Video: OLC Innovate 2021: Social Annotation: Instructor Presence and Making Sense of Science (DocDrop)

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yes greetings everyone uh it looks like the entries have slowed down a little bit so we'll go ahead and get started we have a lot to uh a lot to do today this is a a pretty exciting version of the workshop because

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we've got uh two different kinds of activities going on in it so um really looking forward to all the folks that we have gathered here today and um the folks at olc i really want to

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thank for um working with us to put this workshop on social annotation on as we kick off lc innovate 2021 here so once again i'll reintroduce myself i'm nate angel

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i lead marketing and communications at hypothesis i'm joined here by some other um hypothesis colleagues who will be um popping in and out of both the presentation and the chat as we move along and then a whole bunch of

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educators and folks from the annotated community um that will be playing different roles as we move through the move through the presentation today uh i'd just like to mention um for folks who aren't familiar with it

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annotated is a community of educators um and other interested folks who are especially focused on the role that social annotation can play in teaching and learning uh so there's a whole bunch of institutions that

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um are kind of participants in the annotated community and some of them are gathered here today to participate in this workshop and kind of lead you through some things and share their experiences and we'll get to more of them

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later i'll just point out that this slide deck is available uh is available for all uh you can get to it directly through this link that i'm about to share

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and the slide deck has a lot of links and resources in it so uh you'll be able to um get it and uh and use it as we as we move along to the presentation as well it has links to things like all the

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members of the annotated community um and then i just wanted to uh give a little bit of a warning that one of the things that we're going to be doing today is actively annotating on some documents and so if you don't already have a hypothesis

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account um you'll want to go to our getting started page which franny will put a link to in the chat in just a second and sometime during the course of of what we're doing today

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and get yourself an account so you're all set up to annotate later on um and this uh slide kind of links to a document that covers um sort of uh oops i didn't mean

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to advance that that covers sort of like the mechanics of doing that work um and so it's something that you can read yourself or share out with other folks who might be participating um but i just wanted to give you a little bit of warning we'll come back to

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that right before we start the actual annotation activity so um just to talk a little bit about our agenda today we got three parts my colleague jeremy dean is going to start things off by

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um kind of making sure that we all understand what we're talking about when we talk about social annotation and teaching and learning um then we're going to move to our special guests from metropolitan state university denver um who are going to lead us through a

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hands-on annotation activity around the concept of instructor presence and then for the final part of the show we're going to have a special episode of our liquid margin show um with a couple of guests who are going to be focused in on

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a social annotation in science uh which is a field that's really starting to kick off now and so uh that's the kind of action-packed agenda we've got for the

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full day uh and uh i wanna keep us moving so that we have enough time to do the really juicy parts so um my colleague jeremy is here now and i'd like to pass the baton over to him

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he's going to spend just a few minutes helping everyone understand what hypothesis is on what social annotation is and how it's used in teaching and learning do you want me to advance the slides for you jeremy uh

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that'd be great or uh actually maybe if i take over then it'll double as refreshing then because i think i deleted a couple does that work okay sure yeah let me stop my share

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so i'm i'm super psyched to be here uh absolutely the number one conference i miss going to uh in this uh age of the pandemic um is olc so i'm glad that we're still

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working together olc friends um and nate and his team have put together a great program for everybody today um and hopefully uh i don't know if it'll be the fall of the spring but it's um i'm hoping to connect with some of you guys face to face

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um in the near future um i'm an english professor by training i've been working in social adaptation for about eight years now um but i'm an english professor by training and i taught high school english as well um and i got in the habit very early on

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in my teaching career of handing out a poem by billy collins on day one of every year or term um to try to inspire my students to annotate uh because i knew that annotation been

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so critical for my own success as a student as an educator and as a scholar um and i believe it would be key to their success in uh in my class um and so just alongside the syllabus i'd hand this

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poem out and attach to the syllabus that's how critical i thought the practice was for their success we have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just lays in an

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armchair turning pages we pressed a thought into the wayside planted an impression along the verge in terms of getting on the same page you know when i met with students face to face

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in the class i felt like i was easy to get them on the same page we'd get the book out we'd have great conversations our fingers would be on certain pages they'd be scribbling notes in the margins uh we were all you know quite literally on the same page

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and when i first discovered social annotation the thing that excited me was being able to extend that sort of being on the same pageness um annotation is is nothing new uh it's been around it's an age-old you

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know learning technique if you will an age-old learning technology students scholars educators have been writing the margins of books since probably before the invention of the book but as

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more and more content moves online and reading moves online we lose the ability to practice this uh you know age-old practice of annotation and part of what hypothesis is doing is trying to kind of resurrect the margin if you will for

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student note-taking um but there's a lot more that we can do when we take annotation online than just take notes or scribble notes to ourselves although that's uh you know important part of the

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practice um i love this quote from jennifer howard in the chronicle of higher education actually about eight years ago talking about social reading and social annotation online a book can be a gathering place a

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shared space where readers record their reactions and conversations and again in terms of extending the vibrancy of a face-to-face classroom thinking about you know creating spaces online that are authentic for us and our

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students to engage with each other and with our course content i think the margin again is the place uh to do that um this is our vision at hypothesis for social annotation

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that any website article ebook uh document or piece of multimedia can have multiple layers of annotation you can still have that private layer of marginal notes that you see towards the bottom there but there can also be a public layer i think today

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we'll be working in a public layer on top of of of a document when we when we annotate together um and then there are private uh circumscribed group layers as well you can have a group for your colleagues to

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cook to read together the latest publication in your field uh or a group for all your courses so your students can read and annotate together uh learn from each other uh in the margins as they work through

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course material there are three top level takeaways that i want to share from students and instructors that i've worked with over the past eight years in social annotation the first one is that nothing new piece

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of annotation but it is new in the sense that a lot of times when we read online we don't have a place to take notes um or to have uh conversations hypothesis makes reading actively and this is what annotation has always done um

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larry hanley at sf state writes i want students to learn the profits and pleasures of careful engaged reading to cultivate this kind of reading and learning i've tried a lot of previous annotation tools but hypothesis finally delivers

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on the promise of digital annotation one of the neat things about the screenshot here is the way in which social and digital annotation expand the ways that students can be active

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in a text on a text the ways that they can show that they've done the reading the ways that they can show their own expertise in this particular example you see students annotating with images the assignment call for students to attach an image to a

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particular piece of text within the poem and so they all went and found different images from different sources online and express themselves through that multimodal pathway which i think is a very powerful

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way to sort of extend the different types of ways and different types of learners that can engage and be successful in a course this one i think is is pretty radically new at least it is for me in terms of my own teaching

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history that hypothesis or social annotation makes reading visible when i handed out that billy collins poem on day one i would say you know go forth and annotate and then i would grade four weeks later some

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summative assignment like an essay um and i didn't see my students reading i didn't see their annotations i didn't see a lot of the most of the work frankly that they did before they handed in a five-page

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uh essay that was the product of a lot of microprocesses uh that go into the or formative processes that go into that final summative work and one of the most powerful things about social annotation is making those

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processes visible um knowing that our students have done their reading also knowing where they were confused where they were excited um being able to nurture a particular line of inquiry that a student

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hooks into on a reading and being able to address those earlier formative moments to help our students develop the skills um that they then would you know put on display in a final product like an

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essay linda parsons at ohio state uh says about uh hypothesis or about social annotation my students annotations give me a window to their thoughts and understandings that i couldn't access otherwise i wouldn't get this depth of

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interaction in a threaded discussion and then finally uh hypothesis makes reading or social annotation makes reading of course social and again and again every time that we pull students on their uh you know use

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of hypothesis in the classroom and what excited them it's the social piece that they that they latch on to they love being able to see uh their other students comments and learn from their from colleagues

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um and share their own ideas and this was powerfully put by a student of robin derosa many years ago at plymouth state who wrote a blog about her experience in robin's class shannon griffiths writes hypothesis is

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my literary facebook when i'm reading i sometimes wonder does anyone actually understand this am i crazy with this brilliant tool i know i'm not alone i know i certainly had this experience in grad school of feeling alone

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inside of text i think it's a healthy thing to be alone and to grapple with difficult text but learning is social and so it's also important that uh eventually you have other people to connect with

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and make meaning with around text i'm going to close by just sharing five uh takeaways you know as people in this session may think about annotating with with courses or with

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colleagues the first is just a reminder that this isn't just about the sort of you know reading and writing and and literacy development that it is just as much about community as it is about

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annotation and many of the instructors that give us feedback about why they found the tool powerful they talk about this the development of collaborative skills that they see their students are are are working on as they as they

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annotate socially with each other as part of the course and how those skills and collaboration transfer to completely other aspects of a course other other aspects of other kinds of group work that might be done

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in a course um one really neat thing and raymie who's on on the horn today knows a lot about this um is students annotating ancillary uh objects that are part of a course

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like their syllabi like the syllabi syllabus for a course or lecture notes or even a pdf of a slide deck of of a lecture this is a great way to

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in a low stakes way often get students using the tool get students interacting around the course again you know in the context of a pandemic some of these moments where you might have a conversation about the syllabus

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or about a reading assign or about a essay assignment aren't happening when when we can't meet face to face again turning this tool on opens the margins back up so you can just turn

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this on for personal note-taking and see what kind of social ways students will leverage the margins for uh for their learning um and connecting with with their colleagues many of our instructors will go through

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and pre-annotate a text for students possibly with model annotations of what they wanted students to uh be be doing themselves with annotations sometimes as sign posts or guide posts for

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students as they go through a difficult text to help them get through a text and also uh sometimes just dropping in you know discussion questions uh kind of taking the discussion forum

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that's often found in a lot of learning management systems and you know having a sort of more authentic and horizontal way uh for students to ask questions in the er for teachers to ask questions and students and teachers instructors to collaborate

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around discussion of those questions and then finally you know really the bread and butter of what hypothesis is for uh is for asynchronous seminar style discussion again you know for me the thing i always

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loved about teaching was that meeting with students in the classroom and having a conversation that's what gave me the energy um and it's about extending that space beyond the physical confines of the classroom continuing discussion online

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continuing the interaction with peers online uh through the margins of a text and with that i think i will kick it back

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to nate yeah and you can stop sharing your slides because again they need to be refreshed run a uh all right let me get the right page up here

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sure again thanks for that jeremy um i hope i know we've got a lot of veterans here who are uh very practiced with social annotation but we also probably have some new folks and

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it's good to make sure that everybody kind of understands the general ground of of what we're talking about so now we're going to actually move to a more hands-on activity with some um guests from the

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annotated community all from the metropolitan state university in denver my home state um and i'll just remind folks again that uh you will need to participate along with us we're going to do some social annotation

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you will need uh a hypothesis account to do that um so friend if you could put the getting started link back in the chat again for anybody who doesn't already have a hypothesis account you're going to need that um to get started

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and so now i wanted to actually introduce the folks that we're going to be um talking with today we've got three educators all from metropolitan state university denver like i said

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um and so if you folks would uh come on camera um i'd like to um uh introduce you and uh just ask a little bit of background about what brought you here today in the topic that we're focused on

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around um instructor presence and so um so rebecca cottrell uh ann oberman and meredith jeffers um uh all come from uh msu um rebecca and anne from the

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department of social work and meredith from the department of modern languages and they're all um practitioners using social annotation in their work as well as

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folks who think more broadly about kind of learning design and learning affordances and they've been doing a lot of interesting work with a whole team of other colleagues um on the concept of instructor presence and so i wanted to just

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um kick things off first by um inviting ann up uh to unmute and come on stage um and tell us a little bit about what brought you all here today and your personal connection to uh

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social annotation around the idea of instructor presence thanks nate and the hypothesis community um it's great to be here and it's fun to be here as well with meredith and becky

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we started off as a faculty learning community at msu denver and it's almost three years ago this is our third year and it's kind of continued informally um past that initial year that we were slated to do more of a

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formal uh faculty learning community and what happened was that becky was finding that there was a lot of training around design um but not around online instructor presence and what that meant and how it's manifested in our classes

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and so a group of us got together there's the three of us a couple other social workers a math professor our avp for online learning all got together and talked about online learning presence

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and one thing that came up as one of those tools we were talking about what tools increase our presence and one of those tools that we discussed and played with was hypothesis and the thing that we thought a lot of the examples that jeremy was giving

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before around that student piece but it also allows faculty faculty to be present in the class and so not only are students heard and seen in hypothesis but faculty are felt heard

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and seen through hypothesis and so that's kind of the long roundabout how we got here today and what we really value about using that tool great that's that's good context uh for

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me and for all our guests here today um and becky uh i thought it might be good also to hear from you about your kind of your personal involvement that's a little bit different than anne's if i'm not mistaken

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absolutely so i was also part of the flc that we joined in together but at the time i was teaching in the modern languages department i was a spanish instructor and since then i've graduated with my phd in curriculum and instruction so

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congratulations thank you um so i'm taking on that role as online and hybrid curriculum development and support in the social work department so i am not currently in

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a teacher but i support a lot of folks who use tools to engage with their students so that's one of the conversations that i have a lot and again hypothesis is one that they come back to again and again as they

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like to be able to annotate things together great that's that's really good here and that and so i guess you've actually shifted from uh from modern languages over to social work

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uh moving moving that practice but your colleague your former colleague from um foreign languages meredith is here today who has kind of a different um connection to social annotation meredith you want to tell us a little bit about what brought

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you here today she's still our colleague there's no former that's true yes um i actually think jeremy touched on a lot of the primary uses that i have of hypothesis in different sections um

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but one of the reasons i got really into it is was before covid i was tasked with building and maintaining and sharing quite a bit of asynchronous online courses that were also with an

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eye toward making them open educational resources and so hypothesis has become kind of the perfect way um you come at it from both angles which i think is what becky and anne were getting at one to

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see what students are working on and how they're working through a text and where they're getting hung up on a particular translation or term or concept or a theoretical lens but also as a way for me to direct their

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attention or check in or let them know i'm present and still there seeing what they're doing rather than just having you know a grade and a column so i recently learned actually from from

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nate and franny that there may be a way to tie a flip grid to hypothesis so if those two worlds can combine then i will be the happiest faculty member in the world that would be great

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that's one thing when good things come together right yeah so we've um there's been an augmentation to a hypothesis recently that enables you to just um post a flip grid url into an

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annotation much like you would a youtube url and it will automatically embed that flip grid in that annotation um so that should should record i actually haven't tried it myself so

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that's the only reason i'm saying it was some hesitation but as i i understand it that's all up and working um so i would love to hear if anybody has tried that uh here in the audience on feel free to let us know in the chat

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that'd be great well um so without further ado um i've asked these folks um from msu to um uh lead us through an actual annotation

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experience sort of like kevin was saying in the chat like let's use social annotation for professional development like these guys have um as a community right that's not only something to bring to students in in you know the regular classroom but

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also something that we can use as educators to read together and connect with each other and so um they've selected a couple of uh specific texts um i'm gonna go back to sharing my

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screen again um uh and we're going to start off um with uh just a kind of like warm-up exercise as i understand it um around the poem by langston hughes

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and then move on to something that's actually more focused on this topic of instructor presence itself um and we're going to annotate together in that and so did you guys elect a spokesperson to kind of talk a little bit to kind of

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situate these readings for us or maybe you all have something to say about it i'll start just real quickly and so with the theme for english b by langston hughes of course blanks and hughes there was an

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online education when when when he was writing this poem however it really talks about online instructor presence and student presence in our online courses and how to humanize those environments

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um and so i encourage you to use your lens when you're looking at it and there are already annotations in here um so it's been publicly annotated before i think there's some 2020 references in there and so forth but when you get in there think about your

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students and how they are seen felt and heard and then also think about how you are seeing felt and heard in that online environment and so that's that first one do you want me to wait nate for the second one

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um well you could maybe just give us a little foreshadowing of what you're thinking that we might what we might do in the second reading as well um but we can focus on the poem first but if you want to just like introduce the second one

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yeah and the second one is an oer um resource that is it's a it was run as a mooc a long time ago but it's humanizing online teaching and learning and it's chapter three let's talk effectively communicating with our

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online students by sandra mitchell holder and this is more of a practical reading and so i encourage you in this one to share your ideas share what you're doing in these classes share maybe what's a struggle for you

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but how are you communicating where does your online presence show up your voice um with your students and so the reason i'm kind of catering it to that online instructor presence is that's a presentation that we're giving as our faculty learning

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community at olc and so it's just kind of honing in on how to use this tool um in these readings around presence great and so i've pasted the link to the um langston hughes reading

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there in the chat and then here's also a link to the second reading um that will that we'll go to in a second um i've got the reading up here on my screen um would would you prefer and

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to share it on yours and i'll just i've just been um sort of fiddling with it a little bit um as we get started here to show what the hypothesis controls look like and so as you can see as jeremy was

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pointing out when you bring hypothesis social annotation to a reading you're bringing it to the reading where the reading lives and in this case it's a poem posted on the poetry foundation's website right and

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um the links that we provided are special links that bring up the poem in with the hypothesis annotation sidebar kind of added to it um and so you can see it's kind of subtle but in the upper right hand

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corner is this control that opens and closes the hypothesis sidebar and a lot of people don't realize this but you can resize the sidebar by grabbing the chevron that opens and closes it and you can make it lighter or

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skinnier another thing that people might not know is that you can click on this eyeball to both remove and show the highlights from the annotations so if you'd like to have that clean reading experience without having

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all the highlights get in your way you can flip the eyeball off and uh it will hide the annotations and then you can see as ann was mentioning that um you know this was a poem that was annotated

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by other people students educators different kinds of folks already in advance of what we were doing today um and so there's already a series of of public annotations um on the document itself uh

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and so uh the mechanics of actually annotating for people who don't know it are relatively simple in the sense that you highlight something some words on the page right and when you have hypothesis enabled that brings

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up this little selection tool which you can decide whether you just want to make a private highlight for yourself or whether you want to make an annotation on that text and the annotation can be public private to yourself

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or as often happens in the classroom shared in the context of a private group um whether that's inside the lms or outside the lms um and so we're going to be annotating in public today um and

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so i'll stop talking about the mechanics of annotating um and and then the baton back to you and in case you wanted to guide folks around this document i think one other thing i saw in the

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chat was people were asking about size of group and so this is a really small poem for a really large group of people and so there'll be a lot of um there's precious real estate right and so feel free i mean you can kind of shut those down

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look go back and forth and so really when we're doing this with students we can do many different things but i think if we can just start nate i think that would be great and really again thinking about how you're showing up in your class how your

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students are being seen and heard as you read this poem sure so let's um i'll actually be quiet and let folks read and absorb the poem and let's start annotating it together

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uh for about f you know five minutes and we'll come back let's let's say we'll come back at 8 40 uh and after we've spent some time annotating on the poem sorry i said i was going to be quiet and

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here i am already talking again but um one thing to note is as new annotations appear on the page you'll see a little red indicator um uh in the top of the hypothesis sidebar a little arrow pointing down

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that'll turn red and that's letting you know that there are new annotations and if you click on that arrow it will bring the new annotations into your reading context so i had just done it to my page so i refreshed it

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with new annotations that people have made already and this is the one of the things that we notice with a short work right we've got you know 70 people looking at this one short poem right now

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and it's become like a dense web of yellow as so many people have highlighted this short text um to make annotations and so this is one of the things that happens right is

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the density of the document versus the number of people who are who are sort of reading it together can be can be an interesting balance let's put it that way um and of course that is one of the things that

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annotating in private groups like for classes can help ameliorate right because each private groups annotations only appear to the members of that group and so you don't end up with this

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kind of dense public uh set of annotations um yes uh swati we will be recording that we are recording this session and we will be distributing it um afterwards sorry uh so folks from msu um and

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meredith becky did you want to say more about what we've been doing here on the poem or what we've been seeing yeah and so just pointing out some different people's comments so and i'm going to be referring to your little handle so excuse me i don't know your

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full names but gunder was talking about history so bringing in past context in their own history and placement in the poem um jeffers was asking questions of others trying to get clarification just on

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where was langston from where did he go to school where was he studying um an image was shared to give that context and concreteness bucknell talked about physical space about being disembodied and how this poem brings it in

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and so all these different avenues um or just ways of learning and seeing that poem come in also talking about identity so in social work we're talking a lot about social justice how our identity how me as a white woman

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impacts how i'm teaching students in hypothesis and social annotation allows students to engage in some pretty difficult conversations with the text being the main focus so it can kind of take away some of that

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initial bite as you're building trust with students and as they're engaging so i just wanted to point out some of those comments that were made um that really got to that point of those different instructor presents

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becky or meredith i had also um noticed a comment by a gunder about sharing a personal experience and then you said it reminds me that as much as we open up

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our vulnerabilities we create space for connection for deeper understanding and for extensions it's what i hope our collective work in education will do and i just think that captures both the essence of this poem for me

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and what we're doing in an online space i think sometimes it's harder to connect online and i love this so i love that we can use that to do some metacognition as well as

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um interpreting the the text that we're reading yeah and then i guess i'll be the practical voice um if i had a group of 80 students which would probably never happen in my discipline um but i have had

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groups between you know 35 and 40 students and so to avoid this kind of situation um we've all now experienced like you're scrolling through a hundred different comments and everything is now highlighted so it's

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hard to see what students are really looking at i would typically add to the instructions you know either assigning students groups and say if you see someone from your group posted first you need to reply to them to have a mini thread

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focusing on something or i would go in and scaffold like pre-select some things if i wanted to guide the discussion or you could say if something's already been highlighted please don't put a separate

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annotation please respond to that person if you see a question answer that so there's ways to structure this so that you don't end up with the entire text highlighted which may defeat the purpose but if from another angle this is a shorter

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poem and langston hughes is a brilliant writer and thinker so it is entirely possible that every single word except the and said would need to be highlighted in this to really

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get all the juice out of it um but there are different strategies and i found um i know that nate is keeping up with the chap i found a lot of good resources and i started looking at the liquid margins

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podcast too so if you have a discipline specific question or lesson plan that you're trying to think through there are fantastic resources at the website for hypothesis to help

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structure this yeah and um i i know nancy's been talking a lot about more student resources and yeah there are some simpler ones that link i shared nancy was to like every single guide that exists so um some of those are

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are much more um simple so um yeah frannie could you put a link to the hypothesis one-on-one webinar recording for that marissa asks for into the chat there so i just wanted to point out too

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a couple of other affordances in the in the tool itself here and so you may have been watching as i um navigate on the page um people were talking about maybe you know wanting to see uh to sort

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or view annotations by date and so this little tool at the top of the arrows you can actually sort by newest or oldest or by document location so they're in the order of the document itself and then there's also this search

00:34:22

feature right so if i just wanted to see annotations by someone who had march in their username i can search that and so i can sort of do some filtering in the tool itself to

00:34:34

reduce the number of annotations and kind of the cognitive load of it um so those are a couple of other tools in in the tool itself and i'll just point out one other thing and that's that

00:34:45

um the annotations themselves which and here's the link that we've been using to get to it so this this link that you can copy and share with other folks leads to this entire poem and the

00:34:58

annotations embedded on it right so that's a very handy thing but then every annotation each individual annotation is an addressable uh addressable document as well and so that same

00:35:10

icon on each annotation provides a link that you can share with someone to link to not only the document but that specific annotation kind of highlighted in the document and so that's another another great

00:35:23

affordance in there and then someone had asked about the difference between page notes and annotations and i mean i think you know maybe the folks at msu have some ideas on this too but page notes are sort of notes about the document as a whole

00:35:36

if if you will whereas annotations are about some specific text that you've anchored um in in the document itself do you guys have any have you seen any uses of page notes or or think about them in a different way

00:35:49

no that's how i typically explain them to my classes great well so we've spent some time on this phone actually there's now um what is there there's over uh 80 annotations on it

00:36:01

plus some page notes um so great stuff um why don't we shift over to the second document that you guys uh had brought to our attention that this one focuses most directly on instructor presence and i'll bring that

00:36:14

up on the screen if someone from your side there wants to kind of introduce it a little bit more and talk about it why did you pick this document yeah so this one again it's part of humanizing online teaching

00:36:26

and learning it's an oer and so just thinking about when i share documents with my students oftentimes i'll share different sources different resources so kind of the multi-layers of learning so an open educational resource by sandra mitchell holder it has really

00:36:38

practical ideas and so for this one i'd love to hear what you all are doing designing teaching um with your ideas like not only what does it bring up as you're reading it but what are you doing in these areas for instance when they

00:36:50

talk about how we're um encouraging communication they don't list hypothesis is one of those ideas down there so add let's add our ideas to this and maybe try replying to people too so practice that skill and see how that

00:37:02

feels as far as creating conversations with others um so trying out some of those other hypothesis tools that we can use but really again it's how are you being heard by your students how are you communicating

00:37:15

in the words um in the lack of words in the space in the margins again how are you being perceived through your communication to students so that's how it relates back to that online instructor presence meredith or becky

00:37:32

i was just going to highlight what meredith had said about the poem is that now that we have a longer reading let's invite you that if something is already highlighted to focus on replying to that section rather than

00:37:44

adding a new highlight so that way we can get some conversation going and you'll notice that every annotation becomes an opportunity for a threaded discussion

00:37:57

right so you can reply to any annotation um or any reply to an annotation and start a threaded discussion right on top of it um and i'll uh i shared the link to the second document and you'll notice that ann has kind of

00:38:11

seeded the document with some annotations already that can kind of serve as prompts um for our reading and again i'm going to refresh this little red icon here to bring in any

00:38:27

more new annotations also um i thought it might be interesting would one of you like to say something about the remarkable collection that this chapter appears in because i think the collection as a

00:38:39

whole is a rather remarkable document you might know it better than i do yeah there's some i mean you'll recognize the name so on the on within press books in the contents if you click on contents on that left side

00:38:53

it will open up the full they just did it there the full um table of contents that you have and so these a lot of these folks names are going to recognize some of them might even be part of this group here because i know they're part of the hypothesis community for sure

00:39:06

um but this idea again of humanizing online education and so what is it to bring the human into that and how do we do that most effectively and so there's everything from voice and video

00:39:18

to social learning designing and so just a lot of great meat so if you have folks that are new to online education or moving um from kind of maybe some really traditional ways of doing online

00:39:30

education to a more interactive way i would really encourage um folks to read it it's digestible it's easy um to read and again you can share it um and it has a i think cc by

00:39:44

and maybe that you give accordance to but yeah yeah and it's uh it's a collection was edited by whitney kilgore is that right and then with many different authors on different sections i

00:39:59

i see this one that we're focused on um by sandra mitchell holder i saw one by helen deward names i recognize for sure from the community mahabali's down there i think number

00:40:12

nine yeah yeah if you're not familiar with press books it's a great tool for book publishing basically um especially book publishing that um in an open environment um it doesn't

00:40:27

require openness but it is specially tooled to enable um that kind of publishing and actually has hypothesis built into it

00:40:38

and you'll notice too in these books um there's a bunch of different ways to actually uh [Music] access it you can read it online and then they also have the ability to

00:40:55

usually they have it hooked up so you can grab pdf versions and epub versions and i'm not finding it in this particular book but yeah it's a cc by license

00:41:09

though all right i'm gonna um start to be quiet now again and let's spend another uh five minutes um five minutes annotating together on this document

00:41:30

um i see a couple people are um wondering about how to see the whole document and annotations and i guess i'm not quite understanding it so the hypothesis sidebar gives you access to the annotations right

00:41:44

and when you have it open um you can see the document and annotation side by side and for instance if you click on an annotation it should scroll the document to that the area that's where that annotation is anchored

00:41:57

um if you're trying to see like every single word on the page and all the annotations at the same time that would that would be uh that would be just like too much information to show on a

00:42:09

screen i think so i'm not quite sure um what people are struggling with when they're talking about seeing the annotations in the document together if you want to explain more in the chat what what what you're struggling with

00:42:24

that would be helpful i'm going to give folks just a couple more minutes to annotate um and then we need to wrap up this section of the workshop and say goodbye to our good friends from metropolitan denver who are welcome to stick around for the second half of

00:42:39

the show i see a lot of um questions in the um in the chat about various kind of um you know specific points about using hypothesis um and we won't have time to get to all

00:42:56

of them here in the show today but we put resources into some of the other ways that you can get information about more specific things about hypothesis including our 101 webinars and our help section

00:43:10

uh hey julia okay great yeah so the links to all these documents are in the slides um but here's a link to the document that we're working on right now that i'm showing on my screen

00:43:23

and so i will um just point out too that there's sort of two ways to access hypothesis one is how we're doing it now with a free account and annotating on the public web whether that's a public

00:43:35

or private or group annotation and then it's also possible to embed hypothesis in or integrate it into a learning management system like i believe that metropolitan state just moved from blackboard to canvas

00:43:48

so you guys probably have experience using it in both blackboard and canvas but it works and it can be embedded in all um sort of standards compliant lms's all the big lms basically um and that's a little bit different

00:44:00

environment in the lms because people don't students for example don't need to go create separate accounts they're logged in automatically single sign on to their lms and then uh every annotation

00:44:13

every document that's annotated in the lms is annotated in the context of a private group for that class roster right so there's not this um kind of public private group flexibility inside the lms it's got some

00:44:26

guardrails on it to kind of bring the annotations uh just around that kind of public group of the of the class environment um so if you don't have hypothesis in your lms at your school and you'd like to have it

00:44:38

um that's that's a conversation that we can get into um but obviously everyone is is uh free to start using the the free public annotation capabilities where you can also create a private group and annotate with your class

00:44:52

although you will be asking students to go get get hypothesis accounts and so forth so um we're we're reaching the end of our the first half of our show here or uh and i really want to thank

00:45:06

the folks from metro state um for for coming um this is really rich text and one of the great things about annotation is it can be a completely asynchronous activity too we've done it in a

00:45:19

synchronous form now it is actually in a way sort of more complicated to try to get everybody to do the same thing at the same time and read together like we tried today but this can is an ongoing document we'll all be able to annotate it you'll get notified of

00:45:32

via email if someone replies to one of your annotations um so that this can be a continuing and ongoing conversation um as we move forward and we'll be talking about this more on social as well we did record this and we got another

00:45:46

hour of the workshop ahead of us that we'll introduce in just a second um but so you'll be getting uh as an attendee you'll be getting an email that will include a link to both the recording and the

00:45:58

um slides and which includes links to the documents that we've been annotated and everything so that you can revisit all this at a later time if you want as well so um i'd like to sign off then by um

00:46:09

thanking um and becky and meredith did you have any closing words folks uh as we move to the next chapter here it's great to be here and just one thing is that all these stay the annotations stay like nate said so i'll have

00:46:24

students go back if they're writing papers later or like if you have ideas that you thought were interesting you can come back two months from now and your brain actually clears and you can like look at it so i just wanted to mention that that students can go back in and reread things that their colleagues

00:46:36

say digest ideas um so i appreciate that time timelessness of it but thank you all thank you so much and becky did you want to say anything

00:46:47

as a parting gift um yeah just a reminder that there are so many different ways that you can use hypothesis i'm thinking this morning of our colleague wendy gallagher who runs the translation program in msu denver and she uses this in her

00:47:00

advanced translation classes and she says that it is a thousand times better than a discussion board because students can really dig in and talk about the nuances of translating a specific text and help each other and communicate so

00:47:13

that diversity is one of the strengths of hypothesis and the ways you can use it effectively in your classes that's such a great point yeah the flexibility is really key you can use it for almost anything

00:47:25

that's great meredith did you have a parting thought thank you again for having us i think my parting thought is just even looking at the screen right now on zoom having hypothesis and having the highlights right here that are public

00:47:38

to your group it's so much more powerful than a discussion board where a student is writing the quote but it's out of context like something about seeing it alongside the thought is very empowering for students and also

00:47:51

i think really helps with retaining information and getting to a deeper analysis so i hope everybody is able to play with this moving forward great well thank thank you guys all so much for coming i really appreciate it

00:48:06

feel free to stick around we're going to have a really interesting and exciting second half of the workshop here um now that we've had that hands-on experience which i found really rewarding um and so without further ado

00:48:20

i would like to make a transition now to introduce um another uh good friend and colleague that's part of the uh community here i keep ducking down to look at something

00:48:34

on a little tiny screen down below um but i'd like to uh welcome uh raymie collier who also happens to be in colorado it seems like we have a real colorado showing in the house today

00:48:47

raymie is acting this year as the inaugural scholar in residence at hypothesis he is a um an educator focused on teacher education at the university of colorado denver

00:49:00

which happens to be right on the same campus with the metropolitan state folks so they're their neighbors practically um and i know they're preparing for a big snowstorm so they're probably anxious about all that but um raimi is going to be moderating uh the

00:49:13

next segment of the show which focuses on social annotation and science um and so i will kick it over to raymie and uh let him take away and introduce the next part of the show

00:49:27

well greetings nate thank you and what uh what an engaging first half of our presentation uh today at olc i just want to kind of informally recognize so many friends and colleagues who i know have joined us

00:49:39

as this session as i look through our attendees list my heart is really full knowing that there are so so many people who care deeply about student learning who care deeply about

00:49:52

the kind of ethical and engaging use of learning technology to support student learning and we're just really committed during a very still challenging time as we kind of recognize what some are calling the kind of one-year anniversary

00:50:03

of this pandemic that you all are taking time out of your days whether it's the morning or the evening to come together in community and talk about ways to meaningfully support both students and faculty as they learn

00:50:15

through in this case social annotations i just want to kind of mention that that up front we're transitioning now into what is a special episode of liquid margins and i just want to share a few

00:50:26

housekeeping notes before we we formally begin um i know that we have a lot of folks who are who are been watching or listening and so as you do so please if you can keep yourself um muted

00:50:38

again the chat is open uh there'll be some active presence on twitter as well to share thoughts and comments but if you if you could please keep your microphone muted so that we can really hear from our guests that would be again most most

00:50:51

appreciated i'm going to share my screen and kind of transition us into um this formal part of the day um but since the host has disabled my screen sharing i'm going to just continue to waste a little bit of time

00:51:03

here and talk about what's going on we make sure that all of our technology gets on top of that so again um the focus and i should say that before we formally kick off this is that uh we are now moving into

00:51:17

episode 20 of liquid margins which is focusing on science education and the use of social annotation to support both science education student learning in classrooms and also research and research about science education

00:51:29

we have three really incredible guests who are joining us today and so we'll turn it over to them in just a minute here let me see if i can do that now uh again as a part of olc innovate and on behalf of

00:51:42

hypothesis uh welcome to episode 20 of liquid margins titled making sense of science with social annotation i am just thrilled to host uh and and moderate this episode again my name is

00:51:56

raymie clear uh day to day i am an assistant professor of learning design and technology at the university of colorado in denver and have had really i think the the highlight of my professional career

00:52:10

has been serving during this current academic year as a scholar in residence at hypothesis and working with a variety of colleagues and institutions to support the use of social annotation across disciplines and in both

00:52:23

creative and consequential ways we're joined today by an excellent panel of science educators and science researchers and i'll introduce them in just a moment but nate if you do want to advance to the next

00:52:36

slide this is just a general reminder that if you do use the chat in today's zoom webinar please make sure that you're communicating with our entire community and so toggle to all participants and

00:52:48

attendees as you as you take those notes and share them in our zoom chat so thanks for that you can also again follow that little link there for more information and as a kind of preview to the next

00:53:00

episode what will be episode 21 of liquid margins this will be scheduled for the 19th of march that's just in a week called northern associations and that's going

00:53:11

to be about social learning in canadian higher education so that's coming up next friday so today's guests i really have the pleasure of introducing and learning from and i hope that we all

00:53:24

enjoy the wisdom that will be shared by the following folks dr melissa mccartney is assistant professor of biological sciences at florida international university she also serves as the director of

00:53:35

research at science in the classroom dr aaron mckenny is assistant professor of applied ecology and also serves as the director of undergraduate programs at north carolina state university and

00:53:48

she is joined by her colleague also at north carolina state university dr kaus galler who is an associate teaching professor of biological sciences i have had the pleasure of reading scholarship by these uh

00:54:01

really esteemed science education researchers for really actually a number of years now in some cases learning quite a lot about how social annotation has supported science education and i'm really excited to hear from them

00:54:13

about how hypothesis in particular but social annotation more generally can support science education learning in the classroom and also science education research and so that is our panel today and so welcome to

00:54:26

all of you um if we might begin with just some general um introductions um i was hoping to hear from the three our three esteemed panelists how did you first

00:54:39

learn about social annotation generally or perhaps hypothesis more specifically and why since you're all science researchers science educators why did this thing called social

00:54:51

annotation kind of strike you as kind of consequential for the work that you do given your professional expertise anyone's welcome to begin i can hop in um so i learned about

00:55:06

social annotation uh and and hypothesis specifically through the open pedagogy incubator which is an amazing program um held through the nc state libraries uh

00:55:18

so i got to participate in their inaugural cohort and learn about all sorts of different open educational resources and ways to really engage students in um in fully accessing content

00:55:32

right so lowering accessibility barriers but also in in taking ownership of co-creating learning materials um which i think a lot of times these annotations are uh and then i think of course uh it was

00:55:46

kind of perfect timing with the incubator to be thinking about ways to to lower accessibility and to increase inclusivity at a time when we're all remote and to

00:55:58

build community online um yes so i can answer too uh so i probably i think i started working with hypothesis probably in 2014 um and we were actually approached

00:56:13

um someone named jeremy i'm blanking on his last name right now i'm i'm sorry um like the jeremy dean yes yes yes yes yes he he came and found us and we had some really great brainstorming sessions with him

00:56:26

um and we we kind of use annotation our hypothesis in two ways um one because of the way it kind of the back end of the software makes it very easy to pull in to our to our website um and then the

00:56:40

the second reason is kind of what aaron was saying like it gives people ownership and we started using it as a professional development training for graduate students who were looking to get more into science outreach and science

00:56:53

communication and we use the annotation tool as a way to help kind of break down you know like hardcore science papers um so that they would be more easily accessible to the public

00:57:05

um so we kind of did it in parallel with the training on how do you you know how do you break down complicated science um kind of giving them background on that side of things and then hypothesis and annotations were really

00:57:17

the um the delivery route um to make that all come together thank you so much i was also fortunate to be part of the

00:57:32

open pedagogy open incubator with the library and they are fantastic collaborators and i was brainstorming with them one afternoon on a whiteboard

00:57:45

at one of our libraries and i was talking about how i really wanted students to co-create and read together and share their notes

00:57:59

together and that was my goal for this this assignment and we've been doing reading scientific articles for a long time in that course and using different uh rubrics or

00:58:12

frameworks and um micah vandergriff from nc state library said carlos you need hypothesis and i remember stopping him and i said

00:58:25

yes part of the activity is students identify the hypothesis and the papers that he said no no you need to really look into hypothesis and have students annotate within a

00:58:37

group and he set me up and really helped explain how it could help and it's been it it has snowballed from there and i'm learning from you and others

00:58:51

how we can really engage students well again thank you all for again joining us today and again sharing your expertise and wisdom wondering if you might kind of deepen you know your engagement

00:59:04

with social annotation through perhaps a story or an example you all wear multiple hats both again as science educators and also as researchers of science education and how a variety of learners

00:59:17

are deepening their disciplinary engagement through social annotation i'm wondering for folks who may typically associate annotation maybe with the humanities or

00:59:28

with personal marginalia and may not necessarily associate social annotation with the sciences people may have a hard time kind of like imagining what does that really look like and again because

00:59:41

you're all working whether it's in labs or in courses or in professional scientific education initiatives what does this really look like from your perspective can you share

00:59:54

a few some stories with us love to hear some of those from all from all of you all right i can go first this time um so for me in in my work i am very interested in

01:00:07

sharing what scientists find with with everyone you know the general public undergrads high school students whoever it is anybody who's really not a trained scientist and one thing that is you know has come

01:00:21

up over and over again in our work on this is when you ask someone to read a scientific study the first thing that they stumble on is the language um it's a very specific you know jargon terms um scientists some

01:00:34

sometimes we like to make up words um you know like like post-translational things like that that makes sense to us but they don't necessarily make sense to anyone else so for us annotation um

01:00:46

does many things but mostly it really breaks down that language barrier because when you come across a word that's not intuitive and you really you know a lot of scientific words you can't even really use context clues

01:00:58

to find out you know what they mean um so we've done a ton of work with the annotations and just defining vocabulary words as a way to just encourage people to keep reading you know this word might trip you up and you're gonna stop but here's that

01:01:11

definition so keep going um and that has been our in in the sciences um our main you know the real main benefit of annotations

01:01:23

i'm taking notes as fast as i can melissa um i i think in a in a complementary way to that um in my courses where where i see you are

01:01:36

are making science uh translatable and uh you know participatory for the public right or accessible to the public in my classes i also from day one i teach ecology

01:01:49

classes and in ecology you know we have these like basic tenets of biodiversity is important and yet there is not enough in my opinion uh focus on the diversity of humans is important

01:02:02

so from day one i try to really emphasize i offer a lot of group work and and group discussions whether it's small groups or full class and it is so important to me uh

01:02:14

for for all of us to recognize the value of diverse perspectives that you know we now there are multiple publications now that demonstrate that diverse humans produce better science um and and so i think

01:02:29

annotation provides a space for students to build confidence to call out you know what is this jargon um even within a stem class to become you know to break down those barriers to

01:02:42

sharing uh and discussing you know assigned readings in in class discussions but also to hear you know all these different readings uh i'm thinking about you know scrolling through the langston hughes poem

01:02:56

from the annotated workshop and and just seeing all those diverse perspectives and readings and we can get the same diversity of perspectives and the same richness of discussion in a talk about a single um published journal

01:03:10

article right um so yeah those are some aspects that i'm really excited about yeah and i can just following up quickly on what you said i know in my own teaching and especially since we've gone online

01:03:23

i think students are much more willing to ask a question written you know in an email or on on some kind of forum in the chat box as they are out loud so yeah i think you bring up a great point um

01:03:35

putting this stuff in into hypothesis or into an annotation format you're going to catch more of those students asking questions who never really would have said it out loud or come to office hours or anything like that yes and i think it also provides a space

01:03:48

for the the three than me principle that you know i try not to jump right in and answer students questions and wait for a few days because then i find that you get enhanced you know or increase peer-to-peer interactions

01:04:01

answering those questions for each other and then if there is a lot of like yeah i didn't get this either then i can jump in and say oh well actually here's a little bit of of interpretation to help you

01:04:12

um but yeah i i i love the community aspect and and aaron does a fantastic job creating community in her courses and really emphasizing diversity

01:04:26

of ideas and i teach molecular biology classes very techniques based in a biotechnology program that has undergraduate students

01:04:38

and graduate students in the same class so i i i look at that more on the method side of microbial diversity for example a class i teach and i'm focused on the

01:04:51

methods so some of the papers that we look at are really dense and while we may have grad students that our folk are have already been reading papers

01:05:04

their fields may be textiles design maybe college of vet medicine so and on the other side i have

01:05:15

undergraduates that are fantastic chemical engineers in their programs or biologists who may not feel comfortable in person talking to the grad student because they are intimidated

01:05:28

and on hypothesis when we annotate papers together i also try really hard not to start placing comments and answering uh questions

01:05:39

but what i've seen is uh there are more interactions between grad students and undergrads and i would like to quantify that at some point but my classes are smaller which is good

01:05:52

and and then the other thing that's really interesting is uh we we tried some papers where we actually had one of the authors one of the lead authors be part of the class and they are

01:06:06

i had trouble reading those papers bioinformatics and i told students it's okay to ask questions and with with hypothesis i i felt like i had to define to

01:06:18

scientists and engineers what annotation was but once once i came up with our definition of we are going to ask questions we are going to clarify the text by adding another layer

01:06:32

to make it more transparent to us and others what the meaning is and our idea was or our goal was to annotate ask questions link to youtube videos or other papers

01:06:45

and explain what's going on in this complex scenario and then once we have a set of annotations groups of three or four students are tasked with making the page notes so we mentioned page notes earlier and

01:06:58

we use the page notes as a way of trying to summarize uh annotations in small groups and that has been a lot of fun thank you for these these stories and perspectives and you know we've got

01:07:13

questions and resources that are now flowing through the chat and i wanted to also kind of open up in addition to you know your commentary about social annotation in a class context and some of the pedagogy surrounding that

01:07:26

you've also all embarked upon research research perhaps about what your own students have been learning and doing or again how others are engaging with scientific literature through social annotation you know and

01:07:38

it strikes me that not every educator whatever their discipline may be is going to choose to start researching the processes by which their students are learning using a variety of new technologies and

01:07:52

yet you all have and i'd just be curious to hear again from everyone you know what motivated you to also look at annotation from a research perspective and what are some of the key insights

01:08:05

the key findings that you are beginning to glean or that you have identified in regards to the ways in which social annotation does support engagement with scientific

01:08:17

again terminologies concepts student learning professional learning as well as science communication bring us into your research as well as again having previously shared a little bit about your teaching okay erin do you want to go either way

01:08:32

you go ahead okay so i guess i i've been thinking about i've been learning about the ecology of education and the ecology of learning and thinking a lot about you know what about the core ecological concepts

01:08:45

like diversity and functionality and you know connectivity right i'm thinking about kind of food webs and and maybe this is a food for thought web um and and so those are some of the

01:09:01

the concepts and that are shaping questions that i'm asking again very much from the perspective of you know hypothesis as a tool to increase student

01:09:13

confidence but also student community particularly during this past year of remote learning um so so i'm asking questions like uh and some things that i've found from

01:09:26

from quantifying the usage data from my fall class i've found that you do see higher connectivity or more interaction via replies and threads the more that students annotate so the more you use it the more

01:09:40

you might benefit um i i've also seen you know across the board no matter what the usage uh students overwhelmingly reported that they felt that annotation did

01:09:52

increase their confidence and did increase their sense of belonging in class which felt really exciting but that has kind of uh opened

01:10:03

some uh some additional uh roots for questioning like well what why don't we see you know a tighter correlation with the number of annotations and carlos and i started

01:10:16

thinking about imposter syndrome and you know well what are the spaces where we might see like a false inflation of annotation that might not correlate to an increase in confidence so now we're thinking you know

01:10:27

oh can we quantitatively identify you know usage behaviors that might help us pinpoint some sort of imposter syndrome and how could we help to address that um how can we help increase student

01:10:40

comfort and confidence um so and i am i'm stuck on this and i i believe the libraries a little bit um on open educational resources and

01:10:57

and co-creating and i i went through a pre-pandemic and then pandemic summer of thinking about my teaching philosophy

01:11:09

and thinking about how we teach courses because we teach lab-based courses and what what i enjoy from the experience and what i uh love about teaching

01:11:21

and i i love the equipment and the toys that i haven't had access to in a while but i also love having students create something and and that really drives me and

01:11:34

i think with annotations and summarizing and being able to understand complex terms or being able to come up with a group of students came up with their

01:11:46

tag system for hypothesis to learn about their undergrad research it really um emphasizes how creating community and empowering students to to

01:12:00

to do something you have the self-advocacy you agency comes to mind helping students discover what they want to learn about and and not try them off with a this is an

01:12:14

assignment you have to read this paper and i've struggled with that because i want them to annotate but i don't want it to be a checkbox and i think aaron and

01:12:26

our experiences have really helped on the instructor's side comparing notes and learning about okay how can we do this better to not shy away some students and

01:12:38

shiaway is probably not the right word or encourage everyone to contribute in a way that's meaningful and where it's comparison free which

01:12:49

may be dreamland and impossible but so that they can share ideas in a way that others can build on those and it's not a requirement it's a community

01:13:02

okay so i've i've come at this very different um and and there's two different ways that that i've i've done research with annotations um the first way is i do a lot of work with

01:13:14

graduate students and professional development um specifically graduate students who don't want to necessarily stay in academia and they're looking for these quote unquote alternative careers

01:13:25

outside of working in an academic lab and the way we use annotations with the grad students is like i mentioned before that training um teaching them how to how to translate complex science for a general audience

01:13:39

um and it's always amazing to me that grad students don't recognize that they have these skills because i think grad students go through training and for them it's just normal you know because they spend every day

01:13:52

looking at these words and kind of translating to themselves in their head and they don't see it as a skill so we we use the annotation process to show them no you really do have a skill um and you can really turn this

01:14:05

scientific paper into something that the the you know the rest of the world can use and benefit from um so kind kind of what what what aaron was mentioning we do see um confidence changes when when they go

01:14:18

through this they do you know start to realize oh i i can contribute um to the you know the larger society um and they do increase some of their skill their communication skills

01:14:29

um specifically you know learning how you know what parts of the paper to annotate how to annotate what to include in the annotation um those kinds of things and the other benefit to the annotation process is at the end

01:14:42

of it they have like a tangible packet that they can take with them you know on interviews or put in a portfolio or something like that showing that you know they've actually done this they came up with this product and it's

01:14:55

out there in the in the world and you know and someone's using it so that's kind of what i've been investigating on the professional development side of things then as far as students reading

01:15:08

other people's annotations we use that with first year undergraduates in intro biology courses and you know you can't just give a freshman student a scientific paper and say here go read

01:15:21

this it's really cool it's really interesting you're gonna you're gonna need to know this for the rest of your scientific career and good luck there's all kinds of research out there some of my own about barriers that

01:15:33

students face when they go to read a scientific paper and so what we've done with the annotations is design them specifically to start reducing those barriers so you know vocabulary is a big one methods

01:15:46

is a big one because a lot of these students they're they're intro bio students they might not necessarily know what a western blot is or you know what you know how to titrate something um

01:15:59

so we we get really get into the methods section um so and again that that shows the graduate students writing the annotations that they really do have valuable skills and the undergrads who then

01:16:10

read them it helps them you know better understand what why we need scientific papers how the scientific community uses scientific papers both to you know advance science and to

01:16:22

tend to teach others and it eliminates a lot of those frustration barriers that would initially turn students off um i'm not sure i'm working on this now actually i'm not sure it increases their

01:16:34

motivation and their confidence to keep reading psl i think it does i don't have the hard numbers on that yet um but that that is something that that we're working on right now and um another thing i think the annotations do with the undergrads who

01:16:47

go on to read them is it helps them learn strategies for breaking down complex texts so they'll you know they'll start to realize oh all these words that i don't know are defined

01:16:59

in the future when i see a word i don't know maybe i should take the time to define it um and you know taking like like chunks of text and writing it um you know in your own words or

01:17:11

in simpler language i think that's also a strategy that they pick up just seeing annotations and and knowing that they're there thank you so much for this again really keen insight from again a research

01:17:25

perspective on how students in science again and professionals and graduate students are learning and engaging with this practice um we're about to transition into some q a with again the many

01:17:37

attendees who are here as i'm looking at the chat there are a lot of questions that are coming through but i'm hoping that i might just just kind of wrap up with one more question for the for the three of you um which is that i don't mean to pigeonhole annotation

01:17:50

since it's something that i care a lot about and study but it often is associated again with maybe the humanities or the social sciences or again informal kind of personal reading and i wonder if

01:18:02

the three of you have recommendations specifically for other science educators who may hear about social annotation and kind of say huh that sounds uh interesting or maybe to reference

01:18:14

carlos's story early like hypothesis oh you're talking about the hypothesis of a study not a tool and i'm just curious again given your various areas of expertise and again your deep experience with social annotation

01:18:27

do you have a recommendation for other science educators who again may be curious or hearing about this for the first time where and how might they begin this process of dipping their toes

01:18:39

into the pedagogical affordances of social annotation personally my advice is don't be afraid of the technology your students will get it even if you don't and and

01:18:51

to be honest i think that has worked in my favor because a few times i haven't known how to do something and they've showed me um that's great for them to know that they're also teaching me and i think it builds a little more of a rapport um between us so don't don't be afraid

01:19:04

of the technology yeah that's that's excellent melissa thanks i think also i've tried to build in practice time either as part of my welcome letter like here's the syllabus

01:19:17

uh we are going to be using hypothesis so go ahead and open an account and then practice so i'll have a link to the get started for students tutorial and then i've i've shown screenshots or recorded a

01:19:30

brief video and zoom and then i ask them to annotate the syllabus so it's a very low stakes and it helps you know uh make sure that we all understand what's required and and they have helped me to identify

01:19:44

like oops i did not update that date from last time i taught this class um so that way you know before we're halfway into the semester you know everybody's on the same literal page in the first week of class

01:19:56

um and and what i want to add to that now is in addition to uh introducing it in the welcome letter also carving out some time on day one just to make sure that everybody has you know a guided

01:20:09

15 minutes like let's all go to the same page the same as we did in the annotated workshop earlier you know i think that's so helpful um yeah and as melissa said it it's hugely

01:20:22

helpful to get the students on the same page but also to uh afford them opportunities to correct and enlighten me it it has changed but

01:20:36

i every semester and they i've tried hypothesis and now four different classes and different topics of papers or different types of assignments

01:20:48

and one thing i've don't be scared of the technology and also have the students ask questions and what i try to do now is when i was in person and i've

01:21:02

just finished code teaching this class with my better half claire would point at me and say okay dr galler how do we use hypothesis and i would bring it up on the screen and we would

01:21:15

start and this is what we're going to do we're going to annotate this paper and it's really neat because now we can talk to us as we read this paper and what i've done

01:21:27

online is i've i've filmed screencasts of of me going over the assignment expectations and how it's going to work and actually going through

01:21:39

annotation and putting some annotations in and i've honestly in some of the videos i've i've fumbled and done and didn't do it within the right group or

01:21:52

and students get to see what's going on and see that oh yeah i there are so many options i can do i can bring in rich texts and links

01:22:04

and i also try to as aaron mentioned emphasize it throughout the course our courses are typically eight weeks so i we have to be up and running really

01:22:16

quickly so after we read a paper i try to summarize in a video summary and walk them through with my screen open with

01:22:28

a hypothesis open show them how we went from a blank layer to this layer as we just did an hour ago they're full of annotations 140

01:22:40

annotations on this paper and say you created this and now let's make let's make some sense out of this what do we want to extract from your comments

01:22:52

again thank you this is just so for me at least i'll just speak for myself so it'd be informative and so again i just want to thank you know all of you for joining us today and i'm going to really just shut myself up now i know that nate uh hypothesis

01:23:07

colleagues also frannie have been looking at the chat a little bit more closely than i have um and this is a time to turn things over to all of our attendees and to elicit questions from those who've joined us today um whether questions have already been

01:23:20

asked in the chat or folks want to drop those questions into the chat right now or we can also promote folks if they want to also share their questions you know by speaking it out

01:23:33

the the floor is open yeah i think it's actually uh you guys have been doing a really good job of sort of addressing things both in chat and uh and live as we've been talking i have noticed that um a lot of folks

01:23:49

are have been centering around this idea of you know how to make sure learners of any age really are you know um kind of able and empowered to actually um use social annotation

01:24:03

technology and you guys have been addressing that already um and there have been a lot of ideas floating around about you know using video um like carlos was just talking about the demonstrations

01:24:14

and so forth and i just i think it's some i think that we should stress that it's never true that you can assume everybody is just going to be able to pick it up and use it

01:24:26

easily with no problems it might be that way for some but it's not going to be that way for everyone and so if you i'm sure that you can all speak to how you've had to sort of support different levels of kind of ease and

01:24:39

facility with social annotation in your classes and it could be that you have sort of pointers on how to um how to start the exercise of

01:24:50

annotation off um in in ways that make it easier to figure out who needs more help and and who's ready to go i know remy himself has a lot of practice in this area too

01:25:02

i mean i i i don't need to necessarily need to kind of share my my fumblings and my dr mccartney please yeah i don't um i don't usually do annotations in a social group which i'm realizing now that i'm

01:25:14

listening to all of you um the grad students kind of do them on their own and then the the undergrads read them on their own so i do not have a great answer for this although i'm interested to hear

01:25:26

um what everybody else thinks so i we use i've been using two different things so for one class i i change

01:25:38

the articles every every time i offered a class and we just have one group and we keep on annotating in that group because the previous articles are still techniques and approaches that are used

01:25:52

and students can refer back to them and students can actually see the examples of how one paper had 150 annotations um for other classes

01:26:06

i i use the same two papers so i create a new group every time um for students to annotate within that group like yeast metabolic engineering

01:26:19

2021 and it's it's interesting because i see i i see the lack of and an example in the yeast class at the beginning that could be helpful but i could

01:26:34

share another paper or share some screen grabs and one thing that i've i've we've always have little tech issues but i'm trying to get students to help each other out

01:26:49

and i use student forums as a place to troubleshoot and ask questions and once once they realize they are annotating publicly and that's why they can't see

01:27:02

the annotations or we should be using this link and um it has been really great because the students have understood how to have picked it up really quickly

01:27:16

have helped each other out i've had an undergrad who is now really committed to open science and really mad that papers behind paywalls

01:27:29

there are issues sharing annotations between institutions to the point this student who graduated in december now wants to write an op-ed article and i

01:27:40

i love that so from from troubles we can make we can make learning and hopefully hopefully students learn in the process i just saw this question come through so maybe i'll just pick it up from the chat

01:27:54

if that's okay um we've got a question from um that asks you know thanks a lot for the superintendent discussion certainly echo that can you share a concrete assignment that you've that you've done in class again for those of us who maybe don't take this

01:28:07

form of social peer-to-peer learning for granted what does this really look like for your students in your class so i've been using

01:28:18

a hypothesis for jigsaw exercises so i i teach a class of 45 to 47 students in the fall so in order to break that down into what i hope is more manageable sizes

01:28:31

and and for the jigsaw i divide them into four expert groups each group gets assigned one paper and then i say you know uh so all of the papers are available through our class private group so they could

01:28:44

potentially go and see all of the papers but they have to create five annotations a minimum of five and that way it's a low stakes i'm giving you credit for reading the

01:28:56

paper that i'm expecting you to read to discuss in class so it seems you know fair um to in a way to acknowledge their efforts um and then i encourage them you know i'm going to pick up from the annotated

01:29:08

workshop like if the text is already highlighted don't create a new comment reply in the thread um because i think that's a fantastic way to increase connectivity um and then i can compare to student behaviors from this fall and see like

01:29:21

does that actually increase you know thread length and and the quality of our discussions um but yeah i i think that really has helped again for them to clarify what the paper means and

01:29:33

then if i give those expert groups 10 minutes to convene and come to a consensus um something i want to add to that is maybe they will type a summary page um and compose you know what's your one

01:29:46

paragraph or two paragraph uh review right your tldr for other groups before they get shuffled into their jigsaws i think for that i think we probably

01:30:02

have time for maybe one or two more questions if again maybe nate or freddie has seen things come through the chat yeah one thing i just actually wanted to bring out is i see folks are using the chat space to share um

01:30:17

articles that might be good starting places for various you know various scientific discussions and various disciplines and that's great and i um i can i can understand why sharing them in zoom chat is maybe not the most

01:30:29

efficient way to share resources like this so i have an announcement to make um that very soon we'll be um unveiling a companion site for liquid margins that is specifically designed to allow

01:30:40

educators like yourselves to share common resources publicly about your practices so for instance if you you know let's say uh carlos and aaron have particular scientific articles that they think are

01:30:53

great introductions um for annotation exercises in their particular discipline you know you could share that um with some even some additional information about how you use it as an assignment and so forth

01:31:06

and so um look for an announcement to that coming soon sorry that it's i wish that i could point you to it today but it's not quite ready um but anyway that will maybe get us around this issue of trying to share share a bunch of links and chat quickly before

01:31:18

something ends um you know there's been a lot of uh a lot of talk about how the different disciplines might have different um sort of needs and affordances right um and i think one

01:31:31

suggestion that came out in the chat that was pretty interesting was the idea of instead of moving right to a scientific article you can also um use an exercise in um annotating some sort of maybe

01:31:45

mainstream media public treatment of science right and so you can bring the scientific lens to a more popular work if you will um and have that really be an

01:31:56

interesting uh annotation exercise and as opposed to diving deeply into a really rigorous scientific work which like and science in the classroom does so well and i'm wondering if uh aaron i saw you

01:32:09

nodding as i was talking about that do you have like particular experience directing students toward sort of more um popular publications if you will no i was nodding in like i totally agree with you and

01:32:25

i think i i'm so excited that there might be a shared repository and i was thinking oh and then we can annotate them with like what we do right it's perfect it comes full circle um i

01:32:39

i give a blend i i don't like to label anything as like a classic paper or the paper and i think that's partially because i i'm a microbiome researcher and you know

01:32:52

that's a fairly new field and it's changing all the time as we learn more and as we are humbled continuously by the microbes we study right um so i don't i don't want to

01:33:04

be sessile i don't want to anchor myself to anything specific i so i have often incorporated some of my own research into courses as case studies to give

01:33:16

students a chance to challenge me in person if they have questions you know to practice discourse with a published scientist um and to break down that hierarchy and

01:33:28

power dynamic hopefully but i am even thinking like i also don't want to inadvertently hold my work as some golden standard because really it's not you know it's

01:33:40

it's not where the nature of science is that it's dynamic that we are learning all the time that you know uh yeah every day is a new copernican revolution right um so so

01:33:53

no i don't have a today i have a go-to paper but you know by next semester maybe they'll all be different they'll all be different yeah sorry if that wasn't this no no it was a really interesting tape

01:34:06

carlos actually yeah i have two random comments that somehow i've tried to connect here so one is um i have teacher post

01:34:18

a research postdoc uh here at nc state jason with him who has a ton of experience in bioinformatics and meta genomics said i want some teaching experience can you

01:34:32

help can i help with this class and that was the best yes i one of the best yeses i had last year because he brought expertise

01:34:43

and students felt comfortable maybe it was because we were using hypothesis usernames but they felt comfortable saying i don't know

01:34:54

what that means and i i really appreciate that and these were science papers we'll change them up next semester as we try new projects

01:35:07

and with undergrads i have the pleasure of working with student groups that are undergrad researchers and without the lab we our lab experience as students were

01:35:19

craving research experience and i was just amazed and happy and really impressed with what groups of students did once we said okay let's find out everything

01:35:32

we can about this weird bacterium and it doesn't have to be science papers annotate wiki annotate uh

01:35:44

public newsletters try to connect and students in that case made up their own code for tags and for uh for for classifying adaptations

01:35:58

and i also did the same thing aaron i i was like i i i'm not sure i feel comfortable calling them seminal papers or not so students they came up with their

01:36:11

system and then they just ran with it or or annotated with it and that had fun and in that case it was the combination

01:36:21

of science papers posts anything they could think with this key name yeah so with regard to selecting papers it's very hard and i a lot of people ask

01:36:38

me this question i do not have an easy answer um it's it's difficult it's going to take time you're going to select some that don't work um and you know learn from what doesn't work on that and you know keep selecting in the

01:36:50

future um a couple things that i have found that usually always work um is think more about the experimental design in the paper if it's a like the simpler kind of

01:37:02

experimental design the better um because you know help students follow kind of from the question to the the experimental design to the methods um you know and and those there's really elegant papers out there

01:37:15

i and i encourage you guys don't shy away from science and nature they are shorter papers but um because they're short sometimes the experimental design within them is really beautiful um so i would look for the experimental

01:37:27

design not so much you know the vocabulary words they're going to use or the length of the paper or the journal but but find a really beautiful experiment and start there my second point kind of bouncing off

01:37:40

erin i think it's great to select your own papers and i would totally encourage that because research coming out of my lab shows that a lot of undergrads don't even know that we do research

01:37:52

they don't know research happens especially i know you guys are at a huge campus like i am um a lot of our freshmen don't even know there's a biology department which seems crazy to us but but students

01:38:03

who commute who get out of their car go to a lecture and then go back to their car they really don't understand that research is happening on campus so i think it's totally great to use your own papers and use them the papers from people in your

01:38:15

department as a way to show students that this research really happens on campus and they can be a part of it i all you guys need help you need volunteers um and you know it might help kind of the sense of community within the

01:38:28

department about knowing what's going on knowing what people are doing and finding out a way to be more involved i'm just kind of thrilled at the kind of the various directions that this conversation has taken and particularly

01:38:43

on this point about you know having researchers who are educators that share with their students their own work to engage in a

01:38:55

conversation through social annotation that does a variety of things that again you've all mentioned i just want to re-voice this because to me this is just so important you know mentioning things like showing your students

01:39:07

that research is happening on campus and that you know you are also engaged in this kind of process of scientific inquiry and then also you know to aaron's point a few moments ago about also potentially troubling to some degree the perceived

01:39:22

expert novice teacher student power dynamic that can exist particularly when for example students may be reading you know primary source scientific literature you know conducted by and written by their own

01:39:35

professors but using social annotation as an entry point to then begin inquisitive conversations about the topics the terms the concepts and the methods that to me just speaks

01:39:47

to just the complexity of learning and the opportunity for social annotation to deepen this this shared shared experience so thank you all so much for for sharing from your experience i believe that we're running out of time and i hate to make that

01:40:00

transition such a hard one we're coming up against the hour here and typically these episodes run for about 45 minutes i didn't know if there were any final concluding comments either that our panelists wanted to share

01:40:12

there was any final insight resource or question that you might want to leave us with or there was any other quick commentary or even a bit of housekeeping notes from any of our hypothesis colleagues as we begin to wrap up today's today's

01:40:26

liquid margins episode let's let's hear from the panelists first for sure i'll start i had no idea so many people were doing annotations so it's been cool to to meet you guys and learn about what you're

01:40:38

doing um and i feel like i'm like re-energized to get back out there into annotating so thank you that's great i i read dr mccartney's paper

01:40:52

and i really really love that the hypothesis community has been so welcoming and vibrant uh and learning from from others and i i really loved that

01:41:06

we were able to connect and share some thoughts and resources and when i had tech questions how can i get this you were there so it has been a really supportive

01:41:19

community and i love learning from aaron and other fantastic educators what they are doing to encourage others to participate and i think going back to my

01:41:32

naive comment what do you mean hypothesis a couple of years ago at the library now now i can have rephrase that and say okay how can we deliver the the

01:41:45

guidelines or or deliver the charge of because i'm calling it charge now of we will annotate and i make sense of this together because believe it or not carlos

01:41:59

does not understand some of the text here and i think that with 20 of us doing google searches and being empowered to tag someone else

01:42:12

or ask questions or even annotate publicly on the author's article we can get some answers yeah i absolutely love that carlos and i would say

01:42:28

first broadly this has been amazing i this has been another another flavor of uh i came to hypothesis uh because it seemed to make sense and it seemed really exciting

01:42:41

and i've been doing things by intuition but once again i'm meeting people who are better established and have more experience and and who just the chat blowing up this whole time with so many

01:42:53

inspiring questions and anecdotes and to be able to connect to this web of like motivated inquiry right i mean that's coming full circle to hypothesis

01:43:06

and into what carlos has just been saying about it charging and empowering students to drive and and you know satisfy their own inquiries and instead of you know leaning on us

01:43:19

and and i'm there with you right as an instructor i really try to model yeah this part of the paper was super confusing too and and how amazing to now have a space where we can document

01:43:31

that and then muddle through it together um i i think that's that's incredible uh it's an incredible tool it's an incredible revelation for students um you know really democratizing science

01:43:44

and education thank you yeah i i wanna i just for myself personally diffusers i've just been so inspired by this episode um but also on behalf of hypothesis as an

01:43:57

organization in the broader social annotation community i want to thank dr melissa mccartney i want to thank dr aaron mckenny and also dr karl scholler for joining us today and sharing again your expertise and wisdom with us um

01:44:08

also a big shout out and thanks to the olc uh innovate both this online gathering and the broader olc community for kind of hosting us within this broader event

01:44:20

and making this public and available to to everyone this has just been i think a really kind of edifying and inspiring conversation so just thank you all i know that resources from again the

01:44:33

chat and related this will be shared publicly through the hypothesis liquid margins page they will also probably be shared on twitter and other social media channels soon please continue to stay connected

01:44:46

to again the hypothesis community i've learned from the chat that actually it's episode 19 that's coming at mexico we're going back in time somehow just somehow kind of apropos for this last you know year but in any case please do again remain

01:44:59

engaged with the liquid margins webinar series as well as the broader hypothesis community and my thanks to everyone who's joined us today stay healthy everyone please do take care