Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:08
my name is franny and welcome everyone to liquid margins this is social annotation and on campus and today's guests are
00:00:22
mary isbell she's associate professor of english and director of first year writing and uh sorry i neglected to put your university um and not on my game this morning so
00:00:36
uh international professor of english professor of english i'm at the university of new haven uh new haven university of new haven right i should have done that on my head sorry um i think my this might be decaf by
00:00:50
accident i don't know what's going on uh we also have john stewart and he is the assistant director office of digital learning at university of oklahoma and then on moderator today
00:01:03
is jeremy dean he's vp of education at hypothesis and um i we also have a couple other colleagues from hypothesis here becky george and nate angel
00:01:16
and myself and with that i'm going to turn it over to jeremy and he's sure to do a better job i've just done so but anyway happy friday thanks for being here
00:01:29
you're doing great as always franny um i'm so excited to be here uh i know both mary and john from before the pandemic um this this uh session is called social
00:01:43
annotation inside and outside or off campus and on campus but the secret title is you know like social annotation it's not just for pandemics and we know each other from uh before the pandemic i've met you both in person we've both
00:01:55
presented together um do you guys know each other have you met before mary and john no i don't think so no okay well you're two of the oldest school advocates of of hypothesis
00:02:08
at different different corners of the world um you know mary's been using hypothesis probably since before we had a learning management system integration i think um across two different lms's now at the university of new haven from blackboard
00:02:19
to canvas um and john uh certainly before the lms as well i remember we integra you guys integrated hypothesis with wordpress there you're enough of a developer that i know
00:02:31
you helped us start to explore certain ways of viewing data even before we we had kind of dashboards for users and stuff like that so you both have been around a long time with hypothesis which is why we've invited you here today and i'm i'm very
00:02:43
happy to see you how have you been where you want to share a little how you've been yeah i'm surviving i'm i'm joining you from uh my mother's apartment attached to my
00:02:54
home where my two children are over here hopefully we won't hear them screaming i feel like that's an important part of sharing how i'm doing i i don't have here um the semester is almost over and i'm very excited about
00:03:07
spring and summer um so yeah i'm doing great though john how are you doing about the same for me my daughter's uh right behind me eating lunch already and i've been home with her for
00:03:19
you know a year now and uh just feed her constantly and do dishes and then occasionally get to work on school stuff so john you've been working from home this whole time yeah i had been all calendar year 2020
00:03:32
uh this year i've actually been back in the classroom and i've been using hypothesis face-to-face this semester um so that's been interesting um you know in addition to all the times in the past
00:03:43
and mary are you um are you have you been going to campus to teach no so um our situation made remote teaching the smartest choice since we were trying not to expose my mom to
00:03:55
the virus so i taught remotely for this entire year and actually this spring semester i wasn't teaching because of maternity leave so i hit the ground running in the fall but it wasn't part of the
00:04:08
crisis of the last spring but yeah it's been it's been all remote and hypothesis um has helped a lot with that actually um so congratulations you've had a a
00:04:20
child during this uh crazy year and a half yes i have he's almost 16 months old oh well congratulations um i wanted to start off by reading this quote uh that i actually got uh turned to
00:04:34
by joshua kim in his regular column in uh inside higher ed um it's a quote from a peter bryant who's a professor and associate dean at the university of sydney business school
00:04:46
and a blog that he talks about what he calls the snapback um you know personally familially all different you know athletically maybe academically professionally there's a lot of desire to return to
00:04:59
normalcy right i actually just got my second shot this morning i'm feeling fine so far um and so i'm excited you know the person who gave me the shot ass like you have any travel plans this summer and i was like well i don't know i sure would like to go to maine and visit my family and go to
00:05:12
minnesota to visit my wife's family but i don't know but we do have this desire to return to normal scene he calls that the snapback and what he's trying to do in the blog is kind of ask us to pause and reflect on
00:05:24
what we've learned during this time that might stay with us beyond the pandemic you know like uh maybe the n95s we can at some point burn them i think probably not um but you know certain things we will stop doing but certain things
00:05:37
you know uh make sense actually i was standing there in line today for for the shot and i was looking at the stickers you know the six feet distance stickers and i was just thinking like everybody who's been alive at this time is gonna know like
00:05:50
six feet really clear in their head you know they've just been standing at six feet distance for so long it's going to be a measurement that we just kind of automatically recognize um i want to read this quote and then we'll uh turn into more of a conversation
00:06:03
we need a better story to tell about what we have learned in our little year or two this isn't about case studies conference papers or vendor demonstrations it's about knowing the human impact of what we have all been doing
00:06:15
it is understanding the affordances of a horrible situation and knowing what we have learned from experience and telling those stories to the right people at the right time hoping we can sort of participate in that
00:06:26
uh today um i saw a post this morning a twitter post um by paul manson who's a visiting professor at read and he says tools i've used during the pandemic that i want to keep
00:06:40
and it's got some checklist i don't know how you do this in twitter but it says in class chat software allow them all to speak in ways that work for them zoom office hours lower barrier to check in and then
00:06:52
thirdly online reading discussion tool hypothesis for sure what tools have you i would say tools and practices what tools and practices have you discovered or rediscovered over the past
00:07:05
uh year um that you feel like will be part of your repertoire when you we hope return to normalcy uh mary you want to start us off sure um so i i think i
00:07:19
we did transition to canvas in the summer before this academic year so um some a lot of things i've changed had to do with transitioning into both using canvas and teaching
00:07:31
remote synchronous hypothesis was one thing that i was now using inside the lms and so i think i i upped my game in certain places there using
00:07:42
canvas i developed a couple of new strategies to have students return back to the annotations that they'd made another tool that i'll throw in the mix though would be any sort of collaborative writing environment
00:07:55
i switched after taking an excellent course on data code and ethics during the digital pedagogy lab i made this switch away from google docs i'll share that here
00:08:07
and transitioned into using our own university's microsoft onedrive system to use shared word online documents either way i had always used them to do
00:08:20
one-off revision workshop activities in class but what happened this year is i just created one document that we used all year and the new content went up at the top and the way i was using that was in
00:08:34
tandem with hypothesis i was having students pull things that they had cited and talked about in the social annotation space pull them into the shared document and then use that as the space where we
00:08:46
communicated with each other and i it felt so frustrating at first to not see their faces until i adjusted my expectations about why cameras weren't on and all the reasons that one might feel
00:08:58
exhausted by having zoom on even if one were in the perfect circumstances um that i started to just say hello at the beginning and then everybody's cameras were off and we were in this shared document and then cameras would come back on at the end
00:09:10
and that has proven so productive we get so much done so much synchronous discussion happening um that i've really enjoyed that and i'm gonna keep it um i'll stop there for now i'm sure more
00:09:23
will come up yeah i really like that idea of the um the shared notepad the shared you know class notes i haven't tried before with just a single document for a whole class but yeah i was doing similar stuff with
00:09:35
my class and uh in google docs um having uh shared notes for each week usually um and uh for me that's part of how hypothesis sort of fits into to what i'm trying to do is shared note
00:09:48
taking and um thinking out loud more broadly and so the other piece of that for me is blogs um and so i've got my students set up a blog with each of them and um
00:10:02
and they blog weekly um either what i did was i gave them sort of an assignment bank and i said choose from any of these prompts um reflecting on what we were talking about this week bringing in outside sources or outside
00:10:14
articles that they read talking about their favorite um music or movie or anything else that they're engaging with um or you know about a half dozen other uh prompts each week and just trying to get them to think about how what we're talking about in
00:10:27
class um relates to the rest of their world and and reflects their own interests in the broader world so um that's been the main space for me but yeah i see i see all of these tools is doing the same
00:10:38
work of thinking out loud and uh and trying to connect um in class with with authentic learning um i was going to ask what is the class you're teaching that you were describing that
00:10:50
work in oh sure sorry yeah and we introduced me as uh assistant director for an office of digital learning which is my job but um right now i also teach history and so right now i'm teaching a history of science class um where we're using hypothesis and so
00:11:02
it's an intro to history of science and we've actually been talking a lot about public health this semester because uh obviously and um and then the other class that i'm teaching we're not using hypothesis in this other one but um a lot of similar work is uh uh on the
00:11:16
history of the tulsa race massacre which is coming up on its 100 year anniversary on um may 1st uh of this year and so um anyway i can talk more about that if anybody's interested in the history if you don't know the story but
00:11:28
um both those classes have been really interesting yeah and and one thing you're you're reminding me of is that other piece of that writing for the public writing for a real audience um did you uh which blogging platform were you having
00:11:41
your students use could they choose or what were they doing yeah so we uh we have a domain of one's own initiative here at ou where everybody can have their own uh domain space and build whatever kind of websites they want to for my class i was encouraging
00:11:54
them strongly to use wordpress and so um each student has their own uh full wordpress site uh set up and then um we use canvas as our lms and so they can submit their blog posts into canvas
00:12:06
and then it brings it into the grader for me and i can use the grader just to see clearly what they've done as an assignment type you can ask for a url submission and so it brings it all in so that's been really nice um i have
00:12:20
um installed well i've got an installation going at the university of new haven of open lab which is commons in a box but customized by city tech um you may all be familiar with the sort of
00:12:33
that and and it's because i so want to be a domain of one's own campus and we can't this is this does allow students to create their own projects and associated wordpress sites but it also means that i get to create a
00:12:45
wordpress site for my class and students can join as members and so a lot of i was experimenting for the first time really with that as well having students turn projects into public-facing
00:12:56
work which was great yeah that's been a big part of what i've wanted to do with all of my classes for years now is just no disposable sort of assignments i don't like you know marking something up with a red pen and giving it back
00:13:10
and so you know having them think about who their audience is having them write for each other and having them comment on each other's we don't actually use comments in the blogs anymore but we use hypothesis and we use uh some other stuff to you know give feedback um
00:13:23
but yeah that idea of uh you know talk to talk to your parents talk to your roommates talk to uh just the broader world um rather than to me yeah yeah exactly i think we're on the same page on that front and i actually
00:13:35
had thoughts about that when you have hypothesis what do you do with the comments tool i don't find students gravitating to use it um on their blog post even potentially not making them like not turning it on you can turn it
00:13:48
off on each blog post so um yeah really interesting we're we're hoping to eventually be more deeply integrated with both those versions of wordpress so that your canvas you know hypothesis login will
00:14:01
work across those those platforms um i'm wondering if each of you can reach back into your you know memories about what first attracted you to social annotation or hypothesis and talk
00:14:14
a little bit about that and then also how your practice maybe has changed or evolved over the past year uh you hinted at this uh mary in terms of returning to annotations um but
00:14:27
john maybe we can start with you this time about what first interested in social annotation and if and how your practice with annotation in the classroom has has changed over the past year during the pandemic yeah it's a
00:14:38
similar story sort of returning to um to what i've been doing a little bit in the past um one of the things about history of science is that it's a smaller field of history we don't have textbooks in the same way that you know american history course does or
00:14:51
european history course does and so while there are books that are commonly used a lot of our resources that we give to students are articles or other online resources and so you know one of the challenges of
00:15:03
hypothesis is that it doesn't work as well with a physical textbook but this is not a thing in my field and so all of the assignments that i gave to my students this semester were either pdfs or or um you know web posts blogs articles
00:15:16
on npr or whatever and so everything was annotatable as far as our readings go and so it just was a normal fit for me as a really logical use case uh for me and that was one of the things
00:15:27
that first attracted me to hypothesis is it just works really well in my space um and uh and this semester um it had that same function the other thing i like about it and the other way that i've used hypothesis in
00:15:40
the past is sort of as a curation tool so it's great for annotation obviously and i think that's the main way people think of it but as i'm going through and just reading things and coming across whatever in my daily practice i can
00:15:52
you know leave a comment and sort of collect that thing for myself and uh and remember um i came across one article on npr where they were talking about uh genetic splicing of humans and um
00:16:04
apes of various sorts and they're looking to be able to grow human organs basically on monkeys we've just been talking about the island of dr moreau in my class which has the same themes and and so i
00:16:17
read that immediately thought of the priorities you know discussion and uh marked it and then passed it on to my students and i had that sort of experience on a nearly weekly basis throughout the semester of just being able to um
00:16:29
pull things into my class and encouraging the students to do the same i love that not not a disposable tool for you either right as a scholar as a teacher something you're using and then uh connecting it with your with
00:16:42
your teaching as well mary what about you what first attracted you to hypothesis or social annotation and how's your practice evolved especially over the past year in a new teaching context um yeah so what attracted me to
00:16:55
i wanted something like hypothesis to exist before it did i feel like i was i had as a graduate student encountered in you know teaching first year writing courses i was also
00:17:07
serving in sort of a graduate student leadership role in the first year writing office and um i was frustrated by the anthologies that we often
00:17:19
used when teaching our composition courses we had two courses then and i think they still do at uconn one is you you learn writing through non-fiction and one you learn writing through
00:17:32
literature quote unquote um and when we would when we would teach that other course you would often choose an intro to literature anthology or some kind of textbook that gathered together readings for students
00:17:46
and i was always frustrated by the apparatus of those anthologies the apparatus got in the way of what i wanted students to do with them they presented literature as content to be mastered you know
00:17:58
certain kinds of um literary techniques needed to be learned and regurgitated and that just got in the way so i worked on creating an anthology with my colleagues my fellow graduate
00:18:11
students and that anthology um i i won't go into the details but i worked on trying to publish something um that you know would pull it all together nicely but have the apparatus
00:18:22
we wanted and it wound up despite our best efforts costing a ton of money and it was so frustrating because i knew that all these most of the readings we wanted to choose some were under copyright and that was a different story but most of the readings we wanted to
00:18:34
choose were in the public domain and it shouldn't have cost anything and there should have been a way for us to be able to give students a way to engage so i first was using annotation studio that i learned about that mit had developed
00:18:46
and that's actually what led me to meeting jeremy and learning about hypothesis and so for me it became this will be my non-anthology way of gathering readings and it worked
00:18:58
really well i always wanted students to read and respond my my goal in the writing classroom at least is to have students engage on the level that they want to engage so what surprises you
00:19:10
shocks you any reaction you have my goal is to teach them how to take that and use it to develop an original arguable claim and to recognize that the thing they think can develop into something
00:19:22
exciting to say not just wait to figure out what everyone says in class to figure out what the right answer is um so i've been using it that way and the the way things are changing now that i'm really excited about actually is
00:19:35
i'm starting to realize that that can be the first step toward collaboratively creating an addition with my students for future students so this all things are kind of meshing together
00:19:47
but this idea of i don't want disposable assignments i want the writing that my students produce to wind up somewhere is coming together with annotation so that i'm kind of thinking now not kind of i
00:20:00
am pursuing a project where students will write initial annotations in hypothesis revise them in hypothesis and then submit a formal assignment which is a sort of focused annotations in a particular area
00:20:15
that they think will improve our classroom addition and then during the summer or the winter break i'll incorporate that into an addition that moves forward and it won't that then won't be in hypothesis it'll be in the actual
00:20:27
text um and so that's a big thing that hypothesis has facilitated i wouldn't have thought about things in that way without it and it's going to be an important tool to develop it for sure
00:20:40
are you thinking about centralizing those texts that the students collect into sort of a digital anthology or are you thinking about leaving them sort of spread out all over the web but then using hypothesis to like
00:20:52
string it together in a in a web i like i like that question my the project started thinking i'll be making an anthology and i was thinking about it in terms of some of you might have come across this
00:21:06
initiative at purdue called cornerstone living for learning it's an initiative to um it's nih and tegel funded and it captured humanity's professor's attention across the country for sure because it was
00:21:19
here's funding to develop an integrated core curriculum experience in the humanities for schools that have pre-professional programs primarily and that's our instance at the university of new haven i teach core courses
00:21:32
to students who are not english majors so i got really excited about that program and part of their program at purdue at least has a set of transformative texts and so my initial idea
00:21:44
was to develop an anthology of transformative text that we determined together we would work with and as i thought more and more about it i realized my pedagogical my approach to texts says it's not so much about what the
00:21:56
text tells you it's about what you do to the text and so an anthology says these are the things we find valuable for whatever reason even if they're troubling or what have you um so just long answer to your very simple
00:22:09
question i'm thinking more that it's distributed and i'm actually thinking that i'm one person creating additions with my students but the project's morphing into being more here are the resources that any instructor can use to create
00:22:21
additions with their students and there will be a hub to sort of share additions if people want to make them available to others to use um but mostly my dream would be that people would get the bug and start
00:22:34
thinking of editing as a collaborative effort to undertake with their students wondering if you guys have uh noticed any difference in how your students have responded to hypothesis during the pandemic um you know when
00:22:46
you've talked with hypothesis in the past they probably still met face to face and got to socialize and connect and converse discuss course uh content then but
00:22:58
when we removed some of the more you know the social aspects of teaching and learning if you are teaching face to face did you find students more open to the tool or more dependent on it in any way i was just going to say even
00:23:12
going back to face to face this semester the students are still making connections in uh hypothesis that they don't get to make in the face-to-face classroom um just because of social distancing
00:23:23
um and i think even without the social distancing they see each other's comments in the readings and and respond and start having conversations there um with someone that they might not talk to you know prior in the semester
00:23:35
or someone they might not have connected with and so i think um i do like that hypothesis i like that that there's no um avatar i guess in hypothesis that you don't necessarily you know know what the other person looks like or
00:23:48
who they are necessarily in the class and so there's no preconceived notions and you're just responding to the thoughts um and so as a as a social media tool and that way i like that the conversations there are
00:24:00
sort of um have a different context i guess than what they're having in the classroom yeah grounded yeah that's great mary um i what i used to do in the in person
00:24:12
classroom was have them all annotate and then i would kind of gather some notes of what i was noticing and then the beginning of class was okay these are some threads let's go and then they would it would almost be like that
00:24:23
avatar would meet the person and they would say oh that was you saying that and that was you saying that that would sort of make it come alive um and that you know that didn't happen in the same way but um because i would
00:24:35
have them move from hypothesis into pulling the thing they mo so they might annotate 15 20 passages in a reading that we were doing but i'd ask them to go back through what they'd looked at and pick
00:24:48
two that they really wanted to sort of share what they thought about it and that then goes in the sort of shared word online document space and there their names show up what they're putting is under their names and they start to comment on each other
00:25:00
and that's the live activity during class and um yeah it's not the same as in person um but it still i think had them start to develop this or recognize the personalities of what was
00:25:13
being pulled out i guess mary can you say more about this assignment in terms of so i've annotated 15 times in a text and then the next step is to grab my referent and my annotation and bring
00:25:25
that into the microsoft word space so it would be some of the original text my comment and then i say more i like elaborate yeah elaborate uh basically it wasn't even so much
00:25:38
uh i gave them the option to sort of say again what they said in their annotation but i would frame the discussion in a certain way after having looked at how that so for an example i was using this not in a composition course
00:25:50
this activity um but for a course on review writing the art of the review you know reviewing films reviewing television shows etc so we would read reviews that we decided on together we
00:26:02
found a review of john mulaney's comedy netflix special so they'd all read it and annotated it with hypothesis and then in class i wanted them to isolate some moves that the critic was making in writing
00:26:15
about mullany so they would under their name share a quote and then identify what they thought the rhetorical move was that the author was making and then the next step of the activity was for them
00:26:26
to respond to each other um and that's where the discussion got cool right because the comments in the document was where the back and forth was happening and everyone's together so there's there's hypothesis um
00:26:39
annotations as homework where they may be in the document at the same time or not and there's also hypothesis annotations live during class which i had also done and this kind of brought pieces of that together but because they were all in
00:26:51
there together all the typing is happening at once i it made up for the fact that i didn't see faces on screens there was action that's super cool one strand that i'm hearing here is that
00:27:03
i that i really like is just the idea that an annotation isn't an end in itself that you know it's the beginning of something that continues in face-to-face class time or in some you know more collaborative authoring tool like you're describing
00:27:16
mary um uh that's that's really cool i want to open it up to our guests and also to or to our audience and to uh also to my colleagues if you have any
00:27:27
questions about what mary and john have said the the crowd has been a little quiet today in the chat people have been uh commenting about how much they want to take
00:27:42
classes with these folks because the classes sound so interesting but we don't have any active questions but uh i know you probably have some more of your own jeremy i i have some as well um but but i'll let
00:27:55
you go first i mean let me just get the get the sound bite in there like uh social annotation is it just for pandemics i mean hypothesis over the last year has seen tremendous growth tremendous
00:28:08
adoption a lot of new schools have gotten you guys been around forever and uh and you know university new haven is actually one of our first customers um oklahoma is now piloting for the first time um but there's a decision coming up for
00:28:21
for at oklahoma right should you guys subscribe now they have to put in the context of your specific school but there's a lot of decision makers and and and teachers themselves that are sort of deciding with this snapback with the return to
00:28:33
normal now they can go into face-to-face and see my students for those that teach face-to-face um do i need tools like this um i'm assuming the answer is yes but i guess the question the follow-up is why
00:28:45
and if you say you want to say no you can't but yeah i mean for me it's it's all always been about you know before uh before cove and and still having the discussion at the level of the reading and not waiting until sort of the the
00:28:58
end analysis um so yeah from the researcher side it was always about um thinking out loud and discussing stuff as i was reading it before i get to the stage of writing an article or or trying to you know put it in the
00:29:10
context of like a broader book project or whatever and then with my students um being able to to you know point them to specific passages and then see their reactions um to specific passages and so it's it's
00:29:22
a tool that yeah i will continue using um you know after covid and after everything else and then i just i keep thinking of of other use cases in other classes um
00:29:33
i'm working with one class it's actually an architecture and they're doing a oral history project where they're um taking all these oral histories of oklahoma city and they're coding for locations and um affects
00:29:46
of those locations within the oral histories and um hypothesis makes that really easy you just highlight a thing and then you can you know enter in the the geolocation or description of the location that's
00:29:59
mentioned and so it's um you know whether you're doing that asynchronously synchronously and face-to-face or online the work still needs to be done and hypothesis makes it easy so um yeah i hope i hope i know that
00:30:12
i'll continue using it i hope that the school continues using it um the the argument i think for the the lms integration the the cost to an institution um being worth it has to do with the fact
00:30:24
that i'm i'm this sort of weird professor who was seeking this tool for a long time and like an eager early adopter and happy to experiment and happy to um deal with the discomfort of students
00:30:36
when they're trying to get a new thing set up when it was a hypothesis in the wild right and i could put up with that there are so many of my colleagues who are more hesitant about using technology um
00:30:48
and who at the same time would um complain about students not reading would say you know i give them these assignments and i don't think they're reading them and i
00:30:59
i think i could say to them i don't think they're reading them either you don't have a good way yet to hold them accountable for reading not only hold them accountable for reading but give them a way to read
00:31:10
in an engaging way like you know it's not about like replacing the quiz with the annotations it's about giving them this experience of the value of reading um and that's something that's going to be done with
00:31:23
what they've come uh come up with during class um it's not just that the professor is then going to lecture all the things that were in the reading so the the reason i'm sharing all of that is because um the value i think to an institution is
00:31:36
that the instructors who might be a little more hesitant to try won't have as many hurdles when using the integration into the lms and i've talked to many who've given it a try
00:31:48
um they put up you know a pdf students annotated and they're blown away by the level of discussion that was occurring and that's that's a the beginning of a flipping of the classroom even if that instructor hadn't already drank the kool-aid
00:32:02
of a student-centered classroom where there is no lecture you're going to get drawn into that because you're going to see everything your students want to share so from the perspective of just professional development of faculty i
00:32:15
would say um i think it's it's valuable there and i don't think you'll have as much experimentation if you don't have the app in the lms there's a little humorous those are
00:32:26
great points i thought um and uh there's a little humorous chatter going on in the in the chat now about what's hanging on both of your walls john has apparently the world's largest diploma well maybe not there could be people that
00:32:39
who have even larger diplomas because they have larger walls based on how he says it works um mary what is what what is your thing on your wall say i have been so like self-conscious of my
00:32:52
location for teaching because this is my mother's apartment she'll be happy to know that this will be on the internet one day um so i have told every cloud especially in the fall i was so hyper aware of this being in the frame
00:33:05
that i would say to my students can you guess what it is whoever guesses gets some kind of you know recognition um are there any guesses nobody ever took me up on it it never became like the the buzzy thing
00:33:16
in my class that i wanted it to be but does anybody have a guess this is giving me there's a little bit of glare on it right now so it's a little hard to see hey i mean this is basically like i gave you the perfect amount of glare to make this really hard
00:33:29
not to crack here um if i were to tell you that this said what a word yeah you could imagine that the decor choices of my mother might involve
00:33:46
louis armstrong oh i'm a big fan love that and so it guides our guides our day nice lovely so that's what we've got going on thank you for asking that because i wanted somebody to talk to me about
00:34:00
that since i started teaching here that was a very important question nate yeah i have another follow-up question that's a little more serious too if you if you will allow jeremy um
00:34:12
thumbs up um you guys may have heard i'm going to throw a link into the chat here about um the research project that hypothesis has launched with the university of indiana university
00:34:24
um sort of uh thanks to a lot of guidance and work by our um scholarly residents this year remy collier who's at the university of colorado denver um and this is uh will be certainly near
00:34:36
and dear to mary's heart and john's too i'm sure because the research project is designed to explore exactly the kind of intersection between um kind of first year uh reading and
00:34:48
writing experiences like in the composition and english field and i'm i'm kind of curious um if you haven't heard about it yet this blog post kind of um lays it out but if just given the
00:35:00
context of your work and i'm going to marry first on this um would you say that you find and i know you've addressed this a little bit already but would you say that you find with your students
00:35:11
that social annotation ends up being uh something that empowers writing as much as reading is it both or is it is it mostly about just the reading well the reading is the beginning of
00:35:26
writing and so in that regard i mean the way i teach writing is to try to empower students to trust their impressions um because in order for them to learn to develop
00:35:37
original original contributions to make to scholarly conversations and that's what i'm driving at when i teach academic writing then i need them to trust that their impressions upon reading something whether it's a scholarly article
00:35:50
or a work of literature um has value and not defer to my sense or whatever they can glean implicitly from class discussion about what's what am i supposed to know about
00:36:04
this and so i find student writing extremely stilted when they come in often from having you know been taught in whatever ways they have that there are wrong or right answers and that you have to
00:36:15
you know convey certain um knowledge of certain techniques um i have to undo all of that and social annotation helps me do that classroom discussion helps me do that but social annotation shows them as it's
00:36:28
occurring the variety i used to be i'm going to go into the weeds on this stop me if you need to redirect but i used to be a little concerned about students
00:36:40
being able to see each other's responses before class discussion because i used to think that the power of the class was the moment when the student said i kind of thought this and then the student across the room said
00:36:54
i didn't respond that way at all but what i find and in that moment you can see the multiplicity of interpretations that are out there and i can model in the front of the room that could become an interesting claim that could become an interesting claim
00:37:07
all of these things can be alive and that's exciting i used to worry that having them all annotate together before class they'd all just pile onto certain ideas and i've experimented with that i've had them keep their annotations
00:37:19
private at first and then share um share them in some way um but the more i teach them and the more i talk to them about what it is they're doing that they want to try to
00:37:31
contribute something and not just jump on and say i agree or push them to say i agree but with a difference or i disagree in this way all of that drives toward them
00:37:43
developing claims that are arguable it's absolutely crucial to the way that i teach writing yeah i think that says it better than i could have but i did want to point out that the two biggest user
00:37:58
groups at ou for hypothesis are creative writing and the history department and so it's the the two sides of that coin of um annotating the historical texts that the history department is uh
00:38:11
are reading largely and then the creative writing uh using it to annotate um i mean all of our creative writing courses are taught using um various sorts of literature and so they have the students engage with that literature and then
00:38:22
write off of it um and so they're they're marking up um both what they're reading and what they're writing and then in my own classes history of science is largely um populated with for the students by um
00:38:34
pre-meds and by other sort of stem majors and so they take our courses and we're expected to help them learn how to communicate with each other and how to write from a humanities perspective and so
00:38:47
hypothesis is great in helping me get them to analyze texts but also yeah start that process of writing collaboratively and individually and so yeah i think it's a great transition tool in terms of
00:38:59
seeing the connections between what you're reading and what you're writing um and i i actually want to share something building on this because there's a an activity that i built this semester that i think works exactly toward i'm so
00:39:12
excited about this research project i didn't know about it but um i'm excited to learn about it um one of the things as i was just describing having students respond initially and then helping them recognize that what they what they first were thinking
00:39:25
as they were reading can be the beginning of essentially a question that then they answer and that becomes their argument for their paper um i've realized that they respond in such a so many different kind of categorizable
00:39:38
ways some respond with anecdote you know they say this reminds me of this thing that happened to me one time some respond immediately with a claim some respond immediately to a text by saying
00:39:49
i would argue this about it some respond with questions some respond by having had a question and already answering it by looking something up giving us a definition or a gloss on a term and so when they do
00:40:02
their first round of annotations and we come to class i introduce the categories that i've come up with and i ask them to go back and categorize what they've done and tag in that way so we've been playing around with
00:40:14
with tagging and helping that essentially what that does is it helps me teach them the various components of building an argument that you need all those things and that some of them come quickly to some people and some of them take longer
00:40:26
but they can watch what everybody else has done and see how they would categorize it and then when i ask them to do another activity and i say all i want here are objective observations like these are just that no one would disagree that this
00:40:40
occurs in the text that's something that they can recognize what that is because they've tagged what they did before to see where other students were doing that is that making sense i don't know
00:40:53
yeah that's super cool that's great i'm gonna jump in here because we're a little bit over time but if uh people want to keep this discussion going that would be great i just want to make
00:41:06
you know be cognizant of people's actual time and if you have to jet anywhere so it's up to you um and again also to um people who
00:41:20
came here today to see this if you have to go um there will actually be a recording of this in the coming days hopefully so we'll reach out and share that with you but uh
00:41:33
john and mary do you want to stay over a little bit keep the discussion going i want to share our last thought ah you just i think you just went a long way for me i saw you nodding i i needed myself to tell john that i
00:41:48
thought he should go first because he seemed like he had something to say oh i was uh um so in addition to teaching history courses um the main thing i do is help everybody with their blogs here
00:42:00
and uh here at ou and so i work on a lot of web and dh projects and i was just imagining different uh ways of building this anthology um just using the hypothesis api and um and how you could
00:42:12
have a sort of live updated table of contents with all the stuff that your students are annotating just pulling straight off the hypothesis api um i was imagining the build on that um i would love to hear what you're thinking
00:42:25
about that because i you're talking about the project i was describing yeah and just the way that you're using tags and the way that the students are are going out and collecting things and you know whether that's directed by you or or sort of in the wild as you said um
00:42:37
by the students um you could just live pull off of a group's tags and then yeah whether that's literally a tag cloud or um sort of a an automated table of contents of all of the different pieces
00:42:49
that they're pulling together and then just linking out to wherever that is with the students annotations you know sort of live on the web but your whole like anthology could be a single web page that's just live updated pointing out to
00:43:01
all these different resources that your students are collecting and annotating i like that a lot would you like to join the project please sean i think i could still show you how to do that it's been a little while since i played with the api i was thinking that uh
00:43:14
that john udel could probably do this uh uh in his sleep but um yeah when mary started this project she's like who's doing crazy weird like funky stuff with uh hypothesis and i
00:43:27
sent her an initial list and i don't think john was on there but i i was a mistake john should have been on there he's always been trying to break break the tool in all the best ways yeah yeah i want to hear these ideas
00:43:40
because actually a lot of the stuff i was thinking would be kind of using hypothesis and then building something that could be annotated with hypothesis later but not necessarily thinking about the tagging in that way so that's really helpful um
00:43:51
and i'll be bothering you john you can expect it yeah no um i um i think jeremy has probably um beaten this horse uh beyond death but um the metaphor of the the mimex um and the the idea of um
00:44:05
showing our work as we read through lots of different sources and those connected paths and it sounds like your anthology is is very much in that vein um and so yeah just being able to chart those paths around the web
00:44:18
as they develop and obviously the the downside of that of of leaving things out on the web rather than collecting them into a single space would be you know if any of those resources stop being maintained or go down right um but that's something that you
00:44:31
know a hurdle you could you could jump in i have a closing observation which is that the blog post that i started off by quoting sort of suggested that um that the world that people that
00:44:43
teachers are fatigued um and just ready to return to normalcy and that there's gonna snap back to some thing that was before um and that's not what's happening here right i see two educators here who
00:44:56
have always been innovative innovative continue to be innovative uh in some ways have been energized and more imaginative or you know that at least has continued through this difficult time
00:45:07
um so that's a that's a very optimistic thing uh for for me to see um that great teaching continues uh great teaching continues to evolve um and we've had a great conversation with two great teachers today and i thank you
00:45:20
for your time thank you jeremy yeah i want to thank you too this has been great and maybe we have to think about there is no normal anymore and go forward with that
00:45:32
notion and all and maybe there never was maybe that never was yeah exactly so okay great well uh again i want to thank you um both for being here mary and john this was
00:45:44
a really great liquid margins and [Music] thank you for everyone who showed up and everyone at hypothesis and again there will be a recording of this
00:45:56
soon and we'll share that with you and join us again on liquid margins and again thank you for being here take care
End of transcript