Video: Bringing the Margins to the Center: Introduction to Social Annotation

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welcome to this session on bringing the margins to the center an introduction to social annotation i'm here with a couple of folks that i've known for a very long time and i'm very excited to be here with uh what i believe are two of the foremost experts

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on social annotation in the world i don't think that's an exaggeration i've known amanda allen for a long time now we connected early in my career um on the tech side of social annotation because they were both early adopters of social annotation for for teaching and

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learning um and so i'm looking forward to your presentations to this end to the discussion as follows i'm gonna introduce you uh each um and then i'm gonna provide a little uh overview introduction um and then we'll

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hear from each of you and uh then move to uh maybe a q a and some and some discussion so dr mandela castro is the emerging and digital literacy designer at the university of pennsylvania and a junior

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fellow of the society of critical bibliography i wonder when the first time digital literacy emerging and digital literacy designer was used as a job title but it's an awesome one and i'm glad that it exists amanda is also a pedagogical director of

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the book traces project the chair of the committee on digital humanities for the mla modern language association and serves as the editorial collective on the editorial collective of the journal of interactive technology and pedagogy book traces which i hope she'll talk

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about a little today's something it's a large-scale project to find and record historical readers interventions in the circulating collections of the university of virginia library focusing on volumes published before 1923 so

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actual annotations in books her research explores the intersection of technology and writing including book history dystopian literature and digital humanities her collection composition and big data co-edited with ben miller was published by the university of

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pittsburgh press in september 21 and she is also the author of the of the chapter the past present and future social annotation in the collection in digital reading and writing in compa composition studies

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like i said foremost expert on social annotation in the world allen reed is an associate professor of first year writing instruction instructional technologies at coastal carolina university also a title i mean the first part we've had first year writing for a

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while but the combo first year writing instructional technologies probably also didn't exist a long time ago i'm glad that it does he teaches courses in composition new media digital culture and design graduate writing research he has

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designed and taught a variety of graduate courses in the instructional design and technology doctoral programs at johns hopkins university old dominion university and north central university in addition reed is the evaluation analyst at the center for

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research and reform in education an adjunct teaching fellow in the school of education at johns hopkins university's written two books the smartphone paradox and the philosophy of gun violence what amazing contemporary topics to have

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to have published on that examine the intersectionality of humanity and technological artifacts he has also edited the book marginalia in modern learning context again one of the foremost experts in the world on uh

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social annotation and that that collection is of of innovative research on the methods and applications of interaction between readers and texts through digital means such as commenting or physical annotations such as writing the margins of books and how these

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strategies can be applied in educational settings how exciting is this um all right let me uh just share uh can can one of the that's the wrong way can somebody just because i'm not be

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able to see you guys and um and the my presentation i'm trying to share at the same time can one of the speakers just unmute and say that you can see this next slide i see a red slide saying getting on the

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same page perfect okay we're good no more technical snacks i think i've mastered it now it's a new platform for me too uh so let's get on the same page here um so i i'm trained as an english educator as

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our i think my colleagues uh in conversation today um and well before i got interested in digital technologies uh and to be applied in the classroom um i always told my students to annotate i believed it was going to be critical for

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their success in my classes and i would actually hand out this poem by billy collins which i believe uh alan references in the in the preface to his book um to try to inspire them on day one to write in the margins we've all

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seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just lays in an armchair turning pages we pressed a thought into the wayside planted an impression along the verge now this was not a radical pedagogical

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innovation on my part annotation has been around for a very long time uh scholars and students since then at least the invention of the book have used annotation uh it helps with memory facilitates comprehension and develops

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critical thinking skills as i moved through graduate school in english i did become interested in digital pedagogy and digital tools for the classroom um and i really i still remember the day

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that i was in a computer lab at the university of texas and i saw the social annotation tool diigo and i guess basically i fell in love at that time i just knew of all the things i'd been playing with in the classroom digital

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tools um of all the things i've been introduced to this one just made so much sense to me again probably because it was so familiar from this history um and i got very excited i got very obsessed i kind of made it the one with

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the one tool that we used throughout the semester in my freshman comp courses at ut austin um and the rest is history i moved into the tech space to try to develop this tool specifically for classroom application and that's where

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hypothesis is today uh providing social annotation technology to colleges and universities across the world um there was a ten years ago i guess an article in the

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chronicle of higher education that i thought really captured the power of social annotation and social reading and it's from jennifer howard she writes online a book can be a gathering place a shared space where readers record their

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reactions and conversations and that continues to be what excites me about social reading and social annotation it is that connectivity as um as devorah lieberman was talking about

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in the keynote that's what really drew me to education uh that's what drew me to teaching that's what drew me to grad school i wasn't interested actually it turned out to be a sort of isolated research researcher in a library i really enjoy

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being in the classroom with other people when i couldn't be in the classroom i wanted still to connect to them and that's why social annotation really became such an important part of my pedagogy and now of my uh my profession

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uh beyond teaching so i'll just quickly share the sort of for those that aren't familiar with social annotation as it exists you know and tools like hypothesis this is our model for

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hypothesis that any website article ebook document piece of multimedia that might be being used in the classroom as an artifact for students to engage with has multiple layers of annotation and really of conversation there can be a

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private layer of marginalia uh your notes right which is that kind of layers always existed on top of uh you know analog books but there can be these other social layers of different communities reading

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and thinking and building knowledge together i can have a layer on a text that i'm teaching with my colleagues or maybe it's a text in my field that we're all reading together um you know as part of our part of our research and scholarship

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i can have a layer uh for my course for each course that i teach maybe the same text or different text i can have group discussion on top of the text with a tool like hypothesis and finally there is a public layer uh for hypothesis and

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i think that's one of the things that really distinguishes it from you know an edtech tool that's really just disposable and used in a classroom and not beyond is that this is a tool that exists online and everyday users are using it to engage with content and

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with other people online and there's a variety of professions that have started to make use of social annotation as a core technology to their uh to their profession um so with that introduction um i am going

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to pass it to amanda and then we'll hear from alan and then we'll have a discussion thank you so much jeremy for that really humbling introduction and for having us here today

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um can everyone everyone want to give a thumbs up if you can see the slides and hear me okay wonderful okay so i am coming to you from philadelphia pennsylvania the traditional lands of

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the lenape tribe where it is currently i think 94 degrees outside and later in the afternoon about 1 30 in the afternoon here um so go ahead next slide for me jeremy

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so in both my role as a faculty member and i do teach for the english department and the digital humanities program but also in my role as an instructional designer i often hear a very common lament from faculty members

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that students aren't doing the reading i think we can all relate to this right that how can i tell if my students are reading how do i know if my students are doing a reading how do i know if they're understanding the reading and the

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traditional response to that kind of query is to give quizzes or other high stakes high anxiety assignments this quote that you see in front of you is one that just haunts me

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it says here right that those who read with a pen in hand form a species nearly extinct right and that we no longer engage in that conversation that time and distance

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otherwise makes impossible the reason why this haunts me is because of what i'm about to show you in contrast which is on the next slide jeremy this is a screen capture from my kindle

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that shows that 9940 people have annotated this text and bonus points extra credit for anyone who can name this text in the chat before i

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tell you what it is so i can't imagine that all of these readers were required to use this particular kindle edition for a class assignment although perhaps a small

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percentage are students and this is a rather popular book but certainly capital l literature right the literature that we the three of us here got degrees in right and yes thomas and

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douglas you both get the extra credit this is george orwell's 1984 and yes i do mean for this to be ironic right these readers are in logan's words right engaging in a conversation time and

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distance otherwise would make impossible so i want to shift the conversation from assuming that students do not annotate or do not read right and instead explore how and why we want students to annotate

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why should they do the reading why should they be annotating what does that look like for us as educators next slide please so this quote is uh from jason jones um and

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there are new there are new note directions and annotations and i love that title because everything new is old right well all of our new media stems from old media and here um jones is saying the notion of better

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understanding a text through others experience of it is arguably the foundational experience of most liberal arts classrooms and this is what i mean about the why or the

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should students annotate and i think for me it's that perhaps many in academics or educators privilege certain kinds of annotations over others we imagine that solitary scholar in the archives making

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annotations to themselves and for their own learning but what we really want right what we really think is worthy of attention is those conversations those debates that the exchange of information between

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people in the classroom that's what we're trying to encourage and facilitate is not this the the person learning for their own sake but for that collective community building the knowledge building that happens in the classroom

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as we talk to each other and yes that could be asynchronously or synchronously as we've all discovered over the last two years so what i want to say here is that i really um i really agree with jones that it's the

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conversational function it's the act of discovery and sharing that we align with our practice in the humanities and in this view marginalia is not a personal act but a public act that can and should

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be archived and shared in order to teach our students how to engage in conversational marginalia and to provide them models so next slide here um of course there are historical routes

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to my argument and i'm going to start with what jeremy prefaced for me is the book choices project so here we can see examples of marginalia that the example

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on your screen is about of walt whitman but this goes way back such as the talmud which we just heard about in the keynotes early modern book of hours and the many famous authors whose annotations we fetishize right we think about how

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authors have annotated other famous authors books right we study these in the archives we see them published um in articles about um these scholars and authors we also see this kind of intention

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to archive and document marginalia and these conversations that were happening in the margins by thinkers like daniel bush and douglas englerbart who predicted the need for a network of

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associated texts these examples have all been explored in great depth elsewhere but i want to talk about how i introduced this to students and how i use these as models for their own annotation

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so over the past decade i have been actively a member of the book choices project and i use this as a way of to substantiate and demonstrate the long tail of social annotation practices when

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i was teaching at nyu and now at the university of pennsylvania i actually invite my students to go in to the stacks and we're talking about the circulating stacks not rare books or special collections

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and what we do is we go to the stacks we identify a set of texts that they're going to look in and they actually take the books off the shelf get their hands dirty and look for marginalia in these books that are sitting on library

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shelves well as you can imagine with a place like butler library or van pelt library we find a lot of original 19th century annotation why in the 19th century you see a rise

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in multiple copies of books being published papers cheaper there's more circulation of multiple copies of texts but also because that is when a lot of our academic libraries started getting

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donations large donations from private families from local institutions that we're donating in bulk their entire collections so not only do you have that capital l literature but you have a whole wide variety of things that were

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donated as part of those collections so when you go into the stacks you might find items that maybe have never been checked out before right or a copy of a text that's never been checked out before and you can find

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not only marginalia from these 19th century readers but also locks of hair flowers scraps of fabric um we often find those early um

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library cards that have the the holes cut out of them right that carry the the card catalog information lots of interesting items what this really says to me is that 19th

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century readers were not only annotating they were annotating multimodally right by putting in these drawings these locks of hair these scraps of fabric these flowers but also if we read and analyze the

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annotations which we have done as part of the book traces project we find out that their annotations are not for themselves but actually are in conversations with others many times that's family members we found whole

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family genealogies mothers talking to daughters talking to grandmothers and so on throughout the generations but we also find annotations that are talking to other communities religious communities groups of women who are sharing one copy of a book right to try

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to teach each other and share that knowledge but also we have found illicit romances between members of the royal family we have found battle schematics by famous generals right we have found all sorts

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of fantastic annotations that show that these margins were a way of communicating information across time and space so by having my students get their hands dirty actually get book dust right on

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their hands and find these annotations they are really able to see that this is not a new phenomenon this is not something that just happens on their kindle but this has been happening across time so uh next slide please

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so this is actually a picture from our book choices event that just happened in april at the university of pennsylvania we pulled 250 books off the shelf and our hit rate meaning there was a high level

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of annotations was over 60 in fact there was one group that found any annotations in every single book they looked at their hit rate was a hundred percent um we found so many amazing discoveries

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here and what i wanted to really convey to you is that this project not only allows students to see the annotations but it also allows them to understand acquisition history it familiarizes

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students with the legacy of print collections it provides a sense of history and provenance for the offerings available to them and suddenly the role of the library expands from a convenient

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place to study to a resource that serves the greater purpose of maintaining collections of invaluable research materials searching for these annotations also leads to discussions about what counts as meaningful evidence in the marginalia

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they find and students discover many interesting artifacts that we the book choices team and their librarians and professors are there to help them assess decipher and digitize for use by you or

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anyone else around the world to to data mine and study the findings across the dozens of universities we've done book traces events at so then the discussion moves from what are these marginalia what are we looking

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at here and the move to digitizing text and to opening the conversation to the future of the humanities at large right how can we make old forms of media accessible to a wider audience next slide please

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as the pedagogical director of book choices i help others integrate this work into their courses during the pandemic it became obvious that people needed a way to interact with this material not in their own libraries

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because they couldn't search the stacks right they didn't have access to their libraries during a large part of this time so what we did was we made this open access resource full of assignments prompts and grab-and-go materials for

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use by librarians instructors or workshop leaders in any discipline and you can go to this url i put the link to these slides in the chat and you can explore all of these assignments and contact me anytime for

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help using them with your students next slide please so at stevenson university which is my previous position we didn't actually have a research library at all we did not have a library that would hold

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volumes of pre-1923 texts so what we did instead was we used this site and andrew stoffer came and gave a talk as a part of our distinguished speaking series and brought several examples with him and even with this

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very limited engagement with just the website alone you can see that the materials had a huge impact on my students you can see here this is a quote from one of my students and it's really an expert reflection he

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was able to recognize and articulate the social function of the annotations he found um and he likens this in this passage right to email or social media he the marginalian 19th century text

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reminded him of social media right because of that exchange between people so my goal is to capture this knowledge and translate it into a student's own reading practices so next slide please

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to start this process students read about the differences between reading online versus reading and print from a variety of perspectives i have students read born digital articles but also actual physical paper articles where i

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have them read for a given amount of time and make tally marks anytime they're distracted so yes they end up with 15 20 sometimes even 30 tally marks when they got distracted in their reading practices i then have them read the same exact

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article but while annotating right and they were distract the far fewer tally marks right during that time when they were actively annotating than when they were just trying to read straight through i often

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ask them if they were given a short quiz on the content after the initial reading versus out of after the end of the reading when they were annotating which they feel they would perform better on the answer is obvious right when they're annotated annotating they retained more

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of that information so kathy davidson whose article you see here or whose book sorry you see here argues that the ability to productively

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multitask is a vital 21st century skill students are asked to identify their own attention blindness and then given tools that work with and not against their natural inclination to bounce from one

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task to another right so instead of saying stop getting distracted stop multitasking think about productive ways of multitasking which i really think social annotation offers us a chance to

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do uh next slide so i have tried many different online annotation platforms i have tried annotation studio and google docs and perusal and you name it i have tried it

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the reason why i personally like hypothesis is because it can both be used with an lms so canvas blackboard moodle or as a standalone product with your web

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browser and most importantly for me you can use multi-modal annotations so you can see here in my very meta activity of having people annotate about right reading online

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um they are using videos and links and they're having conversations back and forth and this is a real spring grab from a real class and a real student assignment's real student writing right so you can see them having robust

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conversations and using all of the tools that hypothesis offers to share information it's peer-to-peer learning in action okay um next slide

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you can see from this exchange here that my students recognize the potential benefits but also the drawbacks of social annotations skills oh sorry tools armed with the readings i provide and previous discussions we had about

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digital reading class debates are often rich both online as you see here and off ruminations formulated in their annotations are hashed out in greater depth in person be it synchronous or

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asynchronous right be it online or in person um in the classroom and this allows for conversations that are too big for the constraints of a comment section to take place to evolve i'm often able to identify the areas

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where my students are struggling to understand a text by reading their comments or in some cases by identifying sections in which no one has commented this is very important okay these omissions can signal a place where no

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one was brave enough to take on the difficult language or advanced concepts this way students engage with a text online in ways that form the way i structure my synchronous lessons i am

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better able to use our limited class time strategically when provided with access to their asynchronous comments next slide please so

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this is how i sequence this assignment so first i have students annotate the text online i try to leave space for students to respond to each other before i interject i obviously interject when

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needed when there's a debate arise or a question that has arisen that i can answer but i try to let them have space to just talk to each other first i then use student insight insights as

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slides in class so i screenshot interesting insights or i screenshot interesting conversations and i put them in my slides and i use it as the catalyst for the lesson of the day what does that look like well often i'll

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take a debate or a question of how a term is defined or used in a text and then i provide in the following slides further research for those debates so sometimes it's

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definitions from our professional standards our professional sources it's links to articles that have further information it's i also provide quotes or from course readings we've done

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previously and try to model that good information sharing behavior that then i see them mimic in future annotations so from those individual low stakes annotations

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assignments i then derive writing prompts so this could be discussion board posts right journal entries whatever works best for your class um and i will often do those in groups so five people are gonna do discussion

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board posts for this article five for the next five for the next cuts down on your grading time right you're only grading five posts at a time and also on the student's workload they're only in charge of leading the conversation for one text at a time

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um that then becomes um the you know a student-led discussion so those five people will lead a fish bowl right and those eventually lead to students gleaning information from those

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conversations and links for their high stakes multimodal essay next slide please so this is what that looks like um i have my students apply what they learned when creating their final multimodal

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projects inspired by an assignment shared by carrie crafts so in this assignment they are engaging in design fiction by imagining the future of the book so i i actually collaborate with a faculty member in the school of design

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for this where students identify a problem in the way we currently consume assess access and store information and devise solutions for a specific audience so here you you're seeing the student

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create a smart bookmark where you can read a physical book but put in the smart bookmark that will allow you to um put annotations and definitions into a digital notebook while you read very

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smart right um next slide and this student here was thinking about their aunt who has als and couldn't actually physically hold a book or turn pages of a physical book so they were

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using eye tracking software so that their aunt could use annotations with eye tracking technology very very smart and again addressing a problem for a specific audience um

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so i know i'm about out of time here but these are only two examples from dozens that i don't have time to showcase i believe the evidence is clear what you don't see here in these screenshots is their extensive research incorporated in

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many forms and these proposals and you don't hear their passion and excitement that students convey in their oral presentations but hopefully what you can see is that students went from the passive consumers of annotation

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technologies to active critical makers thinking about the future of annotation and what that might look like for their audiences next slide so you can actually see my entire guide

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to using hypothesis on my website there's the link there's videos for how to use it with the lms or as a standalone with my assignment all laid out for you and next slide you can also read the full article in

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digital reading and writing and composition studies thank you so much that was so great thanks amanda um excellent well we'll turn it over to alan and then as i said after we hear from allen we'll have a q a i know

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there's questions coming in and we'll have a discussion all yours alan thanks yeah that was really comprehensive thorough amanda you are definitely one of the foremost experts i

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will agree with jeremy on that um i don't have any slides to share because i was going to just kind of um reminisce about social annotation and and what um kind of landed me here i was

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thinking like how did how did i get interested in social annotation why um why am i here and and why did i write so much about it um and i think it stems from right out of graduate school i was kind

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of thrown into the classroom right i was thrown into a classroom of undergraduates first year writing your standard english 101 type courses with with very little guidance or

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anything like like that and this is the early um 2000s when there was a real shift towards the digital texts um and i can remember being being worried about that i mean i mean i'm an english guy i'm an english professor and

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so i'm um you know i love books i love holding books i love writing in books but i saw this real shift in students opting for the digital and i think a lot

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price probably had a lot to do with that convenience had a lot to do with that but i was also noticing that in in the polling and in surveys we were seeing that um students time and time again would

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reiterate that they actually prefer print materials um yet they will often choose digital materials for those reasons price affordability convenience um and things like that and the thing

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that worried me about that is um that i also had a hunch that we read differently when we're reading something in print versus something digitally um and in fact there's a um

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type in the chat here for the great book by naomi barron from american university called words on screen if you've not seen that before but she outlines this whole argument in its entirety and it's really fascinating

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um but it was really worrisome for me as well because i saw this happening in my students and so what i began to do was i began to shift all of my materials

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into things like google docs um and have them comment in these documents as we would go and what i didn't realize was that i was having them annotate things socially within their assignments and i wasn't

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grading it i wasn't requiring it i was merely providing it as an option and and most of these students were taking me up on this and so i decided to conduct an actual experimental study on this it was a

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small case study but we looked at um the differences between readers who were annotating synchronously so at the same time that someone in the same class was reading the same

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document you could see the comments popping up synchronously in real time another group was looking at existing annotations while they were reading the text so the annotations were already there much like picking up an old book

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from the library or something that has writing in the margins already and then the third group was a control group no annotations no ability to annotate and what we saw was a significant

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difference between these three groups in terms of important things not just achievement such as comprehension on a post-test but in terms of things like learner motivation

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mental effort required to read and understand the text preference satisfaction which i think are all very important contributors to

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a student's performance in a class and not just the score on the uh final uh post-test and so that really got me thinking about how i could start to use social annotation

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more formally and more effectively in my courses and i think it was around that time that i i kind of um began collaborating with jeremy and hypothesis and realizing like oh there's a whole world

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out here of people who have these same views and here's this technology here's this tool that i can use in my classes seamlessly um and i remember being so excited about that um

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because i wasn't really happy with all the other social bookmarking sites and um things like that and google docs wasn't quite cutting it so once i came across a hypothesis i was really thrilled

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um and so i started implementing that formally in my courses um i started doing that um gosh i don't know almost 10 years ago i guess maybe um

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and then i started thinking about things beyond just sort of informally annotating works as we go and started thinking about things like prompting and metacognitive strategies and things

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like that that i could actually embed into the documents and into the pages on on the websites and different things that could actually prompt my learners to think about specific

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things as they were reading so i was sort of flipping the script and saying okay well we can use annotation for you to generate your own annotations on these materials but i can also use annotation to set you up to think about

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certain things or to prompt you in certain ways within the texts as opposed to using like supplemental questions or discussion boards or something like that

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and so that i think really started to get me thinking and that's a large part of what my doctoral work dissertation work involved was embedded metacognitive and cognitive strategy

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prompting within digital texts so not just asking learners like adjunct questions within the text about what they were reading but asking them um giving them metacognitive prompts to either

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maybe draw their attention back to the text or to ask them to rate their level of understanding as we go all sorts of different things that hypothesis afforded me

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to do within these texts i will say that um there's probably there's there's a balance right because what we did see with that is there's probably a saturation point where you can um have too many annotations within a

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text and it starts to override the learner's cognitive load um and anxiety levels and things like that where it starts to um it starts to supersede what

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the actual content is is conveying so i will say that there is a there's probably a ceiling on this um but what we saw were extremely um positive results in terms

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of again not just achievement but motivation and satisfaction um a reduction of mental effort while they were reading and we saw these changes particularly within

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groups of lower level readers so in other words the high achieving readers would contribute and would use annotations really well

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but their gains were not nearly as significant as lower level readers um and so that learner population became the focus and we started to realize like okay this is a tool that we can start to

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target this specific population and we can tailor these specific prompts and comments and things towards this population to help them and that's exactly what it did and so

00:36:07

we then took that model and we applied it to this program i'm gonna try and share my screen i didn't try this beforehand sorry um well i'm gonna have to

00:36:25

oh this might work okay um we had a um digital badging initiative at coastal carolina university in 2014

00:36:38

where we essentially said for the first year writing courses that's english 101 and english 102 um the standard freshman year writing courses english courses um we developed a set of

00:36:52

badges um about six or seven badges per course that identified specific skills so in other words we basically took the learning outcomes from each of those courses and said what do we want students to be able to do at the end of

00:37:06

english 101 okay well they need to be able to shape a thesis summarize quote paraphrase synthesize all sorts of different things and we we parse these out into specific badges

00:37:20

where the website which is sort of it's still available it's still out here you can access it i'll post the link in the chat um we keep it just as a writing resource for the public but we've since moved it

00:37:32

internally um students would access each of the badge pages where they receive some type of instructional content so sometimes it could be a produced video that we had

00:37:45

developed from faculty we give a text-based explanation of what we're talking about this particular batch had to do with shifting styles and linguistic awareness

00:37:56

but one of the first things that we decided to do was to include or embed hypothesis into this website which is actually just hosted on a wordpress platform

00:38:08

um and what that did effectively was we were able to say to students not just hey go to this website and read this content watch the video read this content and then do the assignment at the end

00:38:21

but as you're reading it we want you to also annotate and ask questions um or piggyback on other people's comments and that's exactly what they did most people didn't require this as part of the assignment but what we found

00:38:32

was that students were doing this voluntarily because they could see other students had who had been there previously the types of questions they were asking or the types of links connections they

00:38:43

were drawing to this into other works and so we thought this was a really effective thing for all of the incoming students into this first year writing program to be able to use and it was actually a really big

00:38:58

success um and so the reason i point that out is because um when we were developing the program which is essentially just a bunch of web pages where we're asking students to read the

00:39:12

instructional content and then develop the assignment and then submit the assignment we were trying to liven it up by saying how can we make this a much more dynamic active activity rather than just a passive reading of a page which i

00:39:25

am sort of terrified of students doing and hypothesis was the first thing that that came to our mind um i'm gonna stop sharing that

00:39:42

okay um and so that's where we are and that's that's been my um experience with social annotation it's something that is just now ingrained in all the things that we do i teach still

00:39:55

some undergraduate courses but also doctoral courses [Music] in all sorts of areas for a number of institutions and one of the very first things that we do as an assignment is the syllabus annotation

00:40:07

assignment which simply asks the students in that course to read closely the syllabus and to annotate it to make comments to ask questions

00:40:20

to draw attention to different things in the syllabus and it's a way to immediately engage learners into the course but also to ensure that they're actually reading the syllabus and that they don't actually have any

00:40:33

questions but i think it's a great introductory assignment for any level uh course um yeah so i think that's about it i think that's that's all i really wanted to talk about um i think we should open it

00:40:45

up to q a and see what kinds of questions you have okay i'm not sure how and when we're allowed to be seen and heard uh but i'm i'm back as is amanda

00:41:11

uh that was so wonderful thank you alan uh thank you amanda we do have some uh great questions um to get to um and so let's get to them um there's a

00:41:26

one question in the chat uh from karen at vincennes university uh how can you get students to open the book to do the reading in the first place so this is you know that problem

00:41:38

that amanda sort of hinted at i don't know if you were agreeing with the problem as it's normally stated amanda that the students aren't doing the reading but uh could each of you guys just talk about ways that you sort of help encourage students to actually do the

00:41:51

reading then we'll get into the annotation piece and maybe the annotation piece helps let's start with you amanda okay i answered a little bit in the chat and also i see that karen has um

00:42:05

put this also in the q a um so in in that in the q a karen writes that um they use reflection questions that that require students to read and find answers but they find that the students just google them without actually

00:42:18

reading the text so there is actually an amazing data-driven article on this i believe it's by admiral and poll and it actually compares discussion board post engagement versus

00:42:30

social annotation tool engagement and what it finds is that when you require students to annotate a text you have more line by line interaction so students are are

00:42:42

interacting with individual lines in the text in an in-depth way which i would call close reading right instead of skimming or surface level reading they're really going at a line by line level to think

00:42:56

about what the author is saying specifically whereas discussion board posts you get more of that broad summary right where students are just lightly engaging with

00:43:06

the text in a superficial or shallow way um they might quote one line if you require them to right but it's more of that broad statement and at least for me as someone who teaches composition

00:43:19

courses i am always trying to say don't generalize don't make broad claims don't make those kinds of statements instead really go to the text and do the close reading and that's what i believe social annotation um you know enhances their

00:43:32

ability to do that so i did post in the in the chat my kind of strategy but what i like to do is i start with a very short reading at the very beginning em foresters the machine stops is a

00:43:46

great short story to do this with i've also used readings about reading online which i showed in my presentation but a very short reading and i have them do just five annotations and three replies just to learn the tool and just to

00:43:59

understand what i mean by um i can see you write reading by using this tool because i can really see the engagement of each individual student and i give them very clear prompts about

00:44:12

what kinds of annotations they can engage with so i offer definitions links to further resources or research for example if they don't know what a certain phrase or concept is right they

00:44:26

can link to the definition of that um i also offer uh you know offering counter arguments or points of um disagreeing with the author points of agreeing with the author

00:44:40

and also um points where they disagree and agree with each other right again requiring them to reply to each other that way not only are they engaging with the text in their own original way but they also have to engage with their

00:44:51

peers comments on the text which makes you think an even deeper level about what the text is saying and doing in through someone else's perspective yes this can go directly to your grade book i often just grade this with a

00:45:04

check mark though right like they're just getting a yay or nay they just did it or didn't do it um and i linked in my um blog post on it how i use a pro rubric which is about how the edu the post needs to be educational they need to be

00:45:17

educating their fellow students to count so they can't just be like this was good i like this cool right but they actually have to be offering information that the other students learn from um and then you can just you know make mistakes

00:45:29

higher as you go along with longer articles increase it to 10 or 20 annotations and 10 replies so on and so forth alan any thoughts on how to get the students to to do the reading either

00:45:42

using annotation or other means oh man you know that's i don't know if that's a question about annotation or i mean if we if we knew the answer to that like how to motivate students to do anything that we want them to do i think we'd be

00:45:55

rich but um you know annotation can make it at the very least active right so you will have students who just will flat out tell you that they hate reading i hate reading i don't

00:46:07

like to read um well this isn't just reading this is contributing this is responding this is interacting with the text um and i think one of the questions on here was about um

00:46:19

sometimes it being hard to get students onboarded and to see it how it can be fun i one of the things that i used to do i haven't done this so much recently was we would have an all media

00:46:32

annotation session which some documents we would say okay i want you to annotate this and respond to these different texts or different sections in this text but i want you to do it solely through media whether that's uh memes

00:46:46

gifs or gifs however you want to say it um a word photos right or there's been times when we try to use emojis too and try to express it that way but um so making it a little bit

00:46:58

more challenging for them and saying like what kind of meme would best express how you're feeling right now that's a pretty easy way to get them thinking about how to use it and then once they're familiar with how to use

00:47:09

hypothesis which is pretty easy to use then i think they're more likely to go along with you on other assignments i love that idea alan that it's maybe the idea of what reading is is

00:47:24

maybe one reason why students don't do their reading because they're like expected or maybe they think that they're expected to be passive absorbers of the information but if you make it active you say this is a place for you to create

00:47:36

for you to respond for you to engage with others you make it social it's something different it's a different experience um and i think we could get into this in the next question i should say there are some that they're not that many

00:47:48

international experts on social annotation in the classroom two are on the panel here for sure there are some in the audience as well um and one of the questions is from another um early adopter of hypothesis a

00:48:01

long-time friend and collaborator of mine robin derosa at plymouth state university and you you hinted at this question um alan but i want to go deeper into it and amanda

00:48:13

responded in the q a area but let's let's talk about it um robin says my students love hypothesis but sometimes it's hard to get uh on get get on board uh to get them on board i

00:48:25

suppose and help them see how fun it can be how do you introduce it to students and help them enjoy the process so let's talk about introducing students to a social annotation how you kind of frame

00:48:38

uh the assignment and the activity um but also the pleasure that can come uh from social annotation and maybe we'll start with you this time now and go to amanda i was just thinking and and this always

00:48:53

makes me sound like old man talking here but like with we're we're living in a social media generation and the reality that is that most of these students are used to being producers and not just consumers of information but that's

00:49:05

exactly what they do they don't just consume social media or what they're seeing online they're actually producing they're actually contributing to that and so it doesn't quite make sense for us to then step into the classroom and say

00:49:18

okay now you're only going to consume the stuff that i'm giving you well they want to produce that's what they're used to doing um and hypothesis gives them a way to do that um and i think that's really important

00:49:29

is to kind of draw that parallel between this is a very um i mean coming from a new media background like this is a very new media approach to a very traditional practice of

00:49:43

reading and comprehending this is the new media approach to that is to be generative as you do that old practice it's like tick-tock for your books there you

00:49:56

go amanda your thoughts uh thanks so much robin for this question i did answer you in the q a comments um with two links i start with genius.com so if you ask anyone in the class you

00:50:10

know how many people have used genius.com before you're gonna get a couple of hands um you're you know musically inclined folks um in my like composition classes in general um courses i might start with beyonce's

00:50:21

lemonade and i show the debate about who becky with the good hair is right and i show them that people all around the world are annotating lyrics on genius.com um and we talk about why people are annotating them and why people care what a music lyric might

00:50:35

mean um in my immigrant literature class i always start with um the song immigrants from the hamilton mixtape um because the author themselves has actually annotated that on genius.com along with his

00:50:47

audience so you see interaction between the author and the audience and that and we talk about that form of annotation and that kind of um knowledge sharing um and then we talk about the ways that they

00:50:59

live tweet events or write live stream on tick tock or um instagram how they use goodreads right to share information about books all the time one of my colleagues at the university of pennsylvania jim english has a huge

00:51:12

large-scale data mining project going on with goodreads that show that there are good read users that read thousands of books a year thousands of books a year right and share their thoughts on those books on goodread so

00:51:25

we already know that students are doing this right they they're doing this on all sorts of other platforms that we may or may not integrate into our class um though it's pretty easy once you show that they're already doing it to just

00:51:36

transfer that knowledge to transfer that skill set into the classroom using this tool that's ready made for for academic work but then also the beauty hypothesis is that they can keep using this outside

00:51:49

of your classroom is an open source tool that they can use for anything i'm in a reading group right now and we are using hypothesis to annotate the book design justice and there's just people from all over the world

00:52:01

annotating design justice for fun right for our own engagement um it's not part of any class we're not getting any grade right um and there's lots of other examples of that um you do i think though need to

00:52:15

talk about like again the drawback backs of some of that engagement right how to be a good digital citizen um how people are are how authors are vulnerable online and how information that we post in online

00:52:27

spaces stills humans behind them and to be you know thoughtful generous compassionate to those authors that have put their thoughts online but also to be compassionate to each other in the

00:52:41

comments right and think about kind of the harassment trolling and vitrail that happens in comment spaces um online and how um what is appropriate and appropriate to

00:52:52

put in those comment sections so i think really this this extends beyond like how do i get students to entertain how do i get students to be good digital citizens who are already annotating right in all sorts of other spaces that we're very

00:53:05

well aware that they're doing that's great i love your point um and i this is why i was attracted to genius.com can you guys hear me i'm getting a funny sound okay um uh

00:53:21

why i was attracted to genius as a as a platformer as well that you're already doing this work this work that i'm trying to kind of you know train you in or introduce you to or develop your skills in it's something

00:53:33

that you're already doing right you leave a movie you have a conversation probably with the person that you went to the movie with right you're excited about a song you talk about some piece of it that really gets you so these are activities that you know everyday you

00:53:46

know folks are engaged with that sort of are also part of the formal um work of the humanities but let me ask a question of my humanities colleagues here in terms of broadening

00:53:59

the scope here to make sure that we're including you know all the different disciplines in the academy is this just a english literature you know adjacent um

00:54:12

uh disciplines thing a humanities thing as it were or let's talk about social annotation as some as something broader in the academy in terms of the skills that students need in college and maybe specific

00:54:24

disciplinary skills they need in in other disciplines and i you're not as more vociferous amanda so we'll start with you and then go to alan um so when

00:54:35

as our wonderful keynote speaker talked about when you know march 13th a 2020 hit and we all moved online um my previous institution stevenson university actually made everyone do like emergency blackboard training that

00:54:48

included together as an entire faculty socially annotating an article together using hypothesis on blackboard like every single faculty member and the whole university was required to annotate a text together

00:55:01

that's amazing yes you might remember that uh before the pandemic they were hemming and hawing about integrating it but then the pandemic hit and i won the fight um i do remember that and we've got tremendous adoption at stevenson and we just found

00:55:13

out one reason why and now every single faculty member across the disciplines uses the lms plug-in for hypothesis in their classes i'm talking nursing biology

00:55:25

fine arts um you know we have a huge uptake in the in the business school right but seriously across all disciplines first of all all disciplines have texts right you're teaching articles in higher education you're teaching pdfs of

00:55:39

someone talking about your subject right every every single discipline does have a text so there's something to annotate but you also i think that increasingly especially in teaching

00:55:51

focused institutions and teaching focused classrooms you do want to create a atmosphere where students are learning from each other that you're not just the sage on stage who's like providing all the information but that your students

00:56:02

feel like empowered to also be experts in in areas where they can offer insight so it if you present that as an option if you empower them to learn from each other

00:56:15

i think using social annotation is a really good precursor to other forms of group work right if they're already used to discussing things in the margins with each other without your introduction then when they get into that group work

00:56:27

which we know students have mixed feelings about i'll be nice um they they will already be so familiar with working with each other and to working out arguments and debates with

00:56:39

each other in those spaces that when you actually get them into those peer learning groups they will be more successful um there are tons of great articles like the one i put into the chat of people in the sciences uh using

00:56:52

social annotation but i just wanted to offer two alternate ways that i've used it so i've actually used social annotation tools to have students peer review each other's work so if you have an essay assignment

00:57:03

coming up and you want a student to read their essay draft and comment on it you can use social annotation for that and you can have their peers comment on their own writing using social annotation it's really a

00:57:16

wonderful way to get that peer-to-peer feedback um and also i've had students use social annotation to do rhetorical analysis so read this article and determine the purpose the audience the context the genre

00:57:29

and do that kind of formal analysis work which is a form of annotation that they're doing for themselves but of course they also share um that knowledge out so those are just two alternate assignment forms

00:57:42

alan yeah i mean i tend to get really um tunnel vision when talking about annotation because we are in that english umbrella um but i'll say i'll speak from experience just

00:57:55

um writing this this last book that i was writing um this past year i had to dive into um some constitutionality arguments and i'm not i'm not a legal scholar by any means so

00:58:08

i really had to try and figure out a lot of the different um arguments that are made particularly on issues of second amendment rights and prima facie rights and all these things

00:58:21

that were new to me but i was really happy to see that when i went online to read more about this there are numerous tools online that actually offer um annotated versions of the

00:58:32

constitution i think one is actually called constitution annotated maybe there's another one i was trying to look it up just now i think it's called

00:58:44

interactive constitution which um again is just an annotated version of the constitution and it shows you original drafts and changes that were made to it along with um citing like court cases

00:58:56

and precedence and things like that to help explain the legal terminology and jargon that's contained in the original document so um that's just one example but i mean there are thousands of

00:59:09

examples in every field every discipline where annotation occurs and happens um and sometimes it's it might not be called that um but that's what we're doing anytime

00:59:21

we contribute or have a conversation within a text that's awesome thank you both for those answers um so let's tackle a tough topic there was a skeptic i believe in the

00:59:34

audience around multitasking amanda suggested reading kathy davidson's book now you see it now you don't which i also recommend kathy davidson also an og member of the uh rap genius community

00:59:47

and uh and hypothesis annotator as well um uh so let's talk about this question of multitasking um and i'll just bring alan into it a little bit because alan you

00:59:59

talked about the ceiling of sometimes there might be too many annotations on a text um that might there might sort of become less useful um and i will at risk of being recorded and vp of education and hypothesis say i

01:00:12

still sometimes wonder especially going back to the question of like making the students read um could annotations potentially sort of create a way for students to not read to skip over

01:00:24

the text and just read the annotations is that a problem um so multitasking multitasking reading versus skimming the noise of too many annotations go

01:00:36

uh uh uh i mean i follow i fall into that camp of of thinking um that multitasking really is not um i won't say it's not possible because it's clearly possible um is it a good

01:00:52

idea no probably not we know that that a trade-off occurs when we multitask particularly cognitively nicholas carr wrote a great book about this called the shallows that he

01:01:06

really dives into all these different issues and explains not just the neuroscience behind it but um the the different trade-offs and benefits that we um that we have when we read digitally

01:01:19

and when we try to do multiple things at once particularly even like media multitasking um i'm always on my kids about if they're on some kind of device in front of the television i'm like no this you

01:01:31

can't we can't be doing this um you can choose one you know um but there's there's a rationale behind that and that rationale is that um you know it does fragment our attention

01:01:44

and i think there is a danger in over-annotating something or perhaps um seeing too many annotations when you're trying to just get the original text i i think there probably is a balance a

01:01:57

healthy balance there i don't know what it is i think it depends on whatever the text is the type of text the type of reader what's being said in the annotations and what's considered distracting versus

01:02:10

useful um i try to encourage students to always make substantive annotations so like amanda was mentioning earlier like don't just write great or yes or me too

01:02:24

it has to be substantive you have to be contributing to the conversation otherwise i don't know how valuable it is let me let me ask a question in the middle of the discussion here um and that is is social annotation is the use of

01:02:36

hypothesis is it multitasking or is it a way to reduce tasks and be and and bring focus um and closeness to one's reading

01:02:48

practice um so i i don't know where the question is at this point amanda but i know you're probably in the davidson versus the car camp um so we'll just let you take what you want from that yes and i make students read the car

01:03:02

essay and they read uh essay by lafarge and um they also read us you know some of kathy davidson's book um and they annotate all of them right and then we have it in class debate about this so i have

01:03:14

thought about this across i mean a decade of teaching and hearing students responses and first i'm um this is not directed at you ellen or the questioner but um i do want to point out that we're being

01:03:25

extremely ableist in this conversation so something like 40 of college students identify as um not neurotypical right and kathy davidson points out in her book that the very first the very first

01:03:39

chapter is about the gorilla experiment right so you have um a set of students passing a basketball back and forth and you're supposed to count how many times the students with the white shirts catch the basketball in the middle of this experiment a

01:03:51

person in a girl costume walks through the students tossing the basketball and then you ask how many students saw the gorilla right and very few of them raise their hands most of them don't see the gorilla why because they're focused on

01:04:03

the basketball so they miss the gorilla and in kevin davidson's book she said that because she identifies as having adhd and dyslexia she can actually see she saw the gorilla because she wasn't

01:04:15

hyper focused on the basketball she was looking at the whole picture so this is what kathy calls attention blindness and this is the idea that when we're hyper focused on one thing we miss the big picture i don't know about you but if

01:04:26

i've given students a reading task like find the number of times that the that they reference the color red right in this novel they miss the big picture all they all they're looking for is the

01:04:38

color red and they have missed the whole point of the novel right so what i'm saying is that sometimes that hyper-focused that we kind of have drilled students into believing is the point of education um it gives them

01:04:52

tunnel vision and they're unable to see kind of the larger point and what is the point of having us close read a text is it so that they memorize how many rivers are in um you know the chapter five or is it again

01:05:05

for that discussion so that they're talking about the social issues that they can give give them a reflection or a lens to understand our world and their world and their cultures better um for me i i don't really you know i don't

01:05:18

care if they spell the minor character in chapter seven's name right i care that they're better understanding their peers their world and our social issues right so um

01:05:30

yeah so is multitasking a problem um you know i guess if you're trying to play a video game while you're while you're reading ulysses it's probably not going to work so well right but if you're listening to music while

01:05:44

you're doing your statistics homework for a lot of people that's incredibly successful multitasking right that's actually the only way that they can do the work um i do want to say that i often offer

01:05:57

students several ways in to the annotation process so you can turn off annotations there's a lovely little eye icon at the top of hypothesis you turn the eye shut all the annotations go away and you can read that clean text before

01:06:10

you open the annotations and start reading your peers comments or offering your own so yes you can read the text unadulterated i also obviously provide print um copies or um you know they can print

01:06:23

their own copies when needed um for folks who work better that way right not everyone is going to interact with the text in the same way but the idea is at some point they're going back to engage with those annotations and to engage with their

01:06:36

peers to learn from each other um it where they enter that is based on their own again learning process and their own um the reading functions

01:06:48

which is different for everyone i mean a question for you then about the role social annotation might play in you know as you sort of said the spectrum of various neuro

01:07:00

neurodiversity right um does it enable across a spectrum or is it pushing for a certain kind of focus or because it seems to me like it could be used to mark every time the word red is mentioned

01:07:13

to find the basketball i guess it were but it also does enable whatever your wormhole is to or you know other observations because it's do you think do you feel like it takes a stand or not stand but does it direct in

01:07:26

any way as a technology or is it pretty open in terms of allowing for different types of people to see and or is that really depending on how that is framed for for the students by the teacher

01:07:38

yeah i do think it's how it's framed but i also think in general we in academia we privilege the written text right we we certainly privilege the alphabetic text um so

01:07:50

i also try to give my students other forms of reading so i always give audio book options for our full texts i don't have you know social education for me is often great for

01:08:02

a article or a book chapter but when we're engaging in novel length works or longer texts i have students live tweet their reading of novels this fall you'll see my students live tweeting oricks and

01:08:15

craig by margaret atwood right um i have also again i offer those audio book options and i play audiobook chapters in class that we can annotate in other ways i think giving students

01:08:27

text to speech software is is extremely important and again i'm going to say like a broken record that the multi-modality of hypothesis is key for why i like it because students can

01:08:41

bring in videos and images which i really think helps certain students learn better right if you have that a picture of what canterbury cathedral looks like in when you're reading canterbury tales that's going to help

01:08:53

readers understand what what they're talking about and if you have um actually once when my students read that nicholas carr article um about shallow reading the very first example he gives is of a baby that opens

01:09:06

a magazine and tries to like pinch it because they think it's an ipad right and so someone found that video and linked to it of the baby doing that and that's it's a helpful visual cue and you can do that through hypothesis you can offer those other forms of learning

01:09:19

engagement i just want to offer a little personal anecdote and then hear from you alan just in terms of your experience of social annotation allowing for a diversity of viewpoints or forms of expression or different types of

01:09:31

students to engage i have one that's very resonant for me in my own personal teaching history which was when i was teaching with genius at high school um and i was i was supposed i was on the cusp of transitioning from a very

01:09:42

traditional pedagogue of english and literature to one that was thinking about things new tools but also new pedagogical practices and i had a student that was not doing very well in my class um she wasn't you know writing essays

01:09:56

that met the standards and she wasn't passing reading quizzes um and we were reading the bluest eye by tony morrison um which i believe i uploaded illegally to

01:10:08

genius.com um so put take that out of the recording but um they were annotating the bluest eye and she went home and she was reading it and she was supposed to end it and she came back and she had annotated this one

01:10:22

chapter she had gone on to the internet and she had researched and discovered all these old advertisements for skin whitening cream hair straightening cream targeted african-americans in the early 20th

01:10:35

century are the obviously the deep context of toni morrison's novel and she put them into the margin and connected them to texts and i was just like wow i guess somebody is

01:10:47

paying attention i guess somebody has skills that i had not given her a chance to really express herself with until just we had this uh platform to do where it was the multimodal piece of it um but it was

01:11:01

also this idea of like maybe she i don't know what she became she became a historical archivist because she had this ability to go and find and really interesting stuff online and so you know i thought it was not just that the

01:11:13

multimodality but also the kind of skill that she was demonstrating um uh ways of reading ways of thinking about culture that i had been pretty you know uh

01:11:25

blinded in terms of what i was expecting um so to you alan just diversity of students different types of students diversity forms of expression have you seen social annotation as a way to

01:11:39

for students to gain voice yeah of course choices to be heard i should say they have the voice voices to be heard of course yeah i mean it's it's really it's really powerful in that way um and

01:11:52

i mean i'm sure all of us have examples of like um seeing these conversations take place in annotation form through threaded discussions alongside the text that might not have otherwise happened in

01:12:05

person or in the classroom because you know sometimes students can feel um a little um repressed in the classroom if if they don't feel strongly enough that they want to speak out against

01:12:18

someone in person or for a whole bunch of reasons um and again it might even speak to um again a sort of digital age where we might feel more comfortable

01:12:31

typing something behind a screen than we do saying it eye to eye to someone but that doesn't mean it's not meaningful or important for you to be able to say that so i think that's what the the text

01:12:44

and the annotation tool gives them is that right and ability to say that and in doing so sort of democratizes the conversation and doesn't just um defer to the loudest person in the in

01:12:56

the front row or something like that that's great thank you um i have some small questions that i want to have answered that that came up um in the in the chat and then um if there's a

01:13:12

question that that you guys have seen that i haven't picked up on because there's all these different channels i think i'm suffering from a little bit too much information and also very focused on what you guys are saying um please push me and say oh i'd like to

01:13:24

bring this one to to have as a conversation piece um but uh so there a couple things came up in the courses of your presentation and they also came up in some comments in the chat in the q a um

01:13:36

amanda uh does a kind of completion check is that right for in terms of grading annotations alan do you have you graded annotations is it a formal like rubric kind of thing or is it uh sort of complete incomplete or just

01:13:50

you know for good vibes or how do you assess social annotation or your thoughts on assessment i i've used it differently for different courses i you know graduate students are very different

01:14:02

than freshmen i've done the thing where we're requiring a certain number of annotations and just like requiring replies in a discussion board i think you kind of get like junk replies and

01:14:14

you're just kind of checking the box and doing that so i tend to leave it a little bit more open-ended um but i do give them a sense of like engagement score which um again i'm not counting annotations on

01:14:26

the text but i am looking at how how often you're interacting with the text and what those interactions look like are they just affirming are they just saying i agree or are they substantive and if

01:14:39

it's a consistent substantive annotation interaction with the text then i would give it a high engagement score and that's just one score that i use um it's not per assignment it's really through the whole course just basically their engagement with the

01:14:53

texts back to you amanda you can say more about assessment but i also want to use what alan was saying to point to draw something out from your presentation um you also had a different way of saying like it has to be substantive it has to

01:15:06

contribute to the learning of the community um talk to me about assessment but also like that seems tough i mean they have a rubric for that to sort of say did people learn or do you have okay talk to us about that yes and this

01:15:18

full credit to my colleague at stevenson um uh christina garcia so this is called the pro rubric um and you can use it for like traditional participation like just like in-class participation that thing

01:15:31

that no one really knows how to grade because it's amorphous and strange right but you can also use it for online or asynchronous participation so what the probe rubric looks like and again it's it's linked in the chat

01:15:42

right there um what this is is essentially something that i create with my students so think about contract grading or other forms of collaborative grading models that lots

01:15:53

and lots of experts have talked about um this basically asks students to define what they think it should mean to to have respectful open brave and educational contributions so what does it mean to

01:16:07

exceed what does it mean to me or what does it mean to fail to do that effectively and if you make this rubric with your students right if they're actively oh sorry i will re-link it i promise um if you're actively building

01:16:19

this rubric together they're coming up with the barometer of success if they're actively contributing to the standard of success then they know whether they're meeting it or not right when they write their annotations and i also have them

01:16:32

do a self-assessment twice a semester so at um midway to midterms and midway to finals right they assess their own um contributions right do they think that they were successful in meeting

01:16:45

this standard in the pro rubric why or why not and sometimes those are brutally honest right like they say like no i have not been contributing because you know my dad had covid and i was working three jobs and you know

01:16:58

fine good i see you and i hear you and that's okay that's why it's just a check mark or not a check mark right but also sometimes they say you know um you thought maybe that the student wasn't really doing their best and they

01:17:10

articulate that really it was like their best effort but they were just confused or lost or felt intimidated by some of the other comments of their fellow students good information to know as well right to help them feel

01:17:22

equal and seen and heard in the classroom space so um i guess it's what i'm trying to say is is democratize the grading process process too right let the students be a part of assisting their own work and

01:17:35

have them articulate what they think they're contributing to class in their own terms and learn from them what they think is valuable amazing um allen there was a question

01:17:49

about do students have a sense it's from my friend reed at pima do students have a pretty clear sense of what will constitute a high engagement score alan um i give them

01:18:03

student examples so some from previous courses i'll do like an actual pdf of a version of a text with the annotations alongside of it just for them to be able to not just see the number but um what kinds of

01:18:16

quality i'm looking for in the responses and what kinds of things they can say and i mean asking questions counts you know i mean you can you can ask questions that's absolutely um fair uh i just i give them a model so

01:18:29

that they don't think that they have to go through every two lines and say yes i agree yes i agree or no i you know um and i think maybe that's where it might get a little bit challenging with mental effort and

01:18:41

things if that's what you're constantly focused on so yeah they just work off of a student model but it's a very very low grade first of all and really it's for engagement more than anything

01:18:53

so i think another one of the perennial questions aside from to grade or not to grade uh annotations and i think there's a very complicated answer to that here which is great i love complicating things is to annotate or

01:19:04

not to annotate as the teacher um and alan you talked about uh prompts and being part of the and annotating um so i want you to talk a little bit more about that um and how you pre-populated

01:19:17

text with annotation and then amanda i'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether you pre-populate uh or whether you're also engaged you know with you know responding to students annotations because i've heard teachers some say

01:19:29

like i'm i'm there i'm modeling i'm prompting i'm sort of seeing the reading to some extent um and then i've heard others that just like step back i i don't play a part i let this be a student's face yeah i like that i like that phrase

01:19:44

emceeing the text i think that's a good way of putting it i tend to lean more towards facilitator and drawing them towards things but as far as the like metacognitive prompting and things that's more or less

01:19:57

um asking them um questions like are you understanding this or did you get that or this is a somewhat uh difficult um idea to understand here's a supplemental

01:20:10

resource or something like that uh i know when you get into like actually embedding questions and using inline questioning like what's called adjunct questioning the research is really

01:20:23

really really kind of furry on um on that as far as like whether or not that's actually doing any good as opposed to doing a delayed kind of questioning

01:20:35

model so i tend not to actually embed questions that measure like comprehension within the text but i'll ask them questions along the lines of you know are you are you

01:20:46

distracted right now or um you know things like that but to very very minimally i don't i try not to overwhelm the text because what we saw in the in the dissertation research was that if you do that too often it actually turns students off from the

01:21:00

text it actually starts to negatively impact comprehension amanda so um i always start with those general guidelines um which i i'm just gonna link it one more time

01:21:17

in this case so um i give them examples of what would make a good annotation so a summary or paraphrase a definition references opinions questions or links to related material so they always have that prompt

01:21:30

and that prompt you know is on blackboard with every single assignment i post within with for annotation right so it's reiterated again and again and again so they kind of know what kind of edge what kind of annotations

01:21:43

i i think might be helpful um i always then for the very first assignment let them go i let them annotate i do not interject unless someone asks a specific question

01:21:58

of me in the annotations right sometimes it's like hey like i don't understand what this means can you help professor right sometimes you will get called out like that in the annotations um or sometimes i will see like a an incorrect definition right like

01:22:12

someone has linked to the incorrect definition of a word or an incorrect reference which of course i step in to correct because you don't want then everyone in the class thinking that it's right um so i will step in in those ways i will also step in if there

01:22:25

is inappropriate behavior happening so i did once have like one student hitting on another student in the comments like one student was like hey add me on snap and then the other person was like nah like you know that's not supposed to be

01:22:37

happening in the annotations so i will step in if there's an appropriate behavior and i'll bring that into the classroom space um i will often also if there's like a really heated or heavy like a debate

01:22:48

that seems to be verging on aggressive sometimes step in and say hey we'll talk about this more in class right just to kind of bring it to a close and then like i said i will screenshot those interesting insights i will screenshot the most

01:23:02

vibrant debates and i bring them into my slides that i start the class with so i start every class with examples of their annotations and i then

01:23:14

model that good behavior of saying i found this really interesting because here's links to further research here's further definitions here's other information that might help you um continue that conversation in a

01:23:28

respectful way so i do interject and i do um you know engage with their comments but not actually in the annotation space but in the classroom space um whether whatever that looks like and i've done this both

01:23:40

in online fully online classes and in fully in person classes um it also kind of gets they get like the gold star of being student of the week that's you know their annotations were shared on the

01:23:53

board and the student and the you know the instructor was giving them that that highlight right i was like signal boosting i was up voting right their work um through the slides by showing them i of course make sure i try to

01:24:04

rotate who's whose comments are being kind of highlighted um and that's not hard to do because you have students who respond differently to different articles right um but then i they i what i find is after that first

01:24:18

time that i do it where i have the interesting insights and i'm providing several slides worth of further information and opening up the discussion that then in the next annotation assignment they start doing that as well right they provide the

01:24:30

links to further research they start mimicking kind of what i had done in the class in their own annotations so that's the way that i model the behavior but i do i never embed specific

01:24:41

questions i never like plant kind of prompts throughout or anything like that i really let it be their space so that i know what they're thinking about without me

01:24:54

leading them down a certain direction yeah i think there's different teaching contexts and so you know the one great thing about it is the flexibility of the tool and um and that's that's something i definitely love about it um i'm gonna

01:25:07

address a question that's a couple questions come up a couple times in the chat and then run around things out i just loved amanda how you were talking about you were using the language of social there's some skepticism i think a few of the q and a's and chats around

01:25:20

is hypothesis social media is social annotation social media it doesn't have this button or it doesn't have this kind of element of immediate gratification it's got it's missing some pieces of what say twitter facebook or

01:25:32

whatever they use nowadays is uh is using um but i loved how you actually sort of took that in a direction of saying well okay it doesn't have a upvote button right but there's other ways of an

01:25:44

upvote button is the simplest way of being sort of like honored for your thinking or honor for your contributions and if you're pulling annotations into a slide and then talking about those annotations you're getting the same you know it may

01:25:57

not be the immediate dopamine i think somebody used in the in the q a of a vote on a social media platform but it is also training us and making us think about those types of gratifications in

01:26:09

over longer periods of time and in different formats anyway you can address that if you want but i just wanted since with three minutes left i'll give each of you a final minute and 30 seconds i guess exactly each to just share anything from the chat

01:26:22

that came up that you that hasn't gotten addressed or just you know your closing uh i didn't get to talk about this but this is one of my you know thoughts on this topic and uh let's start with uh with you allen any

01:26:34

any closing remarks or thoughts oh man i mean this is such a fascinating topic i love i love these conversations and these are really valid questions and great um discussions to have and i just posted

01:26:47

that i think hypothesis is more of a tool for discourse much more so than social media which is based in immediate gratification and doing and saying things for

01:26:59

likes rather than for a valid response to that statement i think um and i think that's the big differentiator between between the two and so i think hypothesis can really foster that kind of conversation

01:27:13

um whereas social media is more of a sort of posturing or even or even signaling to others as opposed to an exchange of ideas

01:27:27

amanda your final thoughts or thoughts on social media and social annotation and so i just want to remind everyone that social annotation is just one of the tools in your toolkit right it's um it's

01:27:39

not the right tool for every assignment it's not the right tool for every kind of engagement it is one specific kind of tool that i think works really well for close reading but as i said before i actually do have students live tweet their readings of novels i do use social

01:27:52

media in the classroom i have had students make you know instagram influencer videos about margaret atwood's handmaid's tale before right like i think you can use social media you can use goodreads you can use all of

01:28:04

these different tools in our toolkit for different kinds of responses from students um what i like about hypothesis is that the skills that they learn in this more safe

01:28:18

more regulated more academic space can then transfer to those social media spaces where the context and audience is different but we hope that the skills that they've learned through the kinds

01:28:31

of engagement we're promoting will maybe make the internet a better place for everyone though i mean that's too optimistic right but i mean really isn't that important what we want is we want to model like kind of good online behavior and and like thoughtful

01:28:43

educated responses to people's comments and and um not just liking things but but having more substantive um conversations but i i i agree i'm very happy to be that optimist i'm not saying it's gonna

01:28:56

happen every single time but like you know when i was in grad school and they're like you're teaching in this composition department it's like composition is what makes engaged citizens and thoughtful citizens and it was like that the bottom of the you know the base of the pedagogy for

01:29:09

you know these courses and i was like okay maybe but if you start to use these adjacent technologies and there's some slippage between them i think um i think that it might be true because it's not writing a five page essay i don't think a five page essay is necessarily going

01:29:21

to prove you know to make great engaged uh you know citizens but using tools that as amanda's point out again and again hypothesis one of its great uh virtues is it's not disposable

01:29:34

it is not another edtech tool that gets thrown out at the end of a course or when somebody graduates or leaves a school you can use it beyond um maybe more on that in other sessions

01:29:46

i have not taken a sip of water checked my phone or drank a sip of my coffee or done anything but take notes and listen uh in this conversation i just want to thank you both so much it's been an absolute pleasure um i could keep going

01:30:00

maybe we'll have another opportunity to do this but alan amanda truly wonderful session i'm going to echo our keynote speaker that you can reach out anytime my info is on the um slides that i provided um

01:30:14

i'm on twitter obviously and lots of other places so reach out hi ellen thanks ellie thanks everybody go to the i think you can click back to the table of contents

01:30:27

or the schedule and you can jump to the next session the next sessions will start in i think 15 minutes if i'm correct um and that will be the the final session finals hour and a half session we have one uh

01:30:38

sharing stories from the classroom uh ctl directors and and uh and staff sharing stories of instructors who have their stories from their schools and we have another session on sort of the avant-garde of integrations with tools

01:30:51

like hypothesis in terms of some publisher and library uh platforms that hypothesis is working with so if you're a sort of interoperability tool geek go to that latter session and

01:31:03

if you want more ideas about how to use this in the classroom go to the ctl session and look forward to seeing you there thanks everybody