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00:00:07
welcome to liquid margins this is annotation lab social reading and stem today's guests are um beverly rainey randy
00:00:19
randy like franny uh she's a professor of biology at barstow community college we have with us once again on liquid margins carlos scholler he's associate teaching professor at north carolina state
00:00:32
university and melanie linehan professor of biology raritan valley valley community college and our moderator is jeremy
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um we do have a big biology focus here today so uh that just this happenstance um but you know great i love it um so but we'll be talking about
00:00:58
you know social annotation in general not just how it applies to stem topics but in particular how it does apply to stem topics all right so with that i'm going to turn
00:01:11
it over to jeremy so um take it away i'll see you all on the flip side thanks so much uh for any and great to be here today i did want to provide a little bit of
00:01:27
context for myself i'm an english phd and i've always been a humanities person throughout my life however my both my parents are scientists and two of three siblings are scientists and my wife is
00:01:40
an academic biologist so i do have something of a clue um but i am coming from a very different place and i'm excited to hear about um your use of social annotation i think
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for a lot of people um when we talk to instructors and administrators at schools it's very obvious why social annotation would be used in humanities courses and it probably is obvious to you guys because you're active hypothesis users
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but sometimes it takes some convincing or some discussion to explain why you might use such a tool in uh in science courses and i hope we can sort of talk that out uh today um
00:02:16
great to see so many people today why and this is the biggest turnout we've ever seen for liquid margins i don't know if you guys have nothing to do in the summer as being academics so everybody's here but i'm glad to see so many folks in the chat um
00:02:29
i want to just start by getting to know you all a little bit better getting to know more about the institution you teach at the discipline you teach in and the types of courses you teach just so we have some context for where you're coming from and let's start with you
00:02:42
beverly oh i teach at barstow community college we're an institution of about 2 100 students and i teach we're a department now of three full-time professors and i teach microbiology and
00:02:58
majors biology sequence primarily and then i wander into environmental science as well but as a community college we're open access and so i have a range of students
00:03:11
who've been in college who are traditional students and then i've got a bunch of students who are non-traditional students and everyone in between so it's a it's a great place we've been
00:03:24
leading into online education as a way to address equity and equity gaps and so my classes for the last five years have been online so it's been
00:03:39
the addition of hypothesis has been a great and great tool thanks beverly and i i can see in the chat that you have some other community california community college folks in the audience here so you're not alone i'm just back from otc in long beach the
00:03:54
online teaching conference for california community colleges we have tremendous use in the california colleges but again it's a lot most of it is in the english courses especially english 1a um and that's at least where it started
00:04:05
but we're starting to see more and more science courses uh let's go to you next melanie and tell us a little bit more about like i said your institution and your discipline in the courses you teach and i liked how beverly added a little more kind of
00:04:18
demographic context um to who she's teaching and what kinds of students she has in her courses yeah thank you melanie linehan i'm a professor of biology at raritan valley community
00:04:31
college and we are in central new jersey and i teach on general biology genetics and cell and molecular biology um like beverly at a community college
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we do see a range of students that are coming in at all different levels i do teach the biology i teach is designed for science majors however i
00:04:57
also get a range of students with different backgrounds that are coming into into that course and that's where i primarily used hypothesis is with my general biology
00:05:09
students and i love it so i'm really happy to be here to talk with you about how i use it in my classes thanks melanie
00:05:22
to you carlos carla scholar and i'm a teaching faculty member at north carolina state university so most of my job is developing molecular
00:05:36
biology courses for undergraduates and graduate students because as a campus we teach we offer courses for the entire campus
00:05:47
and it's been great because we assign readings and we have moved to electronic lab notebooks and gone a little paperless
00:06:00
and or hopefully mostly paperless and this just ties right in and really allows me to to have asynchronous discussions
00:06:14
and with melanie melanie and i have learned together some some tricks and some uses and i think there's a lot more we can learn about the pedagogy side how to
00:06:28
pose questions or encourage and from the student side how can we make sure they use the resources they annotate afterwards
00:06:40
that's lots of fun stuff that's great um i think you kind of covered this a little bit uh carlos but i sort of want to go back across the starting with you and go back across like what what attracted you to social annotation why
00:06:57
did you feel like you needed this tool you talked a little bit about the moving paperless but you also got into discussion i mean why was social annotation a tool that was attractive to you for your molecular biology courses
00:07:10
i i and i think a couple of you have heard this story it was my my great friends and and enablers here are
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the librarians and i was having a brainstorming session 2018 or 2017 one summer
00:07:34
in the library on the whiteboard how to get students to read what is often complicated molecular biology bioinformatics papers for a
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broader audience because not everyone has what's rich about these courses is that we get students from all over campus and and one of the librarians said uh will
00:07:59
cross said what you need is is a hypothesis and i was insulted i'm like the entire course is based on a hypothesis and we we've searched for samples and do things
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and i think what really drew me to hypothesis was it it we we can have discussions and share knowledge before we meet in class
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and that class turned into virtual class the last couple of years and yet it was still useful discussions and it's not just
00:08:37
rehashing what the main points of the paper are it's it's going what i would call lateral going with a connections to other papers
00:08:49
through links um definitions finding out a little bit more about the authors and who does the science that's great and you're you're mostly reading were you saying complicated sort
00:09:06
of academic articles and you were sort of getting at the idea that like obviously students are not always coming in completely literate in how to tackle that kind of reading and this was
00:09:18
a helpful tool for them the instructor sometimes doesn't know because we we pick we pick topics i'm not a bioinformatician i'm i'm a microbiologist and
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lots of the tools we're using depend on bioinformatics so it was a way for us to learn together with me being vulnerable enough to say
00:09:44
what do you all think about this yeah smarter together i love it reading and community uh melanie how about you tell us a little bit about what attracted you to social annotation i don't know if you want to add it sounds i actually don't remember the connection
00:09:57
between you and carlos so if there is some backstory there you could also share us share that with us but also what attracts you to social annotation for for teaching um uh your students
00:10:09
science majors yeah sure so um i've met carlos uh in a number of different ways we we connected through um biome which is
00:10:21
a summer uh conference that's actually starting on this coming monday um and then we just connected on a number of different um
00:10:33
ways through different learning communities and we actually facilitated a learning community together this past spring so i'm really happy to be able to work with carlos on a lot of different
00:10:46
projects and we did give a presentation at my college on hypothesis in stem we created a little slack channel that got some traction
00:10:59
so i could invite others if they wish to join our hypothesis and stem slack channel um so that that's the connection there and really the my first introduction to
00:11:12
social annotation was um during the pandemic obviously i had not taught online previously and so that pivot um was definitely a huge learning curve for
00:11:25
me and i was introduced to social annotation through um actually faculty learning communities i it was not something that i had um
00:11:36
used in in my courses at first and so i was using um these social annotation tools through different learning communities with other faculty and um then i think our my connection at
00:11:49
my college was with becky who was on this call who reached out to our college about whether faculty would be interested in using hypothesis in in our courses and
00:12:02
um at that time i was still virtual online and i thought this is an excellent way uh to introduce material to students where we can work asynchronously and discuss
00:12:15
papers um i actually my general biology course i don't typically use primary literature articles um instead uh news and views articles or something that
00:12:28
um is is going to kind of dive into that topic a little more deeply but it's not so technical that um students may get lost in the weeds there um but i i
00:12:40
really loved um using it um virtually and now that we're back in face to face i teach all my courses are face-to-face now um i i brought it back to the in-person classroom because i think it's
00:12:53
a great way to connect with students um by giving them um some reading materials prior to coming to court the class or maybe a follow-up um discussion that we had where i can
00:13:07
link them to a particular article um that's going to you know drive some conversation outside of the classroom so um that was that was my introduction
00:13:19
to hypothesis and and using it virtually or asynchronously and then bringing it to the classroom i've also had students work in hypothesis during class sessions as well um so i think it's great for
00:13:32
both asynchronous work and and in-person synchronous work very cool i actually want to ask you a follow-up question melanie um just to get this uh when you mention the types
00:13:44
of readings that you have students do right and you kind of alluded to this i'm something of a rehash and i'm somewhat playing devil's advocate but carlos is talking about reading dense difficult microbiology academic articles which i think you know anybody
00:13:56
even you know academics can appreciate that some of their own colleagues are writing in ways that are difficult to interpret but you're talking about reading more popular uh journalism or stuff that might be easier to access and might not need the
00:14:09
same kind of translation but nonetheless you find social annotation to be useful can you just talk a little bit more about like this idea because there's some people that might say like well obviously a very dense academic article maybe very dense piece of literature
00:14:22
needs to be annotated but like an article at cnn like does it need to be annotated i suppose it depends on education level but tell me a little bit more about the need to annotate maybe maybe more straightforward material maybe i'm wrong that it's more
00:14:35
straightforward um yeah that's a great question so i i can give you uh you know one particular example of how i've i've used it so again the the article types i
00:14:49
typically choose are um like a news and views which would be um the review article of a primary literature um topic and um one so for example i'll give you
00:15:04
one specific example is that in my general biology course you know we talk about enzymes and we talk about enzyme structure and all different aspects of enzyme activity but i i would like to relate it to
00:15:17
something that is um relatable to students and and meaningful in some way and so one of the articles that i had chosen for that particular topic was enzymes that could
00:15:28
degrade plastics and so there's been uh recent publications on these types of enzymes um that are that are found that can actually degrade plastics and could be very useful
00:15:41
um for remediation purposes and so i like to pick an article that i think is going to engage students and take that topic that we we talk about the content in our course and relate it to something that they i feel
00:15:55
that they would relate to um and then in the annotation uh piece uh we can ask specific questions or i can ask them to um you know maybe follow up with an idea
00:16:08
that they might have about how enzymes can be used um so i i that's the the level that i use try to use it as a level of engagement to take them you know just a little bit further from the
00:16:20
content that we're discussing in class that's great thanks melanie beverly to you uh what i first attracted you to social annotation as a tool that would be helpful to you and your students um well
00:16:34
i got frustrated with one of my microbiology classes because after an exam it was clear that they hadn't read anything and so i did a google search that was just
00:16:46
students read tools kind of a thing and i stumbled upon hypothesis and i dove into it and i said aha here's here's how i'm going to foster because i thought part of the
00:16:59
problem was that they felt disconnected from each other and so by forcing them into groups and then saying okay we are now going to discuss uh
00:17:11
chapter six here we go um it forced them to read and we saw i saw test scores go back up to a happier place for everyone and we had
00:17:23
some really good discus i could pinpoint easily where students were stuck and where we needed additional resources and support and it became clear that students had had
00:17:34
good questions from the material on on what they were assigned reading and it just ensured that i knew that they were reading they were accountable for the reading and then we could dive deeper into areas
00:17:48
that interested them ah that's great forcing them to do the reading and then discovering in everybody being forced in there that there's great questions and conversations happening beyond uh that
00:18:02
so that's not that i i love that um how do you introduce students to the tool or to the idea of social annotation and let's go on reverse order beverly um i have an introduction video at the
00:18:15
in the first week's module and saying here's the tool here's how here's how we're going to use it here's why we're using it and i say you know i lay out your in-groups so that you have a
00:18:27
built-in study group for the course and you've got an instant community because typically i have sections or i've got like my microbiology classes is 120 students and so that's too big to have just one
00:18:41
general discussion so i'll put them in groups of like 10 and then then they're more comfortable discussing their ideas and saying no i really don't understand x and we go from there
00:18:54
so are you leveraging the canvas groups integration where you create groups in canvas and then okay and so different groups are reading the same material but having their own more intimate conversation about it yes
00:19:06
and so um it would be nice if i had the ability to to just post one example annotation that goes across the 10 groups or so i haven't figured that one out yet but
00:19:19
i think we have to figure that out for you actually that's our job to have the ability to share an annotation in multiple groups and it is a feature that we've got a lot of requests for and we'll add another tick to the votes there
00:19:31
um there is a sort of secret way i think the backdoor way that we have to kind of ship an annotation to multiple groups if you get in touch with uh with uh aaron or with our support team
00:19:43
we might be able to help you there um uh melanie how do you introduce students to uh to social annotation um i actually have them annotate the syllabus and um i just want to thank
00:19:58
becky on this call it was her suggestion um to give me a resource called compass points um like on a compass east west north south
00:20:11
um and each of the letters um stand for a word so for example e stands for excited w is worried um s
00:20:23
is dance and um so right at the very beginning of the course i have them um annotate the syllabus and i have to say this works amazingly well i get a lot of um
00:20:38
rich discussion there's a lot of questions and i instead of spending class time you know reading the syllabus i can um assign the annotation annotate the syllabus assignment
00:20:52
um and then when they return to class or if we were virtual then i can go through all of those um points in the syllabus and discuss it in in much more detail so
00:21:06
it really serves a few different purposes one it introduces them to and to annotation uh right at the very beginning of the semester so they're annotating the syllabus and two
00:21:18
um is they're reading the syllabus so i'm getting feedback and um conversation and discussion about the syllabus which i've never done before uh so it's a really great way to um
00:21:31
introduce for me to introduce um annotation right right at the start of the course carlos and just quick question melanie you're using the lms integration at your school
00:21:47
yes we have canvas and so i'm using the lms integration in our canvas course okay great carlos i think you're using hypothesis
00:21:58
in the wild at nc state right they haven't come around to putting it into the into the elements still in the wild i i have been trying and and hopefully will
00:22:10
i see more and more instructors using it for different things from from courses to seminar series to for example our summer research experience
00:22:23
i do not annotate the syllabus and i've been wanting to do that and i've never had the guts to do it i'm not sure but
00:22:35
what i've done in the past couple of semesters is we kind of have an annotation exercise either asynchronously or asynchronously either on zoom or in
00:22:48
person and we annotate a news and views type article or a news article together and my goals with that is
00:23:01
make sure everyone is annotating in a group in our group because we annotate in in groups um i still haven't although
00:23:13
in some cases we have maybe accidentally or not accidentally done it publicly public annotations but in most cases i have
00:23:24
we work inside a group and i tell students okay today let's practice let's let's annotate this and we're a group of 10 or 12 or 16.
00:23:40
what comes to mind and what would you highlight with with a highlighter and why is this important and my main challenge is getting people to
00:23:53
ask questions and feel okay asking questions and one thing that i haven't been good at but a really great post doctor or researcher here um
00:24:05
really emphasized it in a different class and and helped me think about it more using tags and creating an annotation before and on ontology
00:24:18
what jason whitham did for a metabolic modeling of microbial communities class we shared a spreadsheet and he seeded the spreadsheet with some
00:24:31
key terms that he took from the community of metabolic modelers and then said in the first hypothesis exercise
00:24:44
use some of these tags and and start annotating but like beverly i use a quick introduction video me showing them how to annotate
00:24:56
as best i can within the group and then we either do it asynchronously or synchronously and uh my two goals are feel free to ask questions and
00:25:08
feel free to come up with tags that are different from the ones we have cool carlos do you annotate with your students or are they mostly the annotators and you're an observer
00:25:23
we've done this we've had this is what i love about being in that in a teaching program um and with we've experimented a little bit
00:25:35
both irb approved and just for our own own insights um we had one semester where jason and i tried three variations uh
00:25:50
instructor not annotating instructor annotating and before students and i know remy clear does it the right way and has done studies we were basically
00:26:04
playing around and then have a peer because we have graduate students who are closer in age um pre-pre-annotate before and we saw we
00:26:19
saw some trends our classes are small enough that it's it's hard to do it with statistical significance but in some cases that that information convinced me that
00:26:32
maybe i should lay off my heavy annotations and let students start by annotating with the grad student so i usually lay low and then i
00:26:45
come back and and add some comments or i add some annotations so that we focus on certain parts of the article like the scaffolding receiving
00:26:57
and then let the conversation go and toward the end bring it back that's great melanie do you pre-annotate articles for students
00:27:09
let them have conversation themselves or join the conversation or follow up at a certain point after they've had a conversation or none of the above i think it's more like all of the above so
00:27:22
so i i just have to mention um i i mentioned earlier that carlos and i you know co-facilitated this learning community and um what we felt was really useful was
00:27:34
having our participants annotate um articles and then but we would see them with uh with the different comments and that became like the stimulus for the conversation that was like our jumping
00:27:48
point um for the conversation when we all got to meet so i do the same for my students um i i can you know uh see the article i think that's a good
00:27:59
that's a good way to explain you know like an analogy um put some comments in the um annotation comments in the piece to kind of engage the students in conversation um i also come back and
00:28:13
address the questions if they have them or um if if oftentimes they will ask a question as part of the um annotation and you can create threads which are really useful um you know you
00:28:27
can put links and text and i i like using gifs and um so i think it's it's really great so i think i would answer that question both you know i can start some of the annotation but then i
00:28:39
always come back and um we'll add annotations or add comments and threads that are already existing i think that's really helpful beverly same question to you about
00:28:57
whether you annotate uh the text as well and then i'm gonna follow it up with another question that was actually asked in the chat about are you grading student annotations and if so maybe a little bit about how
00:29:09
so i don't jump in at first with my microbiology students when they're reading the text i have them use a tag question and if i find a question tag
00:29:20
then i can jump in and and respond with information and i encourage encourage through direct instruction saying you will use tags if you have to to mark
00:29:32
uh your question if you've got a question or if you've got uh if you're answering a learning objective one or whatever in my uh when i use hypothesis with my
00:29:44
biology majors then i go in and pre-annotate research papers that i assign for for reading and then that helps direct the question from there um
00:29:55
and then your follow-up question yeah was about uh whether you're grading student annotations and if so any guidance around that so i am grading student annotations and i give them
00:30:10
basically participation points and i say i need to when we're when we're doing it in microbiology i say i need to see a minimum of three annotations per section and an annotation can be
00:30:24
a question it can be a definition it can be an answer to a learning objective it can include a link to a youtube video you found helpful any of those in explaining this concept
00:30:37
and that way i they they have to read the entirety of the of the assignment otherwise they don't get credit um and i do this
00:30:48
similar kind of structure and it's a research article about biology majors and say i need this many annotations for procedure and this many annotations for you know results
00:31:00
and so forth you mentioned that the they have to read the entire article how do you ensure that that's happening there was a question in the chat about this about making sure students are reading and annotating the whole thing
00:31:12
well if they're not uh reading the whole thing then there's no annotation from them at the end of the article and so therefore they wouldn't get points and my students are highly point motivated so
00:31:24
they want every point possible so they read it got it so you're looking at where the annotations are in in the text to help understand that okay um i want to come back to tag well actually i'm going to stick with you just for a second about tags you
00:31:38
mentioned something about tagging learning objectives these are things that are in your syllabus or somewhere in material ahead of class and the students are referring back to it like actually in their annotations using tags so they're the learning objectives are
00:31:50
in the instructions to them and then they're in you know a textbook we'll say by the end of this section you will have learned x y and z and um so learning objective x tag it
00:32:03
when you find the answer and students the students either love tags or they hate tags and those who love them then found the
00:32:15
power of going through and sorting their tags for their groups tags at the end for for study purposes because for the microbiology students i've started letting them use their
00:32:28
annotation notes when they take their exam and so it's a then it's a powerful way for them to build their own study guide without me having to spoon for you
00:32:40
wow uh there's so much there that is super cool use of tags i feel like frannie we should have a whole episode just on creative uses of tags carlos has mentioned it as well um i also really love the idea from
00:32:51
of having a question in the tag so you know to come back there as the instructor and that idea of learning objectives is super cool i want us to to explore that more um
00:33:03
the question is about grading uh melanie um do you have do you grade this in sanitations so this may be this may be like a little off topic so i'm i'm trying to decenter grading so
00:33:19
um kind of jumped on the um ungrading train uh so i i do um include so i have to give something in my canvas
00:33:31
a gradebook so i do include points for completing an annotation assignment but i don't have any specific number or um you know i'm not counting i i really
00:33:46
am hoping that they're going to annotate for for the sake of annotating so i do get a range um and i do give them credit uh for completing an annotation assignment but
00:33:58
um it's part of a larger bin that i call group or discussion work um you know in in terms of getting a grade uh for that annotation assignment but it's very low
00:34:12
stakes um you know i consider this to be you know a formative assessment you know getting some feedback from what they understand and um so that that's how i handle those
00:34:25
annotation assignments in an ungrading universe um is social annotation you know especially helpful in sort of understanding where students are at and how they're progressing
00:34:41
i i find it to be really helpful i i think it's very insightful to see what comments that that i'm getting and um they're kind of gauging their level of understanding um some of those comments
00:34:53
and then being able to really reach you know from from just from understanding to applying um it to another concept or linking out to some other paper or other
00:35:06
video um and i i find it to be very useful for that purpose carlos are you also jumped on the uh on grading train or anti-grading train
00:35:20
yeah but the melanie is a bad influence or i am a bad influence either way so uh so i really tried to i haven't gone completely and and
00:35:36
my wife is on it too and is much more on the peer evaluation and peer grading each other i have gone to a less
00:35:50
gradients and more of a you did it you didn't do it and and provide evidence and along the lines of what melanie said mine are still a grade
00:36:04
but one thing i did this semester with the metabolic modeling class that i inherited that class two weeks before the start of it and and jason jason
00:36:16
got a job but left me with a class that i was not a subject matter expert so i was like annotate and let's learn together and one thing i learned was
00:36:29
i usually do friday deadlines but going back to some of the questions what i um what i did was if you just let me know that you didn't reach your
00:36:41
annotation requirement or you didn't annotate that week and return to it the next week or whenever you have time or whenever you make connections with other papers
00:36:56
and it was really interesting to see people that have for various reasons couldn't annotate that week because of covet because of family things because of concepts not knowing the foundations
00:37:09
yet returned to some of the previous annotations and did an amazing job and i wish i had some data todd in the chat we've been talking about surveys but
00:37:20
um did an amazing job at now responding to questions based on what they had learned from previous from future things we read or things we
00:37:34
read in subsequent weeks now coming back to that article and really annotating and making connections that's so cool
00:37:46
you mentioned todd who's been a great participant in the chat here i do want to sort of now open it up to questions from the audience and my colleagues have been collecting some of those but todd asks a really wonderful question
00:37:59
that i'd love to hear you all respond to he asks are any of you measuring students quote desire or propensity to learn end quote before and after using hypothesis do you see hypothesis improving
00:38:12
student interest and intrinsic motivation to learn we had talked about reading compliance and this is a and people a lot of times mentioned social notation as well that sort of forces students to do the reading
00:38:24
um does it also nurture the sort of intrinsic uh you know motivation to do the reading and engage deeply with it carlos thoughts i think you're still i know you're unmuted but i can't hear you i don't
00:38:43
know others can i'm still thinking you're thinking you got me with that everything's a good question right that's a really good question we can also open it up at this point and let people you know talk over each other
00:38:55
but go ahead carlos or i was gonna say let others answer while i think about a connection desire propensity to learn or intrinsic motivation to learn
00:39:13
i think that's actually a wonderful question and it's something that i'd like to address but i have not addressed that formally in in my course um in my courses but i think it's a
00:39:24
wonderful question and i i would um perhaps include that and some of the reflections that i give uh to my students over the course of the semester maybe um that's a great great idea todd
00:39:37
i may add that to my my reflection piece and and get try to get some student feedback there but um it's a great question i would like to think so but i i don't i don't have the evidence
00:39:48
i have i don't have the evidence to but but or and i have an interesting class because our classes are usually lab based although now my labs are becoming
00:40:01
more bioinformatics on the computer and we have a 50 50 split of undergraduates and graduate students and the undergraduates are engineers or biologists or life science
00:40:14
people and then we have grad students that are from all over so if you could have bioinformatics or functional genomics or you could have textiles and design and what i've noticed and going back to
00:40:28
todd's question and propensity and that's why i was thinking or or wanting to learn i've and i wish i had kept track of this but i've had several graduate students say i
00:40:42
now use hypothesis for my research because we learned in this class we annotated within this group i have this group for annotations and i'm now continuing to
00:40:55
build within that group annotating papers related to my research but using those methods so in that case i think indirectly it gets to that question about propensity
00:41:06
or desire to learn but they they have a different motivation for why they are continuing to use that approach for their research and i think that's the kind of evidence right there i don't know about it
00:41:19
measuring the intrinsic motivation but certainly uh everybody here sort of pointed out that students are starting to use the tool in ways that are connecting you know why why do we do the reading do we need to do the reading yes and these are
00:41:30
the reasons we ask questions while we we get answers um we you know explore together uh beverly you didn't get a chance to chime in on this question of uh motivation to learn it's a great question but i don't have
00:41:44
any any other insights or data on that one all right i like i said i think you guys have already answered it in a lot of ways in terms of the kinds of work your students are doing again maybe not in terms of whether that individual students have
00:41:55
intrinsic desire but certainly in terms of the kinds of work they're doing is they're not just reading for compliance there it's clear that there's a reading for comprehension and for critical thinking
00:42:07
and for continued research and investigation for any i see you've come out of muted video there perhaps to share some questions from the audience uh to help uh round out the conversation here we
00:42:21
usually stop at around 11 45 but i feel like this is a rich conversation so maybe we can have a few more questions from the audience yeah there are a couple more and yeah and i just wanted to let the audience know too that
00:42:33
um in typical fashion here at liquid margins we went over um so if you have to leave there will be a recording of this so don't worry and um also i'll
00:42:45
get i'm getting into the practice of sharing the chat with people because people seem to want that um so that will be available both of those will be available next week um so yeah just a couple questions that
00:42:59
you haven't already answered um melanie rodgerio and i hope i'm madeline i'm sorry madeline for dario hope i'm pronouncing that right um she'd like to know the why of
00:43:11
using it and what do you tell them um that was early on in the chat so if it's out of context or referencing something something else but i think by it she means social annotation and then
00:43:22
also can someone describe how social annotations help students with critical thinking i feel like we've covered the first half there so let's talk about critical thinking and how
00:43:36
you observe the tool nurture that skill in your students and every my little threesome has been rearranged here so i'm going to completely shake it up and start this time with melanie
00:43:51
i think the way that i could relate it to critical thinking is i like i gave example earlier is where we um discuss a content topic in in the course and then use a news and views article and
00:44:04
i think they need to think critically because now they need to apply the concept to a real life example or scenario and then perhaps you know during that annotation they
00:44:18
come up with their own questions so some of we talked about tags earlier so i don't know if i use tags um exactly the way that that was described but i use tags like confused or
00:44:30
interested or want to know more um and so um quite often uh during the the annotation of an article um they will have other questions and they want to know more and i think that's
00:44:44
part of critical thinking you're you're taking a concept that you've learned and you're applying it to a real life situation and then you're thinking about something you know something else that's related to that
00:44:57
particular topic so that would be my my understanding of using critical thinking and do you have a set of tags that you suggest students use as they're annotating those the ones you were just
00:45:09
listing yeah so i put that in the assignment so when i i create the assignment in um my canvas course i ask students um you know depending on what the assignment is i do ask them to
00:45:23
tag um the their note annotations using those terms so that then you can segregate all of the confused all of the interested and and
00:45:36
exactly you can filter them thank you so that that helps um to to keep the discussion going keep the conversation going so cool i know i bet there's a lot of people in our audience today that would love to see some of the assignments you
00:45:49
guys have uh beverly i know you two are using uh tags in a sophisticated way um but the question was about critical thinking is this a tool that helps students with critical thinking from your perspective for how and how
00:46:02
i i think it helps with their critical thinking because i see i see them carry their their information that they that they've questioned in the text over into our weekly discussions we have a
00:46:15
weekly ion ethics discussion and then i can see them link the the information that they've digested in their annotations into their into their ion ethics discussion so i'm
00:46:28
seeing application there so i i think it's working well excellent carlos i just got sidetracked by kay's comment on on in the chat
00:46:42
i i agree that um i think peop learners in these classes that that i'm able to teach and now i teach a couple of first the second
00:46:58
semester experiences where we use hypothesis i i think they're doing critical thinking because this articles we pick as instructors are
00:47:10
challenging enough that we're asking them to make connections we're asking them the question so one thing we've done we've we've teamed up with the philosophy program here and
00:47:24
they have a so so gary comstock is a professor here and along with a researcher at harvard uh nate od they've developed how we argue
00:47:37
and how we evaluate and how we evaluate or how we argue how we argue is available online as a module and for that 200 level class
00:47:50
we have students as an experiment we had students do how we argue first that six hour online class and then annotate or then uh and critically read
00:48:04
and some of the questions that came up about arguments about connections we see them in there going back to metacognition in their
00:48:17
reflections we see it in their annotations so i think it's there even without us having a specific question like how many genomes did they
00:48:28
find or why is electronic waste an issue they've made the connections they are critically not all but they are critically reflecting on why is this
00:48:42
what's behind the author's use of words here is it something i can judge or is is it supported by other evidence that's great thank you carlos friend
00:49:00
anything else you want to surface at this point yeah we've got another question this is from hart wilson who heart thank you for being in the chat so often in um liquid margins it's always nice to see you
00:49:12
um he says it seems to me that general articles like that could also be used to help students become more info tech literate what are the implications for our discipline that this information is shared with the world at large is it any
00:49:26
good not sure i understand that second part but maybe you do or heart could clarify i'm trying to find it to uh maybe read it one more time so he says it
00:49:43
seems to me that excuse me oh my gosh seems to me that general articles like that could also be used to help students become more info tech literate what are the implications for a
00:49:56
discipline that this information is shared with the world at large is it any good yes she hearts a she um
00:50:12
does anybody want to take a stab at that i think the second piece may be talking about you know using hypothesis and context beyond the lms um uh but
00:50:23
i think we have covered the literacy piece to an extent but anybody want to tackle hart's question i'm typing away sorry heart um so so we have and this is carly shogren um
00:50:40
here at nc state has a public science public communication project at this part of this 200 level class and i think that because of what they
00:50:53
and they are able to learn the terminology then then they are able to better craft this public science assignment
00:51:05
by taking what they learned the concepts why is electronic waste in this class interdisciplinary global challenging problem how does a sustainability fit in
00:51:17
they are able to take the facts and and express them in a in their own words for public consumption and i think that to me is a connection of
00:51:29
the annotation with the public facing part that's super interesting and of course you get some of that effect even if you're working within the circumscribed space of the classroom because you still are sharing that knowledge with a
00:51:45
community um even if it's not the the biggest community at large um anything else on that topic beverly or melanie or if we talked you out here on this
00:51:57
friday afternoon for some of you guys um well this has been a great conversation i really appreciate uh all of you um and i would love to follow up on some of the things we learned here today as i said tags is a big takeaway
00:52:12
for me the very interesting and sophisticated and different ways you guys are using tags um and if any of you are willing to share your assignments for us to share with our community i think folks would appreciate them as sort of springboards for their own um
00:52:25
for their own work um but i just want to close by saying thanks so much for spending time with us thanks so much for engaging so deeply with our technology uh it's pretty amazing to you know be
00:52:37
working at a place and building a tool and then learn from the users about cool and innovative ways of tools getting implemented so appreciate your work ahead of this uh
00:52:48
this morning as well yeah i just want to thank everyone so much you know for being here um wonderful guests great show um if you do want to share assignments you can email those directly to me and i
00:53:01
will include those in the resources portion of the liquid margins page for this episode um and thank you to everyone who made it here today in the chat was a really good
00:53:14
chat as well so i'll definitely be sharing that and once again thank you for joining us today and we'll just see you next time on liquid margins take care everyone
00:53:29
you
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