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greetings everyone thank you so much for coming today and i'm really excited to um to have both eileen and emily here um from colorado college
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uh mostly because i myself almost went to colorado college and both my parents graduated from there uh so it colorado college is kind of near and dear in my heart um and i'm kind of sad that i didn't go especially now that
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it's such a cool interesting school to go to so i'm really interested to hear about um things at colorado college and so uh yeah let's hear a little bit about um who you are
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and and what your role is at colorado college aileen do you want to start hi everyone i'm happy to start aileen lowe assistant professor of english as franny was saying thanks everyone for attending and for your
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questions later on and for the invitation to talk about hypothesis um i am new to the cc community but before this i was on the tenure track and teaching at allegheny college which is
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very similar in small liberal arts college um and emily and i are actually teaching similar classes right so we'll be talking a lot about this first year writing course that that is new to cc as well
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um and i think that's i mean i'm so i'm my discipline is 20th century american literature great and that's that's so great to hear i love i love 20th century american
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literature we'll talk about that too maybe emily can you uh kind of give us an idea of yourself and what you do at colorado college definitely so i've been at colorado college as faculty since 2004 so it's
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been a while i'm a social psychologist so i teach primarily courses in psychology um ranging from research design to specialized seminars at the 400 level on
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social cognition and and and um and stereotyping and integrate relations and such um of course you know it's a liberal arts environment so we all teach um contribute to the gen ed curriculum so um i also teach you know introductory
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level courses in um in in writing and cultural psychology um and um i'm as you mentioned right i direct the bridge scholars program so that's our program for our first gen students for and and students from minority and
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minoritized backgrounds um and it's a you know they come early and and and get get a class and start with leadership training um and other student life opportunities so um
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so i actually you know back to the topic of being here talking about hypothesis i've used this tool since um late spring when we all made the pivot to remote teaching and have used it you know all the way from you know the the
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the introductory level class to the 400 level class and and yes i'm looking forward to discussing how it works in the different contexts great that's that's all really interesting i'm uh i'm really interested
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in your field because i feel like i know less about it emily um having read some 20th century american fiction i at least know i at least know what alina is talking about a little bit um so we'll maybe
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talk about that a little bit more as we get into it um so we organized the theme for today's discussion around this idea of college success in the sense that um you know when students enter college
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they're not always necessarily prepared to succeed at um at the world of college and i know colorado college is a little bit different than other schools and so it might be helpful if one of you would explain a little bit about how
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colorado colleges may be different than a typical institution in some ways sure alien whatever i'll i'll take this one because i've been around for longer so um colorado college in a way that is very similar
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to you know other liberal arts colleges that you know they're very student-centric very learning-centric like that we do expect students to to find the connections and and and through either you know by their own
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design or working with advisors um find the interconnection between courses that for example right now we are all in a pandemic right it's covet um you can't just have molecular biology you need
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molecular biology you need your organic chemistry and you also need your math and you also need your ethics and you also need your political science so you actually need all of it you need to dig into history um and then you need to think about gender and
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ethnic studies right that all comes together and i think um what we truly deeply believe in in in this liberal arts environment is that let's help students make those connections and one thing that so that is similar a lot of with a lot of
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institutions that have liberal learning as its heart but what makes us different is um that we have the blog plan so blog plan to those of you who haven't heard it before um is um
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one class at a time that's the best way to put it is one class at a time so we have three and a half weeks we meet every day we don't just meet for a short 90 minute period we essentially have the whole day most people meet for
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about two and a half to three hours at least they might come back in the afternoon for lab watch a movie continue discussion but it's 18 and a half uninterrupted days without other obligations and you finish
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the equivalent of a four semester hour class and so that allows us to really get into intensive learning right so you don't need a week a week and a half to warm up we have half a day to warm up
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and then by the night of the first day you might already have you know 80 pages to read and four new papers um by the middle of the second week your first paper may be due and so that intensity
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is very unique um for us and actually i'm aware that a number of schools um out there maybe some of you participants i know your schools might have thought about how to convert to the block plan during the pandemic because um folks feel that you know if
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we can't get people together to learn for september and october what if we do two blocks of remote learning and then if november works out they can come back for a month right so actually i know more more folks are
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thinking about how to condense teaching into the blog plan so that's what makes us um you know a little bit different thanks for that description yeah that's that's really great stuff um i have a long thought that that kind of
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you know the intensity of the block plan could really um could really be advantageous in in some situations i mean i did sometimes find weird connections between the different classes that i was taking at the same time and they would connect
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but i always felt like that was something i brought to it it was never something the institution was doing and so the fact that you have these interdisciplinary intensive intensive classes really really seems compelling to me
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so uh you know maybe to kick this off since we have this organizing idea of of student success and i know that you know in a you know say traditional college context you know often college success or
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student success is like an actual course that people take often when they first enter the institution and it might be like a you know a one credit course or something like that and tries to give them
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you know an idea of an understanding of how the institution works and some study skills and maybe some life skills like a kind of collection of stuff to help them succeed as students and i'm just gonna guess that um maybe
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the way that you think about college success and student success at colorado colleges may be a little bit different than that but i'm not sure so um alien maybe you'd like to start off by talking about how you guys think about
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uh college success at colorado college that's a great question and i think especially for this class that emily and i are both teaching right now that's really key right and um one thing that well i'll just say largely the one thing
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that i really attracted me to teaching at cc was this like this ability to do really intense learning um and the ability to like have sort of a freer schedule right and so i feel
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like with student success here we're really thinking about the ways that they're also interacting with the community and thinking about how they can go out there and do things and how we can take advantage of the place that we live in
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um as part of our teaching tools and so when we i think when we think about student success it's not just about like in the classroom right we're also really thinking about the different communities that they're participating in and the different ideas that they're bringing in
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um but but i think for the 120s right it's we're we're beginning we so the first block is them thinking critically right getting them to think about um how to engage
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and to participate and then the second block that emily and i are both teaching is a little bit more focused on writing um and so even in the way that that we sort of broken that up right it's about like
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scaffolding and building and being able to make these connections as as you both were saying earlier so i think success is really to to help students understand like sort of the next level of thinking
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that they should be doing here right and really trying to get them to become critical thinkers which which is hard because i think that that we do this a lot in our work but we don't always talk about it very explicitly
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and i think at cc we're really trying to scaffold that and to to see how we begin to to create that kind of student and learner and person that makes sense did you want to add
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anything to that emily yeah and actually you know i realized maybe the audience would not be familiar with what we what we are the course that we had we could not co teaching with we're teaching at the same time so
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as a part of our first year curriculum right all first years take these two units back to back and in this second unit is really as alien talked about focus on writing but it's also talking um deeper into
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writing about how do you write in your disciplinary style but also to talk about how writing in your discipline and in your own writing but also in reading other um scholars writing privileges and
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advances some topics and some voices and disadvantage others right so actually it does have a um an equity and inclusion lens even in the writing process and so um so that you know when you talk
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about what is student success i think um for students to to to begin to see knowledge as um as a part of the culture of knowledge construction right that their voices are celebrated and then their
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voices that might have been marginalized and how do they navigate that beyond just the conventions of okay do i use mla or do i use chicago do i do apa right that's sort of a deeper dive into their reading and writing that we want to get them started the first blog that
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wow actually every single class i go into in some sense have that hidden dynamic the hidden curriculum of who's doing the speaking who are we speaking for um so that's exciting to to introduce student to this goal
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that's such an interesting point too like to take disciplinary writing beyond just like what format the footnote should be in right now there's other things that we could talk about that are probably more interesting than
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what style your foot should be in um i'm so i'm really curious now because um and maybe to bring social annotation in this a little bit because i think a lot of us think of annotation really as a kind of
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exercise in reading and this um this uh phrase came up just uh i think it was yesterday wow it seems like a million years ago that's covered time for you um where somebody brought up the idea of
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formative reading the idea of um reading as a kind of preparation for later reading and and reading as a preparation for writing and so i'm kind of curious how you guys
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think about um annotation as a as a tool that's really oriented around reading uh and then how that then uh pivots into the idea of writing because
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it sounds like the course that you're focused on here is really a lot about writing and so can you connect that idea for me about how reading moves to writing with annotation i don't know who's who should get up
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okay i actually think this is one of the things that i really wanted to talk about and i think one of the things that hypothesis really allows me to do like i really want students to understand that that reading is
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both a practice and also a way of building community um and then when we read these texts right i make them really talk about both content right because i think it is important to understand but also a form
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um which gets us to think about like what emily was saying about knowledge construction right like who is the audience what what voices are they privileging what kind of research are they doing what are the limitations of that of that research right um he can only like what's in the
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archive right like not everybody's diaries are collected and not everybody was taught how to read and write um and so it really is about understanding the link between
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reading as a practice right like looking for all of these things when you read and then and then finding your voice in that right and really being able to be part of this conversation so i think reading for me is always the
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beginning of a conversation right you're starting to understand where someone is coming from and then as you're doing that you're developing your own ideas and your own ways of of thinking and then you start formulating your own i like
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actual words right and articulating um your thoughts and so one thing that i've loved about hypothesis is you can see how the community is building right like you can see students responding to a text and you can see them responding to each
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other and then you know you can see them coming back and answering a question that they pose themselves earlier but then also they're pulling in like definitions from the internet right and and then putting in videos that might be
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that connect right and so you're really beginning to see the each of us comes into reading with a different position right um
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and from there we begin to to find our voice right and find a way to um take what we're reading and and doing something with it right so it's not this passive activity it really is very active
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and i think hypothesis makes that like very visible for us that's that's really great and and uh emily madson looks looks like you want to add something onto that if you want to move on we can no no no
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please you were asking about how does the the annotation go into writing right so i was thinking about um the more technical style of writing for psychology paper right so how do we how do we help
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students go from reading to writing so um no many of us who teach sometimes wonder oh okay you've read 20 papers this semester um just go and now write a literature review um in the similar style but yet um it's
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easy for us who are immersed in the field right who are experts to say that but for novices right people who are just starting to be in the field whether they're first years or whether they're juniors um they don't see that hidden code of
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how it's written so in one of the things we do um in in my classes for hypothesis annotations is we use a hashtag um that says hashtag deconstruct um on the bottom for your text and then
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um and and when i'm some so i would regularly in a paper that will write look here is the end of the introduction where you see that the author has now summarized their predictions and
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laid out their two hypothesis right and after i say that then i'll say deconstruct right in the later part i might say ah did you see that the authors um mentioned this really complex procedure of um
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alpha cronbach's alpha reliability analysis note that they actually don't write a whole paragraph it's just in one in four letters it's done hashtag deconstruct right so um instead of me needing to
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remind them in a lecture um it is delivered just in time right so they're reading there and then they see it and then um i could then make a note that remember this when you'll be writing your paper this is a feature you want to note
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um so i think that definitely makes a connection between the reading to a few weeks later when they need to start to write that's a really interesting example actually that did kind of um go where i wanted to go next was to
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actually just some of the more kind of practical things like so maybe and i hear from both of you emily first um so you already gave us a description of one of the ways that you use hypothesis really specifically with
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this hashtag deconstruct uh which sounds really great um can you talk a little bit about um some of the ways that you kind of use hypothesis or assign hypothesis readings or
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a sign annotation in your course and then even things about like do you grade them or how do you like encourage participation or maybe you don't need to i don't know just like how is it how's like the
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practical aspects of it mm-hmm so you end it with grading so let me start with that um i do a completion grade so i did i do tell them that i need you to put in um depends on the course right let's say
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six annotations or substantive annotations not the yeah that's cool right that doesn't count i did describe in the explanation in the syllabus assignment section that yeah that code doesn't count as one but anything substantive
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including asking a question relating it to a previous class so i give them a list of um ideas for what they could say that is considered substantive but what i find is that students um most of them go beyond right after
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after the initial um few annotations they go beyond because they enter into a dialogue with each other and so they just chime in and lose count so the grading is really a small part um just a completion grade but um one
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example of how i use it is um i use it to encourage students to engage in more more difficult um some people will say courageous um sustained conversation
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about um about identity and inequality because as a psychologist some of the papers that we read relate to racial gender um identities and also discrimination and and and
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and prejudices and so um it's a psych class so sometimes the way we talk about it is quite technical so i thought um in in the in the um online annotation is when people can combine the annotation with some of the
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personal experiences right so after somebody say um a paper that we recently read on identity formation right different ways that identity forms and different stages that people can be in
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um i would ask questions like you know um does this relate to um examples that you have observed you know these are first-year so i say in your high school experience right people will chime in and talk about
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um yeah this is what i observe and it relates to that principle right so they bring the keywords back in and i find that um because it is asynchronous more students
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have the time um to think about what they want to share how they want to share it and they end up sharing then when we um do a similar conversation in the classroom right when you have 10 minutes and you need to i on the spot decide
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okay do i talk about what happened to me or what i saw in um in 11th grade while listening to other people right so so the asynchronous nature actually allows students to be more reflective and be comfortable choosing what they
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want to share um in in a format that they want to share because they can choose the words it's not spoken so um that's definitely one place where i think that we build that learning community um but also that um intimacy because we
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can share and relate to our personal experience in a very safe way i think that's really interesting um and emily is colorado college um all remote right now or do you have a face to face we have some
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face to face we have some face to face but um courses that are face to face are more likely more likely to be the lab based class or the studio based classes um otherwise the writing focused classes tend to be
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remote right now okay and how about you eileen do you do you want to talk a little bit more specifically about the ways that you bring annotation into your courses yeah and i would say because this class
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is um a writing course right i think i used hypothesis differently than i would in a literature course so i might talk about that too but but all of our readings are pds all of our readings
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are um you know through our lms system right which hypothesis is embedded in which is really helpful um and really aaron and her team were great about converting any of my pdfs that were older and just
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to like um to be hypothesis friendly which was great that i didn't have to do that because we're all at home so i'm like i don't have a beautiful scanner to do all of this work for me
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um so all of the readings are our pdfs on canvas and through hypothesis and um i didn't want to have lots of different questions for every new assignment that we were reading and so
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we've had one set of questions for all of the readings um and they really focus on on content and then also really focus on form so we begin with these questions like what's the genre right like what am i even reading here and and
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um what i like about hypothesis that you can pinpoint those moments where it clicks for the students right so the question is you know what's the genre and then and then you know following that is where where where was this obvious for you in the text
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um and so i i love the idea of the hashtags not only i didn't do that but i want to adopt that right where um so i can see in the text exactly where they thought okay this is where the genre was clear for me this is where the audience was clear for me this is where
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the tone was really evident um and then yeah we get to the more complex questions about about content like what's and i i like to ask a question of like what drew you into the text because i think that's really important for students is
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i get to see what's interesting for them and and the thing i love about it too is that i hear from all of them um i mean i i signed it as a part of our participation grade so it's a separate grade but it really like emily was
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saying it's about completion and and i i really i mean this is what's remarkable about cc students is like you don't have to really police them you know um and they just they
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and they they bring in such interesting things right and i think i always come back in and say like this is great you know because i want them to really see that that what they're contributing is is wonderful as i think
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especially as first year students they they feel like oh my idea doesn't matter right or like my reaction is is kind of silly or dominant and really it's not they're bringing in so many brilliant things and
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i love to see the ways that they're connecting with other texts that we're reading even though we're reading very broadly right we're reading from lots of different disciplines like we begin to really see how language is shaped by
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scholarship um and we've been able to sort of hone in definitions of of certain terms that we've that have like that have been threading through all of our readings so yeah it's like a basic um
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reading questionnaire that they turn to um they don't answer all the questions always right but i also don't think i think that as long as they're thinking about it that's what's important to me you know as you're as you're talking
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having taught a little bit myself i'm realizing that it it almost sounds like the annotation process has made you as a teacher kind of more differently involved in the reading too and this the way the students are
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reading would you say that's true oh yeah totally i think that my teaching is a lot more focused like i i can see what they are having either trouble with or what they're really clinging to what's really interesting to them and
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and you know i think that's also like a it's a sign of um how much material is coming across during sort of lecture or discussion right because you can see that all of them are are attuned to this word right like
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we read as texts and it was talking about like fetish and fetishization and then that term has like just come up again and again and again and all of our in all of the their annotations and i'm like okay great like this was a term that clicked for them right
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um and so i think that it's it's made my teaching yeah a lot more intentional a lot more focused and and i think also it's just more participatory right like again like i said you can you hear from all of them
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um and in a normal class where we're just kind of reading things together or reading things on their own like i don't i don't always hear from all of them and um i also think one thing that clicked for
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me when i was using hypothesis too was like i've always wanted to sort of be in their head while there's a lot of reading and i think emily is the term real time right and um actually we can do that now right like i
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can actually see exactly where something like matters to them um so i i love that part about it that i think that definitely makes me a better teacher oh that's that's really interesting i mean
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i love this idea where i mean i think especially in the educational technology world everything's so focused on you know making the students do this and making the students do that or whatever and we don't always think about
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how it then in turn kind of might change what happens to teachers and teaching right um it's really really interesting to think about emily did you have thoughts on that as well like how it's affected you as a teacher i mean mute um very similar to alien
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right that that we i get to hear from every one of them and and in addition to you know just understanding how they're learning i found that it helped me differentiate uh my classroom right i mean again you know at any classroom
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whether it is um as karen asked on on on the chat how many students are in our classes um at colorado college it's typically up to 25 so it's a small class um and i know that you know obviously with before when i was at university of
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michigan right then the class size is a lot bigger um but but but at any size one of the challenges i always had is how do i differentiate even though it's a it's a course i know what level it is um
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some students would just come with more more preparation or more knowledge from other courses and some would be novices in this and i and um hypothesis by looking at their comments and their annotation
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really helped me know you know week to week where they are what knowledge they have what are gaps and i can adapt therefore my um synchronous teaching to what they do in a way that you know
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pro i'm going to pre-code it in a regular classroom i have no insights to that i i try to you know in the classroom gauge based on what they say or don't say figure out what they don't know and don't know um this actually allows me
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before the synchronous class to now know that huh i think you know there were a lot of um questions about the correlation coefficient i will now spend an extra 10 minutes i'm reviewing that concept with people in a way that
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previously i would just guess so i think differentiation is is definitely an outcome from it and i think it is a very inclusive teaching practice you know given the diversity of how students you know have gone through the educational trajectory
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um what they what what classes they took and and and the the experience so um yeah i i use it for differentiation that change how i teach that's really interesting yeah i've heard this idea of um
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uh instructors uh seeing annotations before lectures and then having that influence their lecture like you just mentioned emily you know i'm seeing a couple of questions pop up in the chat now on one thing i i saw this it's not really a question
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more of a comment really but um but david buck who's here and i know that he tweets pretty extensively about the idea of ungrading and different different kind of grading schemas uh he mentioned like the labor-based model and so forth um
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and i'm wondering have you guys experimented at all with ungrading i mean i think colorado college as you already kind of mentioned is maybe a somewhat unique context in the sense that the students are maybe different there than they might be at some other kinds of
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institutions like university of michigan um whether their classes are bigger for one thing uh but have you guys thought about or experimented at all with any of the kind of ungrading uh movement
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if you know what i'm talking about i personally haven't um incorporated that yet um but i do know an econ colleague who is trying to do that so i need to learn learn learn more from her
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it's great that uh that it would start in economics that seems like the the least likely place how about you ali alien sorry i haven't done it i um i'm one of those people who's still a
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little too scared to let go of that um but but that would be a really interesting thing to think of through especially using this platform right um yeah i could see some connections
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there but um yeah i haven't i haven't yet i i wish um yeah david put in a um and you might put in some more links to david david mentions that there's a
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hashtag on twitter ungrading slow chat which is where i think i've come across some of david's comments on that's pretty interesting about it and it's mostly educators talking about how to do it and how to get less scared and the different
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practices and stuff thanks for bringing that up david um i'm also uh seeing this question from donald about hashtag management which is a way more practical like lower level thing really but um do you and maybe this is really more for
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emily because of her more extensive use of hashtags but do you find emily that you have uh difficulty in like the number of hashtags that start to get spawned and or how do you manage that not really i
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think people have been polite and and and judicious in the use of hashtag but i think it's partly because we have a smaller class size so i think management in the large class would be
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different and i think in that case um if if if i ever get to a point i thought about it if i ever get to a point where there are too many um hashtags that we probably will um have some convention about using of
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keywords so that there's less redundancy we also um on the side use um slack as our class um communication tool um and so you know between slack and and um and hypothesis i can imagine a conversation
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starting up in slack and say hey let's um use all used marriage instead of wedding marriage and and be able to very quickly correct the proliferation so um so yeah very manageable
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yeah it sounds like a lot of the um affordances that you guys uh benefit from have to do a lot with this small class size right like i mean when you've got a community of less than 30 people different things can happen and if there are hundreds right and i will mention that
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um hypothesis does have some uh kind of capabilities that might be more useful in large class situations like in canvas at least the ability to tie
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uh the annotation groups to sections um which can make a big difference in a much larger class and like the the commentary in the chat here you probably don't need it you don't need it in the class this size right where you might use the same the
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same pdf like like the nameless thing that she does um so uh one thing that and i'll just mention this quickly on hashtags too i've learned recently um after having met the inventor of the hashtag chris
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messina i recently learned that for accessibility purposes it's actually kind of important to do initial caps in multi-word hashtags because when screen readers are reading
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hashtags out they can sense that the initial caps are new words whereas if everything is lowercase for example it's harder for the screen readers to know what's a word little tiny tiny practical tip there but
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i always used to lowercase all my hashtags too and now i'm sort of trying to change um yeah so and i'll just i'll just mention this again um donald uh uh or draw on this point
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that donald race um it would be this idea of having structured hashtags so as a teacher you might be able to say define some hashtags that you want to use in your in your course like i think you have emily and then have
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hypothesis sort of like enforce those in the sense that there's like a pull-down menu of hashtags that are used in the course or whatever and we don't have anything like that right now we've done some experimentation around the idea of having structured hashtags
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um but that may be something that kind of comes into the uh comes into the software at a later point and i'll just say that the way it works right now is when you've been using hashtags in your browser
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your browser actually saves your personal sort of hashtags that you've used and so they kind of pop up when you start to type them in again but it's really only personal to you and your use and if you move to a different browser they're not there of course
00:33:13
um so that that's the way it works now and it's not that structured but it sounds like it's still still working out okay for you um so just a little bit of a little bit of information more specifically on
00:33:25
hashtags uh so i'm wondering um you know we've been asking you a lot of questions uh uh both of our guests here but do you have any questions for us or for the community that's gathered here
00:33:38
about annotation that you've sort of been wondering i've been wondering um i i know that some um professional societies are using using um the annotations um as a means for kind of
00:33:50
collective writing right that you're writing a piece together and using hypothesis to actually tag it as you know like um read um you know really need revision um and then green love it and then they can
00:34:02
put the comments associated with it um and i have followed on reddit that there are some sort of external um plugins or just taking external that you can save the annotations
00:34:15
along with the pdf but you have to export it out but it's not quite integrated yet i'm curious is there interest in you know we as um you know in the teaching context at the end of
00:34:26
say wednesday we can download the pdf with the whole classes annotation and then that pdf because the annotations are there can be used as a separate thing outside of hypothesis
00:34:38
i wonder is is that in the works i i definitely hear where you're going there emily and and i'll i'll have to say that it's definitely something that people have wondered about and thought about and asked about
00:34:49
and um uh people are definitely using hypothesis in writing context um especially when you're commenting on something that you don't have access to modify
00:35:02
yourself i mean like i myself often you know edit collaboratively in google docs because it's such a useful environment for collaborative editing and i would say probably more useful than trying to use hypothesis for that now
00:35:15
just because of the way that google comments can be resolved and all those kinds of things um but one of the barriers to reaching what you're what you're hoping for emily is that um
00:35:28
hypothesis and the text that it's annotating really they're not the same document right they're it's the the annotations are like independent entities that just are anchored into that
00:35:40
document and so it's actually a kind of tricky technical problem to think about how to bring them all together and maybe say print them out for instance or you know take a snapshot of them or something although you can do screenshots obviously
00:35:54
um but so i'm gonna say that right now there's no uh graceful way to do that in some sort of systematic way um screenshots come
00:36:06
closest in the level of saying like i really want to see the text and the annotation together but of course screenshots are not text right they're pictures and so they would be in that situation unlike the pdfs
00:36:18
that elaine mentioned that can't be annotated and so that's not really so useful so um there are ways to export annotations separately um and we're thinking about bringing that capability into the tool
00:36:30
so that at least you can have like an external record of all the annotations and each annotation of course carries the anchor of the original text that it was linked to in it but they're not sitting on top of
00:36:42
the original document itself when they're exported right so i'm kind of um i'm gonna have to give a uh a soft no to that and i wish it were different but
00:36:54
it's it's just it's something that there may be a future where that can come together but it's it's a hard problem to solve and we haven't figured out the best way to do it yet but what you just described sounds even that sounds fabulous already right that
00:37:07
is a record of what people wrote with the anchor uh itself i think that that would be very important yeah and we don't have it built into the tool yet but um uh either me or one of my colleagues can put a link into the chat
00:37:20
um to a tool that our colleague john udell has designed that is a tool that you can use to export annotations sort of outside of the app right now and it's a little bit tricky
00:37:32
when the annotations are made inside the lms i think it's trickier than if they're made out on the open web but it's still possible i believe and so uh maybe aaron or jeremy can find that quickly or for any
00:37:45
um and i know that we're getting close we got about five more minutes left in our scheduled time and i'm one i didn't give didn't give a lena a chance to ask any questions yet i've loved all all the questions in the
00:38:00
chat too like you know we we haven't sort of privileged that we have these smaller courses and i'm it's making me think about how to make it work for a larger course because one assignment that i want to do for my lit class is to have
00:38:13
you know a personal annotation assignment right where i get to see how they're close reading one passage um i might i have had a i've been thinking about this a lot with this question of just um not grading their comments but using
00:38:25
it as a grading tool right so having them turn in a pdf for me and then i get to sort of grade using hypothesis and um you know i don't have advanced adobe so it's hard to make comments when someone does turn in a pdf and
00:38:38
and i i think logistically right now it's hard to to have all the students turn in a pdf file right but i've been thinking about that more and more as a as a way for us to give feedback to them right um
00:38:50
and that a lot of the features that the students use now and that i use now to comment on our hypothesis pdfs would actually be really helpful when i'm giving them
00:39:02
feedback and grading their written work um so i wonder i'm wondering if anyone has done that with it or yeah it's interesting that you bring that up because a lot of people assume that if you're going to use annotation
00:39:15
in an lms context the first use would be like giving feedback on student writing for example as opposed to the kind of collaborative reading that we're talking about here and so it's definitely possible
00:39:28
um and really the barriers to it now um are really have some some part to do with the way permission structures are set up in the lms so interestingly enough in moodle a
00:39:41
different lms than the canvas that you guys use at colorado college it's actually possible to give students the permission to upload their own hypothesis enabled readings and so essentially if i were your student i
00:39:54
could turn in my paper to you for annotation purposes um and then there's also you know the question of you know how how uh how private those conversations are going to be is it
00:40:07
going to be just a conversation between me and the teacher or is it again going to be like a peer review kind of thing where the whole class is involved and so um i that is definitely a place that hypothesis will go um and it's a
00:40:21
little bit of a dance between us and the way that different lms's work and just around the permissioning and so forth but it's certainly something that we uh that we are interested in doing um and i don't know
00:40:34
if any of my other colleagues wanted to jump in on that i had noticed that our other colleague jeremy also joined he may just be like like enjoying lurking in the background and listening but if any other hypothesizer has any
00:40:48
comments about that i'd love to love to hear them i mean there are sort of workarounds that you can do now for instance your students could send you a pdf and then you could enable it uh
00:41:01
for for social annotation and the only trick there would be like the privacy question like did you want the whole class to be looking at it too which could be useful and instructive or did you just want to use it
00:41:14
in a private context um and in that case unfortunately right now there's the problem of like the only real way to have complete privacy around annotation between two people would be to have like private groups
00:41:28
you know you and each student in your own private group and that's it's a little too ungainly to sort of work out that way i think um and i noticed that we uh we got also a new
00:41:40
question from karen um about uh and we've kind of been chatting about it i see that you've been chatting in the chat too but about the students kind of response to annotation and
00:41:53
i have that too because i have like i mentioned earlier i have a couple of high school um kids of my own well one's in high school as a college actually and um the one in high school actually dislikes annotation quite a bit
00:42:04
and i always feel that it's because maybe her teachers aren't assigning or using annotation in the rich ways that it sounds like you guys are and i i would be curious to hear a little bit more about um your
00:42:18
experiences with the students attitude toward it like you've kind of described that they jump in and they kind of get started and they seem to sort of take off have you had any like negative reactions to it i think i think i think your intuition is right
00:42:30
neat that you know it depends on how the assignment is structured right and and that's an education psychology that a novice actually has a hard time asking questions they don't know what's the right question and so if we just tell the students
00:42:43
go post four questions and answer four then it is hard for them to ask good questions they might not know the right level to ask and i think if we can help by modeling what questions to ask
00:42:57
what questions to comment so actually i'm i'm sure alien does the same right i promised the students that 48 hours before is due my annotations will be there if you want to be way ahead of me please but otherwise 48 hours ahead you can
00:43:09
start by looking at what i comment on and how i say hey look at this um paragraph the mixed tree is actually really dense so i would suggest right and we offer strategies and i think if we do a more kind of proactive type of
00:43:23
questioning it helps and um to karen's questions right that you know do the students like it i actually um on slack asked the quest students last night and say hey how is it working for you tell me you know what's working what's
00:43:36
not working um how should other students use it right i ask them very broadly and they they really mostly talk about the texts are sometimes very long and dense right and that
00:43:47
um i'm i'm stressed out or it gets boring late at night when i'm trying to keep track of reading another 40 pages but they all said that it is very beneficial that when they can see what
00:43:59
others are saying and asking it helps them know that their questions are normal it helps them break apart the long paragraphs to smaller things so they can pay attention so they talk about actually
00:44:11
affects their motivation it helps them manage their time it helps them manage um um segmenting the work to to to do it with um good and attention and one student i didn't
00:44:24
paste into there talked about that how she feels this close reading and annotation um led her to increase her vocabulary and insights um into the topic right so um but otherwise is um
00:44:36
they don't know you know how best to divert their 90 minutes reading and i think that this tool helps helps them yeah i'll just add that that one of the really helpful things about the workshops that we did
00:44:48
have here both with with both one that was led by um aaron from hypothesis but also our team here that was looking at remote learning or just distance learning was that that they were very clear about
00:45:01
about the fact that you had to have a very kind of structure and like assignment right that it helps to have a guide it helps to have them look at very specific things right especially at the beginning when you're just getting used to
00:45:12
doing the social annotation um and and then i think from there you can kind of keep fiddling with things right and see what what works for them and what doesn't um and also yeah you have to be engaged too right you can't just like
00:45:25
throw this out at them and then expect them to do and then not check in at all um like i think for me it's actually been really fun to do that right where i get to respond to them and um and yeah and i think a lot of it too is that you have to go in there and
00:45:38
and not validate their comments but like but but be supportive of what they're asking and what they're thinking about and then bringing it back into discussions right so i mean we all know this as teachers
00:45:50
right it can't be a standalone thing like it has to also exist as part of the classroom um and there are ways to build that at the front end right but then also ways to come back and and um
00:46:02
and echo some of those points in discussions and slack or whatever else you're using hey great and i realize we're getting we're already over there a lot of time you guys may have to go teach or something so we should probably let you go i i saw
00:46:16
that melissa put in some of her prompts or a question about if you could put in some of your prompts to use and i know that emily um did share some of the prompts that she uses at the beginning of the show we are recording this um and it will be
00:46:28
up on our liquid margins uh web page friend if you could put that uh web page uh url in the chat again so people can see it um but i do want to be respectful of your time uh so uh if i'll give you a last chance to say
00:46:42
farewell uh emily and and then aileen and uh and then we'll we'll cut it off so that people can get on with their days do you want to say goodbye emily oh i goodbye trying to copy down you know
00:46:57
um some of the information on on the chat so oh sure yeah and you can actually uh you can save the chat you click on the three little buttons and you can save the whole chat for yourself anybody can do that um so if you want to keep it yeah and i
00:47:10
guess you know in my goodbye then um you know if you if any one of you want to get get anything from my syllabus and and such then email me you know you can find me colorado college emily chan
00:47:21
it's easy to find um thank you um thank you everyone i really like look forward to hearing what other folks have done and the liquid margins has been really really helpful in giving me some ideas about what i need
00:47:34
to do to or what i can do and like emily said please do reach out if you want the questionnaires i you know doesn't matter to me i'd love for people to be able to use them um and i did put my email on the chat
00:47:46
but it's just a low at coloradocollege.edu um but thank you everyone this was great and yeah let's keep talking about this stuff thank you all so much for coming uh both
00:47:59
both aileen and emily and all our guests today it was a really great conversation thanks to my uh co-conspirators here at hypothesis and uh we'll bring it to an end then
00:48:12
thank you
End of transcript