social piece of social annotation is for the reading piece of uh of um of social annotation so i was wondering if you guys could riff on that idea of just like
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what is important about the social piece of social reading and how is it not just kind of like oh for together but though that togetherness those interactions actually help with fundamental academic and and
00:29:38
higher order academic skill development um chris you were leaning forward and i keep going back and forth in a linear one so let's start with you this time yeah i i think for me in some respects
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one of the benefits of being able to see the traces that other readers are leaving behind um kind of normalizes that reading can be
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challenging and sometimes to get through those challenges recording them asking questions looking at how other people respond and go oh i i didn't think about it that way
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do i agree with that is that a thing that that i should take from this text and in some respects i find that when
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students can do that electronically they are [Music] a little less hesitant to make those kind of question themselves or question each other moves than if they're face to face
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in a class don't get me wrong i love face-to-face classrooms i have had them like i said with the with the large newsprint annotate together that way but they
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at least in the in the class where i was using this tool and i've actually found that with other online tools they are kind of more likely to go oh i didn't think of that or
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i'm not sure i agree with your interpretation in a way that perhaps they would not in more traditional classroom environments so there's that social piece where they are they're able to
00:31:17
question the text and each other's interpretations of the text as well no well i don't know if you're still there but do you want to pick that up the idea of what why the social is so important in social reading and how it actually
00:31:35
invests the reading part yes um well i i think that the social is is important in in the learning overall
00:31:49
um and i think about a negative example of when my husband actually was in grad school and unbeknownst to him the entire class
00:32:03
was meeting um in a very challenging course that he was taking and all the grades were sort of determined by
00:32:15
what the consensus was it was a very theoretical class uh that the students had come together and he was the outlier so you know
00:32:27
not to not to brag about my husband but he's he's a very very intelligent person but it didn't matter how hard he tried how many hours he poured in how he just was banging his head up against
00:32:39
this brick wall because he was this this outlier who was not in on the conversation he he was not able to benefit from uh sort of the shared collective
00:32:52
consciousness of his classmates so i i see that in a similar light with with reading my my students i i always have
00:33:06
out of a class of about 24 25 they're usually uh some very intense readers who who come in with with some strong skills um
00:33:18
but the majority of students are are um on un unafraid um and unabashed reading haters that's what they tell me at the beginning i hate reading i hate
00:33:32
reading i'm a terrible writer so um i i usually get me with a with a serious brick wall um and again i know that my students aren't going to have a lot of time to get together
00:33:45
and and and discuss the texts or discuss their approaches to different assignments but this is a way for them to
00:33:59
as chris said see what um almost the the first of all see that yes we're all engaged in in something that that may not uh be
00:34:11
something that we find immediate joy in or something that's very challenging for us um and there's i think there's an esprit de corps that that is developed in that sense but also
00:34:25
to see that there there are um there are different ways to view things and then then sometimes their classmates will have very similar takes on things um
00:34:36
and a consensus is is developed around certain ideas and and um certain certain difficulties that students have with with analysis they'll they'll start to say i'm not i'm not
00:34:50
alone um i i am getting this i am on on the right track with this or other people are having similar challenges so i just think in terms of of learning
00:35:01
um and opening one's mind to to to something new the the social aspect the um the ability to break out of that that that sort of bubble of isolation
00:35:15
is is really really valuable let me reframe for you a little bit mary because i feel like from reading the article i got the sense that you were the most focused on like the bloom's taxonomy stuff right and like the
00:35:30
different things that students should be doing to be good you know better readers to improve to become more expert readers i think you said um does the social interact with that i mean
00:35:41
so one thing we often get is like i want to have a way for my student to read the essay and only i can see their annotations right and that will allow me to help drill in um those different kind of blooms
00:35:54
taxonomy type things right um but is this social important in kind of that development of those you know spectrum of reading skills and strategies such a good question um
00:36:09
yeah i think i think the thing that i've learned by using digital annotation is that i was very focused on yeah those cognitive skills so how can we build reasoning
00:36:21
to do better work and to produce better insights and more knowledge and i think what i really did learn by watching how my students communicated
00:36:32
you know was just remembering that reading has always been about relationship so i think that initial question is so interesting too like do we do we separate reading from community um and i was just
00:36:46
thinking you know we've always read to be in dialogue with someone who's different from ourselves or we've always read to escape maybe from relationships with people who are close to us to find to find something new and to
00:37:00
connect um so i think i think what what using the tool actually taught me was that you know there is on the one hand specific interventions we can make and specific
00:37:12
skills that i can make you know approachable and accessible to a wide range of readers so that they can find themselves to be expert readers and and i think that's on the one hand but
00:37:26
then on the other hand i think there is this question of you know how do relationships change over time and how is the way we really relate political um so is there something about the
00:37:39
multi-logic that we have now this ability to hear many different voices rather than just having a dialogue between two people that could give us more of what we need now to confront the
00:37:53
realities of our time do we need more voices and more perspectives to confront the rise of bias and the rise of echo chambers do we need more ways to hear new ideas
00:38:06
so i think i think that kind of piece which is you know on the one hand about community but it's also about feeling and engagement and emotion the affective so that idea of really
00:38:18
making a connection with the text as well as with one another i do think that that's indissociable from expert reading um and i think it manifests in many ways like i think um noelle and chris you're talking to about
00:38:31
that that connection they make as sharing responsibility to understand a text and not looking at it as a kind of individual struggling to master something but working as a team um so i think all of
00:38:45
those pieces have to be together and i think the tool has kind of helped um establish that multi-logism as a pedagogical approach amazing uh and also i was going to try to shoehorn a question in but we're
00:38:57
running out of time but you covered it because i wanted to ask about aspect of reading and i think it's there um i said on twitter this morning that i'm furious with my colleagues for only giving us 45 minutes because i could go on all day with you guys talking about this stuff
00:39:10
and so maybe we need to have a sequel but we are creeping up on time um i do think the affective reading piece of the article is one of the most interesting interventions that you guys make and i would love to have a whole
00:39:22
session on why is it important that the emotional responses and experiential responses to readings are one and this are connected to the cognitive and other pieces of how we read but i will shut up
00:39:34
and just say thank you so much uh for this conversation i hope we can continue it at some other time and i'll hand it back to print thank you again for coming to liquid margins and we will see you next time
00:39:47
take care everyone
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