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hello everyone and welcome to the third episode of liquid margins i just want to make a plug for next week's show and that's on science and using collaborative annotation
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with science so experimenting on the margins annotating science is the title of that one um and now i would like to um introduce our guests um we have mary
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klon from uc san diego and alicia maggard from auburn university they actually went to college together we just discovered at willametteview but they didn't know each
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other there um but around the same time right um and with that i'm going to turn it over to nate angel um he's our director of marketing and hypothesis
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so over to you nate hey franny thank you so much and welcome to everybody who's here today i see uh got almost 50 people filing in that's so great to have such a great crowd
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um and i i'm made angel as uh frannie said and actually our little team here franny and and holla and i that are here from hypothesis are all in beautiful sunny portland oregon where it's not sunny today oddly
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enough um but i'd like to uh invite our guests to say a little bit about themselves where they're calling in from uh sort of what their work focuses on
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and let's start with barry sure hi everybody my name is mary um i am an adjunct i teach at uc san diego and at san diego miramar college um
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and my uh main uh focus for teaching is u.s history and native american history so native history is my kind of research focus but as far as instruction goes i'm all about anything
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american history from the beginning to the end and alicia hi i'm alicia maggard i'm calling in from birmingham alabama in the sweltering south today um i'm an
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incoming historian at auburn university where i'll be teaching classes on technology and military history and then i used hypothesis last semester when i was teaching a course through williams college in their
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williams mystic program focusing on american maritime history oh well so we've really got some americanness here today um and uh a lot of times we have my colleague jeremy or
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our colleague jeremy dean um as a kind of leading the discussion at these conversations on liquid margins but um today uh we decided that since the topic was history it would make more sense to have me do it because i actually have a degree in history believe it or
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not way back from the early middle ages when i graduated from college and then i went on to get an abd and american civilization which even though it sounds like an oxymoron is a sort of history adjacent field um so
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i'm really excited to be here to talk with mary and alicia about this stuff um and i thought one of the ways that we might start things out was to get a kind of understanding
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of um what kinds of readings do you have your students do is it for instance like are there often textbooks involved with the courses that you
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that you uh teach or is it um are you looking at a lot of different kinds of documents that you put together i thought we'd start with alicia yeah so um for my course that i've run there's kind of like two goals that i
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have for my students and the first is that i want them to be responsible readers of scholarship so they were reading journal articles chapters from scholarly monographs
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and they were annotating those and then the second thing i wanted them to do was to start getting into primary sources so alongside scholarship we would have a primary source that was often related to
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the topic if not directly cited by the historian that we were reading alongside it so for example my students narrated the narrative of the life of moses grandi
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which is one of the antebellum slave narratives from a formerly enslaved watermen in north carolina how about you mary what what kind of text do you have folks reading um the same kind of thing i have them
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it's a mix of secondary sources so journal articles book chapters or short um i use jstor daily a lot like short little blog posts that kind of summarize
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academic articles mixed in with a whole bunch of primary documents and especially in my survey classes i try to do mostly primary documents and then add in
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like a little bit of secondary sources to get them to practice their analysis of the primary documents in the annotations um yeah and then i also have them listen to podcasts sometimes and then annotate the
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transcripts so there's a whole bunch of um anytime i can get them to think about history with whatever kind of source i throw it in there yeah and what mary what is what led you
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to start to use uh collaborative annotation uh how long have you been using it and what like even what got you interested in it how did you learn about it and what made you want to bring it into your pedagogy yeah so
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i started teaching in 2017 um i my first semester teaching i used reading quizzes to get students to do the reading which was not it just did it just it felt really flat i had to make
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the reading quizzes so i was like trying to make multiple choice questions about these sources that i just i felt like i was missing the point of getting them to read and analyze the sources by distilling them into these multiple choice questions
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folks would um either like not do well or they would not take the quizzes at all and so i decided to scrap it and i think i learned about hypothesis through a vitae article or a chronicle article somebody had linked to it um
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and i went and watched like all the youtube videos and webinars you guys had and i was like this is perfect so i started using it in 2018 and it was like just i think it was revolutionary because i had folks
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reading and talking to each other about the text where as before i could barely get them to do the re like i was trying to force them to do the reading by giving them a quiz that i would like punish them for if they got things wrong that's really not what i
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want that's not how i wanted to teach history at all so this was a it was a really great tool and i've been using it ever since then and it's been consistently like one of my favorite aspects of the class and i've gotten
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really good responses from students as well who really like to see their classmates opinions and their analysis alongside the text too when they're reading and that really makes sense to me that
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like why if we want to encourage people not only just to be more careful readers but even just to read it all why should we turn it into like a punishing activity right it's that doesn't no
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definitely not what about you alicia how did you come to know hypothesis and get started using it so compared to mary i'm a new kid on the block um and i wonder if i share an experience from some of the people watching today
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which is that when we decided to move to remote learning this spring i was thinking about what i could you know what are the best elements of my in-class um exercises and work that i could translate
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and i was really grateful kevin gannon wrote about hypothesis in a piece for aha perspective so just a plug thank you aha thank you kevin um because like mary then i went and i looked at it and i was like
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what i've been doing and i wonder if other historians have loved response papers as much as i am that kind of weekly low-stakes writing assignment that students would do after they've done the reading but
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before they'd come to class and for me the annotation got the best elements of those response papers in that it asked students to read at a deeper level it allowed them to practice low stakes
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writing but then it had some other aspects of response papers that it was different and better in some ways so for example i am kind of frustrated when i am the only
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audience for students response papers so this allowed them to practice writing to an audience of their peers i found it to be hugely motivating for students who would want to see how other students had reacted i thought
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that it was kind of it allowed them to process some of the information of reading through conversation and then also the way that they could make it more multimedia so the fact that i was getting youtube
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links youtube videos wikipedia links pictures in the margins just allowed students to kind of bring that material to life in ways that they were not always i think feeling welcome to do
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in response papers yeah that's that's really uh interesting that um the multimedia part comes out too because i think you know that's a that's a a a thing that annotation can enable
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that is a little bit hard to do in other formats right where you're like i mean you could include videos in a response paper i suppose but there's just something about actually having it in the martin margin there and i love what you said
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alicia too about the idea of um not wanting the students response papers just to go to the audience of one the teacher have you heard this um this idea of the renewable assignment as opposed to the
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disposable assignment um it's kind of a phrases that came out of david wiley's work you know the oer um the oer specialist if you will um but anyway it's uh that idea that you
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know to encourage students to be making works that aren't just something that the teacher is going to read and then essentially throw away um after it's assessed right it's really powerful
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you know one thing that a lot of um a lot of people that are coming into annotation sometimes struggle with this and i wonder how you guys have if you've encountered this how to deal with it
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is um there's a kind of concern that if you have collaborative annotation open on a reading so that when a student first encounters the reading one of the things they might see is annotations from their fellow
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students already in place or even maybe possibly seated by you the teacher um and that that might kind of um warp or infect their reading in some way that that there are already responses
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there and i'm wondering um mary have you encountered that issue or do you have that concern about students kind of finding things pre-annotated and if so how do you deal with it or do you you actually
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not see it as an issue yeah um i don't see it as an issue really i think that um i mean there are there's an option for them and
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i tell this to them at the beginning that they can turn off everyone's highlights and they can minimize the window if they want to read it just as themselves but i do feel like there is something that's really gained from
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reading reading the text and then um you know because primary documents are not easy to read even if they're short they're not like um they're not always the most intuitive documents so if you have like stumbling over a line you go to the pain
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where all these annotations are and you see like five other people have questions about the same thing i feel like it's it's um it's empowering it's useful to see what kinds of questions people are asking and then see the replies for
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people who are trying to figure it out and then i also don't give them a blank document to start so for um i have a practice of giving them questions to guide the reading especially for primary documents so
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general questions are not like asking them to find specific things in the text but just sort of like who is the author you know why do you think they're writing what's the context so they are thinking about how to answer these questions already when they're reading
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so i think some students have commented that they felt a little bit of pressure this is that ucsd especially where it's like oh everyone else has commented and i have to sound smart and you know it's i just sort of like try to
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ease there like there's really no pressure there's no wrong way to take to to annotate the document like whatever you're doing is adding to the conversation even if no one's replying to you at least you're
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sort of inputting your voice and then also i annotate too so i'm in there with them sort of replying to questions and then asks um this last you know remote
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pandemic quarter semester i would send out um kind of an announcement every week sort of giving the distillation of the themes that they had drawn upon in the annotations to give them just a sense of where the class was
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at trying to um just reiterate that we're in this together this is one piece of the where how we're creating a community in this online space so just um you know the same way that you would i want to encourage people to
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participate in the face-to-face classroom this is like where they have the chance to do that um online at least for me for my classes i don't know i feel like i got away from your question a little bit no no yeah
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there's no like with annotation there's no right and wrong answer here to the discussion so um yeah that was great what about you alicia have you run into that concern at all about like people encountering annotations already and it causing a
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problem yeah this would be more interesting if i disagreed with mary but i want to emphasize some of the things that she said which is and i'll get to that question of worrying about students encountering bias but
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one thing that's wonderful about it as she said was that students can see different models for how to interact with a text and i loved that i loved that i had you know i think that we all have experiences of students who are
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stronger at historical analysis and close reading when they walk into our classroom and getting them to model those skills where other students could see how they had looked at a passage
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and how they had moved on to an argument from it but also people who were having responses to a text as a reader like logging their emotional response in a way that you know especially as we were managing a remote classroom really
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could build some community and some camaraderie you know i had students who were i thought of them as my researchers who you know every wikipedia rabbit hole they fell down or every additional primary source they
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found they could kind of show to the other students and that was as somebody who's fallen down wikipedia holds myself that was actually really rewarding to track their progress the question of does it bias them to see
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how other people have seen it does it limit them i don't want to dismiss that concern but i think that assumes that students aren't already reading texts and interacting with everything that we
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assign in a world kind of rich with context and you know mary makes the point that she asks her students you know questions to help direct their reading to help them be more efficient and better
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readers and you know that's a practice that i use and i think that's one way that we're already shaping how they get to a text but i also think something she said about a face-to-face community like i think about the ground
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rules that we establish in my class at our first meetings and the kinds of rules for respectful dialogue and you know one thing that i did when we started doing these annotations was kind of have that check-in moment again
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kind of establishing what our ground rules for participation would be and what kind of belonging to our community in the margins meant for students and i find that you know i maybe this is
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my personal experience but something that you learn in a social way you learn more deeply because you can connect it to people a time and a place and remembering that you really disagreed with somebody in the class
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about one instance or maybe you felt really validated when five people responded to your did he really say that what kind of comment in the margin makes that real to you in a way that
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kind of trying to get through your history reading you know when you're tired at night and you don't know anyone in the class maybe doesn't make it as memorable and as enriching
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that's a really uh really powerful point i makes me feel like we should generate some disagreement here so we can all remember this conversation better right so far there's been a lot of agreement you know and you bring up alicia maybe you could
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follow up on this um it sounds like a lot of your practices here were really shaped by the pandemic kind of coming onto the scene um and it sounds like you've found a way to use annotation to sort of
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enrich what's been happening um for online and remote delivery and i'm wondering do you feel like this is something that was only useful to you in that context or could you see
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also using it in in a face-to-face delivery mode yeah i'm so sorry for all of my um colleagues because i i feel like this is the answer that we know is true but we hate to admit it which is
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once i was sort of forced to adapt to this i can't imagine teaching my seminars in a face-to-face mode without it and i think that's for me that kind of comment about the response papers that
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were for me a wonderful way to get students to think through writing to get them practicing thinking and to prepare them for discussion you know i i don't think that discussion is a level playing field for all my students
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so the more that i can do to help them feel like they are ready to come to class with something to contribute the more i can kind of back channel with them but also the way that my students can shape the discussion you know getting to
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see conversations that have already played out around a text and knowing that then we can walk into the classroom with something that like we're kind of ready to go with um i think that's wonderful instead of
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you know and and i i loved response papers but i felt like only i had that insider information that you know student x and student y vehemently disagreed um but it's sort of more fun when they
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can come to that conclusion and when they can then come to class ready to to kind of back up their opinions or to to know that's a point of potential disagreement
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that makes sense what about you maria's the has the fact that this has all been having happening in the context of the pandemic had an effect um for me i'm like a hypo hypothesis
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evangelist i love it so much and i've been using it for a while so i um i mean i definitely using it in the pandemic context but i already was using it in the face-to-face classroom but i really like what alicia said about
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having it as like another avenue for students who might not be as comfortable in a face-to-face class discussion or even in a small group discussion to have some way for their
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voice and opinion about the the text and the content to be to be heard that's really what i find it as like um it's another channel for them to interact with the material that doesn't require
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you know speaking it up in class if that's not their thing you know we try to do other things to get them comfortable with that but in this uh it's just like another another tool in your toolbox but i love hypothesis like
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i will never stop using it it's the best oh yeah and i admit we didn't actually know mary very well when we invited on the show so um we uh we didn't cherry-pick people who
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were going to be so uh evangelistic if you will um you know a lot of i see a lot of talk in the chat and there's a lot of questions kind of brewing that we could get to later but some of the some of the conversation is
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around assessment and so i wonder if you guys could talk a little bit about how you think about um incorporating annotation into your into the assessment scheme if you think of it in informative or summative ways
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or if it's you really see it as a sort of something different than the kind of normal assessment assignments not normal you know that normal kind of graded work that you're looking for people to do
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mary what's your take on that um yeah so for me the annotations are um i guess how it would assess that students are doing the reading so there is no i don't
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go through and like critique each person's notes that they take or i don't i'm not like i'm nitpicking their grammar or anything or even the ideas that are coming out like
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as long as it's relates to the text or relates to the content of the material they get the full points for doing it like it's really just sort of encouraging them to um check in with the reading and check in with their classmates on a regular basis
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so my guidelines for them are usually just engage with the majority of the text so for you know um upper division class where they're reading like a 30 page article
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that's means something different than if they're reading like a two-page primary source but um you know they're engaging thoughtfully with the text that's like my only guidelines and then i give them the questions that they can sort of answer if they're feeling
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a little at sea with what to say but um i don't ever judge or evaluate the content of their annotations it's more about seeing where those conversations go on their own um i do kind of say to them i don't want
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to see one word annotations as the bulk like i don't want to just say oh interesting or question mark you know that kind of thing um although i do find like really funny sort of one-off engagements with the text we're like oh
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well you know that that kind of thing is funny to me and i like it if you have also you know paragraphs that are later um but yeah there's no it's really really low stakes as alicia said before it's not there's
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i don't want it to be any pressure of like there has to be a right answer you it's um you know i i it's like 20 of the grade of my class so i do treat it very seriously but it's just that the fact that you're you're there and you're
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participating that's really all i care about in terms of assessment so it's almost like a class participation level exactly what about you alicia how do you handle assessment and annotation
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right so um when i used it i was doing it in a small upper level seminar so i was able to kind of include it in a kind of larger participation grade and
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like mary i gave them some instruction on i want to see you meaningfully engage with the text and i was like if you want an approximate word count here you go don't write essays in the margins don't make your classmates read those but
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show us that you've thought about this material you're connecting it to class themes to something your other classmates have said and i just kind of set numbers i said i want to see you know three substantial annotations
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and two meaningful responses to what somebody else has annotated and i was like beyond that go to town you know i loved when i would read it and somebody would say like they would highlight something and put a smiley face in the margin you know for
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me that was tracking their interaction but it wasn't graded um i see questions in the chat about how to assess this and how to use it with larger classes
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this is something that i am thinking about i suspect mary has more experience and and i will just say that her first instinct to say you know it's kind of a check mark or a no check mark like did you get your five
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points this week or not um and the last thing i'll say um before i hand it over to somebody who knows better is that i i i was able to use all of my students so i had 19
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students annotating collaboratively and it didn't feel like it got too noisy but i do wonder some of you who have much larger classes if kind of creating even smaller communities within that class
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like through groups who are kind of responding to each other even if that rotates throughout the semester if that does give you a better opportunity to get kind of those meaningful
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multi-step conversations in the margin how about you mary did you uh did you encounter that issue of um you know too many too much noise on a document or did you break into groups or yeah um so
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the biggest class i've used it with is 65 um and i do i what i do is i give them a choice of which document they want to annotate each week so there's multiple readings assigned each week
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i want everyone to read everything but i was only going to give them the check if they annotated one so kind of people sort of self-selected into groups that way and it minimized the amount of people
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working on the same document but i have to say i don't it doesn't bother me to see like hundreds of annotations it's actually kind of like that because you can really see just the level of like
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so many different opinions at once i i understand some people might find that really distracting but i also add a piece of advice instructors thinking about using that i don't read them all like that would take me hours so i sort of
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scan them i do the search for a question mark make sure i get the questions i am in there annotating with them so i will um this last uh quarter i gave them like a time period i said i'm going to be online every wednesday at three o'clock
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to four o'clock i'll be annotating the text at that time so people sort of either got on before me and posted their notes or waited till after i posted my questions and came to respond so there was engagement with me there but i didn't
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worry about reading every single person's sanitation but one thing i i don't know i just i love the um i i don't mind seeing the hundreds in the annotations but i might that might just
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be me um when i first did it i got an email from jeremy because it was like very early on in this whole process and he said your students broke the record for the amount of annotations on one document
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and i was like you don't understand what this means like i had a diversity and equity and inclusion requirement class that a whole bunch of people take to satis there's mostly stem majors it's like one
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of those classes where you're like come on guys history is cool and they're all like okay like let's go off to my engineering class and i had like 300 annotations about a document about the pueblo revolt of 1680 it was like uh
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i mean it was great for me i love to see a level of engagement so but um in terms of like getting it to be more manageable yeah you can i setting it up as a group assignment would work getting them to sort of self-select and sort of annotating the
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document of their choice would work um but you can go either way too you can just have it be a free for all like b and go for it that makes sense and i'll just uh there's i'd see there's some chat in the in the margin here
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uh of this call about um you know uh how hypothesis might work in this or that context and so forth and i just want to um say we're not going to really address any of the technical aspects of hypothesis on these shows there's a lot of other ways to
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engage with us and frannie can put in a link to our help center and there's all sorts of ways to start conversations with the hypothesis team but we're really trying to focus in on on kind of the pedagogy and people's experience
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you know educators like like mary and alicia so you know i've been asking you guys a bunch of questions mary and lisa and i'm wondering before we we shift over to total q a mode although we've already been addressing them them do you have any kind of questions about
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hypothesis or or dreams or things that you wanted to kind of bring to the table that we haven't addressed stop them in their tracks about thinking i have well i'm just gonna say something okay
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well i have um i am of two minds because i use canvas now um at both my institutions hypothesis integrates really really well with canvas um which i love because you can you know feed it into
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the speedgrader and you can set up your group assignments and all that stuff and you can see everybody just they don't have to leave the lms but there's one thing i really did like about when i was using it um without the lms before the app where
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i just had them download the extension and then annotate the pdfs in their browser or the links to the articles is that i would set up a group for my class but most people would forget about the group and they would just annotate in the public
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which i actually really loved because they would be annotating alongside you know some of these things were from like regular um online primary sources that other history professors were using so they would be annotating alongside students in
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wherever other place and i just thought that was kind of cool so i'm um this is not at all a question this is just me talking but i think i'm gonna try to do this um in a more
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meaningful or intentional way maybe um this coming semester is to try to get them to engage with a wider audience in some in some way so if anybody has any ideas about that i'm i'm all ears yeah that's a that's a
00:29:45
really interesting point mary um and uh as i know that uh even our uh our ceo and founder dan whaley is in the audience here answering questions in the chat um and there is a difference between the
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way hypothesis works in the lms integrated environment versus out in the in the kind of with the individual account out on the wild web as we say sometimes um and and some of that is this difference between having some
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scaffolding around privacy and ease of use with single sign-on and the lms and then you know wanting people to maybe move toward a more kind of public discourse like you're suggesting mary so there is there are both those possibilities and they're both sort of
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interesting um alicia did you have anything you wanted to like voice that we haven't touched on um i suppose my one like wishlist item for hypothesis
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would be a way to select a non-text piece on the page so if you've used hypothesis you know that there are page notes so you can signal a note that is not an annotation that is
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not tied to a specific piece of text um but i found that in assigning some primary sources with some visual elements um that students who were kind of showcasing their visual analysis i was
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like oh if i could get them to kind of annotate pieces on a map in a way something that wasn't text based i just saw so much more potential for my students who were kind of eager
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to showcase those skills yeah that we uh just so you know there's obviously you know hypothesis is focused on anchoring annotations and texts up till now um but there's you know we we know that
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there's a need to also be able to annotate other forms of media like to marquee and images or on maybe you have a pdf where the text isn't even selectable yet or something like that um and then
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obviously there's the question of video annotation i mean there's all sorts of things so you know our roadmap does include um does include the idea of working towards those things but we're still text has been complicated enough to get
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into the world and so we've been focused on that up until now thanks for that so we've had a whole bunch of conversation and questions going on in the q and a in chat and i'm just going to ask franny do you want to surface one that we
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haven't already kind of addressed yeah i mean there might be a couple that we haven't addressed um so i'm just going to take the last one that came up because that's it's timely and
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interesting so i guess this is to both um guests have you ever had to backtrack a conversation where students misread something in a way that was racist or sexist
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um yeah i have yeah uh so this past quarter i taught a class called citizenship and civil rights in the 20th century it's like the most timely class for all the stuff that went on at the end of um
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may and june um and i did have some it wasn't it was just a little aggressive the comments that were being made and i did luckily it was it happened in a way that i was like i
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was really present in my annotations in that class like i was there weekly and engaging with them and so i was able to um i didn't remove it but i sort of publicly stayed my sort of counterpoint and sort of
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probed this person's question a little bit further gave them like a link to a different thing and then they responded so thanks i didn't realize that so i think it came across as more aggressive than he actually intended it to
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but um yeah i have had to sort of um intervene either in the annotations or then in my sort of messages to the class about this is the general theme of the class here is an interesting debate that occurred but we
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want to make sure that we you know and sort of remind them of the um rules of engagement but overall not so much i mean i think that um as a major it was like the majority of cases everyone is
00:33:48
very respectful and even if they're disagreeing they're disagreeing in a respectful way and it's not i don't it's not like i'm not scared of that usually happening if that's
00:33:59
um okay thank you what about what about you at least have you had that experience at all um i i have in kind of you know miss reading in ways that you know their annotation is not where i would want the conversation
00:34:13
to end um but also to echo mary what's you know i'm in there annotating and i found that by the time i saw those other students had been in to respond in kind of respectful engaging ways
00:34:26
to suggest you know that that was not that was not maybe the full takeaway there um and then sometimes i come in to kind of emphasize that correction but often i find that my students are teaching each other
00:34:39
um i haven't had any disrespectful well one time i had disrespectful language in the margins but it was me my students were reading letters um anyway they were letters from a 19th century married couple and they were
00:34:53
doing the most wonderful analysis trying to understand the husband's actions in terms of like the context of the time marriage and masculinity and you know i got to have a really organic moment with them where i just came
00:35:06
through with the last annotation and said these are all really great points i just think he's a dick and and i i thought that those kind of moments that you can have in the margins with your students you know later in the semester when you know them
00:35:18
was a great way to kind of you know to kind of have some levity um and to show the different ways that you can read a text and that it doesn't always have to be dry and scholastic so one one flagrant offense and it was
00:35:30
just me right it happens to all of us um there was one more question in in the chat that i i don't know if you covered it or not forgive me if you did but um
00:35:42
do you point students to particular sections of a text with any annotations of your own to kind of you know see a discussion of a particular section
00:35:57
and can either one of you just jump in um yeah i do um especially if it's a like a secondary source so especially if it's a longer article where i want them to maybe focus on one
00:36:11
particular aspect of the reading that i think really reiterates the points that we've engaged with in our other content i but you know they're free to annotate wherever but i would um ask like a pointed question where i'm highlighting a specific phrase
00:36:23
and say what do you all think about this quote does it make you think of this you know that kind of thing um but otherwise i do just post um more uh questions that apply to the whole document especially if it's a primary source
00:36:35
or um particular sections are like what do you think about that in paragraph seven like it's a it's a mix um so i do give them some scaffolding i guess um in terms of their annotations i don't just sort of
00:36:48
put up the blank document and let them go yeah i've done it both ways um so sometimes i do what i think of as seeding the document where i'll leave um kind of open-ended questions um to
00:37:03
help students who maybe don't know exactly how to get into a text if they see you know if they see my name as the instructor in the margins followed by a question mark that's
00:37:13
a place that they know that um that they can have some buy-in um and sometimes i'll point things out so um i taught a published slave narrative and i could just
00:37:25
highlight um the um the title page and show them that it was published in london you know that it was published for a certain reason and even though students didn't respond to that annotation i found as they were
00:37:38
going through the text having seen my annotation when they first visited the document that was shaping their reading in the back of their minds and then so sometimes seating it in advance and then um i don't know mary if
00:37:52
you've done this but i did the staggered deadline where you had to annotate at one point and then 24 hours check back in and give more annotations so that you had to have a chance to see maybe other
00:38:05
people's comments who weren't there if you were an early bird and so i would often come in and plan my kind of weekly login to look at annotations to coincide with that change between the
00:38:18
first and the second deadline so that i could kind of highlight certain conversations play the role of moderator to say you know oh you know another student made a similar point on page seven
00:38:30
you know it sounds like you guys have a lot to say on this question yeah and i just had a sort of a follow-up question for you alicia like so when you're doing something like annotating
00:38:43
um the title of a piece or where it was published is that in an attempt to show them you know that you can annotate things that are maybe outside of the
00:38:55
main text just to give them a flavor yeah so it was a great moment for me like as a historian i want my students to be interacting with the content of the text but also kind of
00:39:08
thinking in more meta ways about it as a primary source so thinking about the context of its creation and getting to highlight something that students might not see as like
00:39:19
a key part of the you know the body of the text was great for me um and it makes them start to think about you know questions that i hope we get our all of our history students to think about like why do we have this
00:39:33
primary source and not others you know why did they write about it in this way for what audience and for me that's something that i've been able to do kind of like through long teasing it out in discussion but getting
00:39:47
to put that annotation right before their eyes when they sat down to read it i found that then they were highlighting parts of the text that were making them think about the context of why it was written for whom in what
00:39:59
broader context so yeah that was a that was like a good moment where i was glad that i had been able to get in um and kind of shape how they saw it great uh thanks there's one more question and then i think we're we're
00:40:13
really running out of time so we'll have to wrap up um but so this question um have panelists ask students to indicate places where they're confused whoops now the screwing up
00:40:24
or don't follow the logic or effective implications of the text and if so the fellow students then reply to them
00:40:38
yeah yeah so that's one of my sort of guidelines for students to say what they're confused about what to what is going to go in my notes what's going on my annotations one of the options is if you were confused ask a question
00:40:51
and then um the other thing is if you see a question you can reply to it so yeah i do um encourage them to do that and then one thing i i'm going to be more explicit about
00:41:02
going forward is that when somebody has already highlighted a piece of the text rather than somebody else highlighting the same text and adding their annotation i'm going to encourage them to just reply to the original highlighter
00:41:15
so that you're encouraging them to to build up that um that comfort level with talking to each other about these things so that they are really um yeah they're using each other as a resource that way
00:41:27
but yeah definitely ask questions yeah it's definitely great when somebody you know will put a question on something that they don't understand maybe it's a reference or maybe it's just a move in a scholarly argument that
00:41:41
they're not following and to get to watch their classmates respond to it or that's another place where i come in although usually especially questions of fact students will answer and it's really rewarding
00:41:54
when they are discussing analysis like i'm not sure you know how they're making this point or what the broader significance is and that's when you get to the best conversations is when a student's kind of brave enough to put that question
00:42:06
there so those are actually some of my favorite annotations they often lead to the best kind of notes in the margin for our collective notes that's like turning the conversation over to the students
00:42:19
so that's great anyway we are at 9 45 so unfortunately we're out of time um this was such a great show i want to thank our guests and i want to thank nate
00:42:33
and i want to thank everyone who rsvp'd for the show and turned up here today you
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