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welcome to liquid margins uh episode annotation unbound social reading for any subject i'm nate angel from hypothesis this is kind of a special episode because we're welcoming
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folks from basically all over rutgers and it might sound like that's just a focus on a single institution but rutgers is one of the largest um universities in the world and it has so many multiple schools and uh you know
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campuses and things going on um that uh we we really thought it would be exciting uh to kind of try to get a picture of usage and social annotation across rutgers so we invited a number of people here today
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i'm going to be handing over the reins to my colleague jeremy dean in just a second and he'll introduce these good folks and start the conversation with them in just a second thanks nate and it's great to be here um
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i'm super excited i've been working with folks at rutgers for many years now uh some of our guests today were some of the first users of hypothesis at rutgers so we go way back and i'm excited to to
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have this conversation here today um i just want to start off by getting to know a little bit about you guys as educators outside of the social annotation of it all so i'd just like to go around and just tell us a little bit
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about yourself as a as a teacher what your philosophy is you know briefly and we'll get started there uh silva you want to start off um hi my name is sylvia muller uh let's see i've been teaching at rutgers
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since 1998 i spent a chunk of time as a non-tenure track faculty member but during that time non-tenure-track faculty member but during that time i was also doing work uh as pedagogical support for
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faculty that were transitioning to online and hybrid forms of uh classrooms so you know it's it's i've seen this from both sides of the fence um
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uh i've uh i i came from an undergraduate degree at sarah lawrence college uh which was which is a tiny uh small liberal arts college every
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class is uh heavily invested in independent work with the student working directly with the faculty member and all the classes are tiny seminars uh and i did my junior year abroad at
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rutgers university um to be able to take as many classes in film history as i wanted and was confronted with the fact that what i thought was college teaching and learning uh was not uh obviously the
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dominant pattern at rutgers um i got through it then by just kind of pretending that i was in a tiny seminar which i'm sure endeared me to my faculty to the teachers and the other students
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but when i started teaching here um it really because i knew of some of the advantages of that kind of close intimate work with material i've always been trying to get back to
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high-touch kinds of activities because i i really strongly believe that there was a wonderful set of research studies um
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oh i'm gonna get the title slightly wrong christy can you correct me uh uh the invisible universe no um oh they were done at the cambridge basically it it's that you know students don't come to us
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uh as empty vessels waiting to be filled they come with their own set of ideas their own mental models for how the world works and if you never directly
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talk to them about how they think about the material you're showing them or you know the processes that you're trying to explain uh then you really aren't able to do much in terms of changing their mind uh because
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what the research shows is that they will kind of conform to what you're asking them to do for a while but it doesn't create lasting impressions and um you know one
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of the things that i'd like to think is that if you go through a class with me is that it doesn't just end at the end of those 14 or 15 weeks so um so yeah so the hypothesis tool has really uh when i
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saw the uh tool for the first time it was so clear to me that this was something that would really match up with a lot of the things that i was always trying to accomplish
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um and yeah so i have a lot i have a lot to say it's good stuff that's great so i love that i love the idea of hypothesis as a way to bring high touch interaction to uh larger courses um
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christy why don't we go next and i think sylvia uh reframed my question a little bit like tell us a little bit about your teacher and then yourself as a teacher then how does hypothesis fit into that philosophy sure so um
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my background is actually in k-12 education i spent a few years teaching high school history before i moved to rutgers university where i was an instructional designer and um i also
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have taught online at the university level for njit and for rutgers camden so um so like sylvia i've seen hypothesis as an instructional designer working with
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faculty and i've also seen it as an instructor myself and i personally was interested in using it when i was designing online classes because i had this weird
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conflict of i'm an instructional designer and i um really advocate for online classes to be you know planned from day one and we want everything laid out and you know
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everything should be ready to go um in these asynchronous formats but at the same time i don't want to be the sage on the stage that's just giving my like top-down information to my students um as sylvia was saying
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my students come with a wealth of experiences and i was trying to look for ways that i could have them bring their experiences to the online class so whether they're talking about and
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sharing and connecting their experiences from other classes what they've learned um what they have you know just experienced in their own life so i'm teaching a gender and technology class right now
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and so a lot of their own lived experiences are really um relevant to to the material uh so i want them to be experts in my class as well and hypothesis has been a really great way
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to do that that's awesome thanks for that uh and just to clarify real quick christy's teaching online sylvia do you have a synchronous meeting as well in your class are you also fully online
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uh well my preferred modality is fully in in the classroom um uh because i needed a challenge in the past couple years um but uh uh yes i've been teaching fully online since 2004
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and uh hybrid since 2008 so uh right now i'm teaching uh hybrid okay all right rachel tell us a little bit about your teaching philosophy and how hypothesis fits in
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uh sorry you're on me right now all right so i'm a nurse and i began teaching nursing in 2005 um then let's see
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i came to rutgers and i am the director of their pre-licensure program um so i deal a lot with curriculum and and we look at you know what are we teaching the students and and what what are some different
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ways that we can help them to learn that information and one thing that i like about social annotation is that it really supports universal universal learning and design principles universal
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design for learning principles and it really helps to create that inclusive environment um like what's been previously said that our students you know they come with their own life experiences and that impacts how they
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view the material that you're giving to them how they learn it so it's important that with um with the inclusivity of social annotation it gives students multiple means of engagement
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of interaction of expression uh and it it lets us know as the faculty you know we actually learn more from the students sometimes than where we're teaching to them
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it also puts the students in the driver's seat so the students instead of becoming passive you know receptacles for the knowledge they become the creators of the knowledge and the learning
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with social annotation another connection with nursing specifically is that you know in nursing we talk a lot about critical thinking and clinical judgment and you know our nurses really have to
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be able to think on their feet and make complex decisions uh social annotation fits in nicely so there there is a popular uh nursing theory it's a nursing model
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for clinical judgment that supports thinking and it's by christine tanner uh it's called the clinical judgment model and it focuses on noticing
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interpreting then responding and reflecting so when you look at social annotation that's exactly what we're asking the students to do we're asking them to take a look at this article notice
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what's important to you then interpret that so they're going to think about okay what well i like this part of the article but but why do i like it why is it important to me is it important to something i've learned before something uh we're
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learning in this class something that i've seen in clinical or maybe even something in their personal lives that that they can bring to the table for everyone in class to share but in a
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safe space so social annotation creates a safe space because sometimes you know in nursing we talk about sensitive topics and you'll ask a question in class and the room is silent
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but when you put it into social annotation by giving them an article to look at they they feel safer because it's an online environment they feel safer to say what
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they're thinking um so they also get to not only interpret but they get to respond you know they're they're telling you okay these are my thoughts and then they can reflect they reflect on their own thoughts
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uh through and they reflect on their classmates thoughts by conversing um replying in the annotation aspect so i really like social annotation and it's used for nursing
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oh that's awesome rachel thanks for that um i want to follow up with you specifically about that model uh for clinical judgment that that you were referring to because i think that could be something cool to share elsewhere in
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our you know community of practitioners let's use that as a springboard to go back to sylvia and christy to tell us a little bit about how how social annotation specifically connects to
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your disciplines one of the really neat things about this group one of the really neat things about what's going on at rutgers with hypothesis is it's a really vast diversity of um disciplines that are using hypothesis i'd have to give a shout out because i thought this
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was really cool for the past couple semesters it's been a caribbean studies uh course that's the most uh heavily annotated course not that you know volume matters necessarily um but uh
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there's quite a diversity um we heard about the connection to nursing and uh christie you're coming from sort of a gender studies place and sylvia from social informatics so tell us a little bit about you know how
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that particulars of that discipline what you're trying to get students to do and how social annotation helps with that maybe starting with christy sure so um
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the students in in my class are uh often coming from a lot of different majors um like some of them are gender studies majors but gender studies uh a lot of times is not a primary major at
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rutgers camden um they have uh we have a lot of minors or double majors um so for me the the gender studies class really overlaps with so many other
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disciplines and the social annotation allows the students to bring their experience from these other disciplines into the class so students have talked about what they've learned in their anthropology classes
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um i think an annotation this week had a criminal justice major was talking about how um what she's learned in criminal justice applies to the the gender and technology things we were
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discussing with like algorithms and facial recognition um so it's really like i kind of said before this is a little bit repetitive but just an experience to
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let those overlaps with other subjects kind of creep in um in a more natural way and also we do kind of start the class off with more like heavy theory of
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gender studies and it helps the students [Music] understand that better because they're seeing what each other is thinking so they often will just ask a question of like what do they mean by this and other
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students will respond to them well i think that the author is saying this or i'm interpreting it as why and most of the time they answer each other and i don't have to say anything in the end besides like yeah you got it
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so it really helps them also you know get through the more dense material that's awesome sylvia how does it connect to informatics well uh
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a lot of students that uh come to the information technology and informatics program are kind of under a bit of misunderstanding about what the nature of the program is
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about um so we are going to teach them things about information technology uh but the field is really centered around a social sciences approach to understanding all the different impacts that happen
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when you put human behavior human practices in contact with rich uses of information technology so a lot of the times um uh for especially the social informatics
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class uh uh i'm having to explain uh disciplinary differences which are abstract and frankly if you're new to the field they're weird um there's also
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the goal that i have for that class is to introduce them to the kinds of research that social informatics scholars do and um the whole
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sequence of assignments is designed to introduce them to okay if you want to develop better tech if you want to implement tech in a more effective way there is research that has some answers
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for you and you need to go be able to look at that research and interpret it successfully and because these this is a 200 level class uh it's mostly sophomores sometimes i get a junior or two
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um most of them haven't read research studies and there's a lot of questions so sometimes what i'm asking them basically what i'm asking them to do is to go through the article and use the annotations and the
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annotations can be anything from bringing in personal experiences to uh i don't understand what the heck they mean by pro-topography what you know what is that term um so uh
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and i tell them that i'm going through and i'm looking at what they're they're annotating and i'm using those opportunities to answer them uh sometimes uh like what christy was saying they answer each other and all i have to do
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is kind of go yeah you know um but uh sometimes uh they really do need my guidance because they're reading in a genre they're reading a type of writing that it's not just decoding the language it's
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also decoding a whole super set of structures um which i think would be pretty much impossible uh i i have not i have not had a ton of success
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with the research study analysis assignment until i figured out how to interleave it with the annotation exercises um so it gives them
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enough confidence in i'm successfully identifying the pieces and what's going on in this research to then be able to write about it and present about it for
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themselves so um so yeah i see this uh i've done a lot of different things in this class i've been teaching it since 2004. but the rewrite the last couple of rewrites over the
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lockdown because we were forced online and i had to make better use of it uh really pushed it to oh you know something clicked into place and
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it's not that everything is perfect but suddenly we are able to do things or get the students to learn how to do things in a in this 15 weeks that we couldn't get them to do before successfully so
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that was a big deal for me at least i was really excited thanks sylvia um so as i was saying earlier a lot of you guys are old school in terms of your use of hypothesis at
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rutgers i was looking at some data this morning and i was seeing some of the first usage was wasn't 2019 not sure if that was some of you guys i know that the school of communication and information was um one of the first
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to start to play around with the tool shout out to veronica armor i don't know if she's still there um and that christy was the early there at camden and um you know uh herself and others they're
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using the tool and range i know you've been using it for many semesters um and i'll just say that just really quickly to sort of impress upon the idea that of what grew out of those early experiments you know over 10 000
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students at rutgers since 2019 have used hypothesis which is a pretty pretty healthy number so my question is how has your use of social annotation
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evolved over that time of when you first discovered the tool and you might have assigned uh social annotation assignments a certain way and and where you are now has there been any growth or sophistication in how you're assigning
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the tool um and i will just grant the fact that there was a pretty major uh global disruption in the in the middle of that that probably affected any kind of linear uh progression of like how one would use
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the tool and challenge these the tools so you could also mention you know how a push to remote if you were synchronous like like sylvia before uh forced you into new ways of using the tool but just talk a little bit about how your
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relationship with hypothesis and how use in the classroom has evolved and let's go back to rachel well interestingly enough i started using or i first was introduced to hypothesis
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right when the pandemic started rockers camden offered a certificate in online learning and christy was one of the teachers and she introduced me to social annotation and i actually got to participate in it
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as a student so i saw it from the other side and then all these ideas started popping into my head like oh wow this has so many uses for for me for nursing i can use that for my students so that's how i was
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introduced to it and initially you know i would assign an article give the students expectations like this many annotations this many responses and then over time it has evolved i have a
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rubric now i don't just use it as an outside of class activity i pull it into class so we we use it as an in-class activity one of the big things i look for like i
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used to assign articles on you know most of the topics that we were covering weekly but i try to get to those more sensitive issues now because that's when i notice the students really open up because we can't get that back and forth in class
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conversation wise on sensitive topics so like when we talk about things like addiction and equity and diversity inclusion lgbtq issues in health care
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students kind of they'll shut down they'll listen to what you're teaching them right but they're not really diving deep into the knowledge they're not engaging engaging with it which they're able to do with social
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annotation uh also in another class um evidence i teach it research and evidence-based practice course you know uh what sylvia was saying how she used it
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so the students could be introduced to like really reading research uh that's i had students do that as well so i would divide the article into components and divide them into groups and make it a group activity and tell them you know
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this is what you're looking for and this is how to dissect an article and this is you know for this type of evidence now let's do it with another type of evidence and it introduces them to different sources and getting more comfortable in the reading
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so you know we could look at a research study we could look at a clinical practice guideline or a position statement it supports advocacy and the students start thinking about oh well yeah i'm reading this and now i want to do this
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and be an advocate for my patients that's awesome christy how's your practice evolved sounds like you were the the beginning of the use of the tool for for rachel herself which is awesome yeah
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so um i first used it in fall 2019 uh i taught the gender and technology class online asynchronously that fall and then honestly this is my
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the next time i've taught the classes currently because covet hit i was doing instructional design support and um there was not a lot of extra time to be teaching so so uh this is the second time i've been
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using hypothesis in the asynchronous online class um i actually haven't really made changes with how i used it from that first run because it worked really well my class
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my online class tends to be pretty small it's about 25 students and um the way i set it up was i just wanted the students to feel free to get in there and have a conversation without
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having um pressure of specific expectations so i was trying to avoid creating um kind of the sometimes you know in online classes the
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discussion board can be a little bit more like stilted with the post and reply and i wanted this to be more informal so i basically give the students the instruction of you need to go in and annotate here are some
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examples of what a you know a substantial annotation is um you can ask a question you can reply to a classmate about answering a question you can talk about your own experience and how it connects to that
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you know they have a couple bullets of like what a good annotation is like not just like i agree um and i have no requirements of how many annotations they have to post
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just the assignment each week is annotate the readings and it's pass fail you you annotate you um you get credit and if you don't annotate you don't get credit so
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that system worked well for me i have some students that go in and really mark the document up and some other students go in and just say a few words here there so um but
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in the end i feel that the goal of them you know really digging into the reading and bringing their experiences to the reading um has been met and that's why i didn't really make any changes to what i was doing
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so we'll see how it goes this semester thanks christy sylvia how's your practice with social annotation evolved oh my uh well i i've been using it every semester
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since i think i want to say it was before 2019 honestly because i think i was using it i know i was using it prior to the canvas integration because the canvas integration
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did make things a lot easier um i was looking just at canvas stats for 2019 so it's very possible yeah um yeah so the uh the first couple of rounds were not successful
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because we had a lot of technical issues um the uh the camden integration made part of it easier uh what i found i had to do was sort of fiddle with it a little bit because um
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uh initially i was uh giving it some great weight uh but not enough so i had too high a percentage of the students were kind of blowing it off
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because it felt like too much for not enough um and that drove me crazy because i was like you'll get so much more out of this if you just do this so the lockdown actually gave me a
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language to talk about that um because i was like whenever we are synchronous it's costing everybody a lot in terms of resources to be able to all be together at the same time
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and i don't want to waste time dragging things out of you um so part of what and i actually wrote this up as a page in the getting started section of the online and the hybrid
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courses which explained like this is what i think we're doing with hypothesis feel free to disagree with me but you know this is why this is why i do things the way i do them um and the uh uh
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i want to make those if we're in the classroom or if we are on the zoo meeting i only have you for an hour and 20 minutes and i need to get as much value out of that hour and 20 minutes as
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possible um you know so it's not like i don't want to be your task master where you know i'm just smacking you to keep you moving um but what you will find is if you've done at least a little bit of the
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reading and you've pre-verbalized some of the things you're thinking about the reading then you're going to be much more willing to come in and talk and after the first
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i think the first two semesters teaching during the pandemic it suddenly struck me that something that was missing because we had so many just logistic issues with you know getting everybody together
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uh that we weren't always doing a good job of following up so i turned the assignment which i have been doing kind of in two phases which is you get some of the points for doing the initial set of annotations and then you
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get some of the points for the participating in the group activities based on those annotations in the classroom the last year i've been doing it as a three-phase so you get each activity is
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worth 30 points out of a thousand you get 10 points for doing the initial set of annotations you get 10 points for doing a good job in the classroom meeting and then each week i'm giving
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them a follow-up thing to do and i've been using i've found the follow-ups to be very flexible so like the first phase annotations is always the same just go in look at what we're reading this week
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and going to be discussing give me five things you know i kind of give them a little bit of a ballpark because they're undergraduates you know they want a word count um and then uh but for the follow-up phase i can do things like uh like for
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example um i expanded the use from social informatics into information visualization so we've been giving them tufty uh which is dense and chewy and lots of examples
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um so the tufty is kind of like the bedrock but there's lots of other things that we're giving them to look at so in the follow-up phases i've been saying things like okay go look at the examples in the other reading that i
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didn't have you do annotations on and pull those into you know as examples of what tufty is talking about in in this thing or uh sometimes i'll ask them to do something in their discussion group in
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the classroom and then report out in an additional annotation back to the original reading uh there's i've really been very happy there's a lot of different changes i can ring with that depending
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on what i need them to be doing that particular week to kind of solidify the work that we did together in the classroom so um yeah but it took me it took me a few
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goes to figure out what was the right number like how much weight is too much weight and now the issue we're working on is well it obviously i need them to be doing
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some of the cognitive work in the class and that happens in the classroom um but we still have students that are stretched mighty thin with extra jobs people getting sick stuff like that thank god that's starting to die back a
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little um so i'm working on trying to figure out what's a good attendance policy uh because you know i need you there uh for some of this i maybe don't need you there as
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much for some of this but striking the right balance but yeah once they kind of get the sense that oh sylvia really is reading these oh sylvia is really responding every time i have a question then that opens up all kinds of
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possibilities so there have been some really delightful conversations uh that have erupted uh in these annotations especially with the infoviz students this year um because there are
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all kinds of directions you can move off in so yeah i hope that's not too long an answer but it really has been a journey over the last few years with this no that was a great answer there's so many different points in there that i
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wanted to highlight but i really love the idea you're gonna say better than i'm gonna recap but about you know making the synchronous time is precious make it count and this is a tool that kind of can help
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help that help make your synchronous time really count well i'll tell you that of all the reasons i've given students for why i like using this tool in my classes that's the one
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that really seems to click with at least this group of undergraduates because i know how much some of them are struggling to be there in the classroom paying attention
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you know the the whole time that we spend in intellectual development is a precious resource and you know anything that helps us get
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and preserve that focus for that time um i think they really do appreciate because so much of their college experience has been disrupted by forces that none of us can control
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um so prioritizing that focus i think really seems that seemed to be the the tipping point for someone it's a real lesson right i've been on both sides of it right if you show up to
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teach a class and it's clear that people haven't done the reading you know it's less productive right and i've been on the other side of that where i didn't do the reading and i wasn't contributing to the productivity of that group time and it happens in the workplace too right you show up to a meeting without an
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agenda it's probably not going to be as focused and so this that's a real life skill i think to sort of you know put some investment into something before you and then develop that investment you
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know collaboratively so i love that idea um so christy this week uh tweeted a lovely uh anecdote from a student and so my next question is around
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um the student response to the tool um and i'll just want to read christy's quote a student literally just told me this week about hypothesis quote i really enjoy annotation the annotation portion
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and reading my peers comments the annotations help me to understand the reading and get a chance to see other comments about what everyone was thinking so we'll start with you christine then uh and then rachel and sylvia just tell us a little bit about
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how your students have responded to uh social annotation as a as a classroom tool so i just want to actually know about that quote too that that was completely un like i did not
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prompt the student for that um i really i just emailed all my students this week to check in and be like how are things going how can i better support you very open-ended so this student really just brought up annotation on her own
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um but hypothesis the other time i ran this course um was by far the most popular tool i was using and it wasn't the only tool i was using and the most popular
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assignment um i actually asked specific questions about it in both the midterm evaluation and the end of course evaluations and students um very largely i don't remember exactly the numbers but um
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really felt that the annotation helped them learn the most out of all of the assignments that we were doing in the class um and i'm running the midterm um evaluations again next week so we'll see what they have to say this semester but
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obviously at least it's helping one student so far but yeah i mean from my perspective i feel like they really take to it um and they get something out of it and
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you know based on the feedback i have gotten that is true from the student perspective as well and rachel corsiera you're a student turned teacher user of the tool
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so you you know something about the student perspective yes uh interestingly that christy had said his student you know was giving social annotation hypothesis accolades
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i had a student last semester so at the end of the fall semester when they filled out their course evaluation they they said that i created a safe space for them
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and it you know really it touched my heart first of all but you know i was like oh wow that's my goal and i'm i'm glad that you know you're seeing that um and you're and you're feeling that that
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you know it's it's hard to talk about some things and we all know how much more comfortable people are to talk when when they're typing um so the social adaptation when we're talking about this more more difficult
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topics they the really that that the safenet the safety that they feel and and really saying how they feel is important um two christie said something
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that made me think that's something i wanted to say but it's it's left my mind so i'll let you know if that comes that thought comes back but i i do also notice with social annotation
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um i've had students say to me you know i really like that article that you assigned this week and they actually they have fun with it um so it it's not like a churro this is i gotta get this off the checklist i gotta go do my
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social annotation assignment uh they they actually have fun with it and enjoy it i feel like so much of what you guys are saying is oh just it's warming my heart uh and uh i feel like i could have yeah
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it's great uh sylvia how have your students responded to social annotation uh pretty well um one of the things that uh i know this is gonna sound strange uh so
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i also do work in educational research uh for the computer science uh department from time to time um and one of the and i also one of my previous lives at rutgers was working with the implementation and the building of tools
00:36:26
for very large enrollment stem discipline classes um and uh one of my big i think thing that they got a little sick of me talking about was not every f is the same
00:36:38
um so i you know i i look at dfw rates i think a little differently which is kind of like tolstoy it's like every happy family is happy that every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way um
00:36:51
so one of the things that i really have been paying attention to is you know who's falling off the back end of the bus um with what i'm doing in my classes
00:37:02
and one of the things that i think uh and again you know i wish i could quantify this more precisely um it really to me is a bit of a tone thing but once i i once i kind of convinced
00:37:16
them that no i really am interested in what you have to say and i want you to feel like you can ask questions even if you think they're dumb and you know all that stuff uh speaking of dumb questions we actually in one of the toughty
00:37:29
readings earlier this semester um tufty shows uh an example of a stereo opticon view and uh so in the annotations the students were like i don't see what he's talking about i don't see what he's
00:37:41
talking about so when we got to class i mean this whole conversation erupted like those uh magic images that you stare at and like another whole picture pops up nobody was getting it i was like guys
00:37:53
number one very few people can see this without the special viewer and number two you're viewing it on a pdf instead of the original book it's not going to work but we we had a fun time with that anyway um but once you kind of convinced
00:38:06
people that you know this is a safe space they felt like this is something i can participate in and if i can keep you with me for more of the course if i can keep you with me through some stuff which is maybe going
00:38:19
to make sense a little later but you know for right now i just need you to get through some of the basics with me um that seems to be keeping more people in the class
00:38:31
for longer um so i don't think that the number of a's and b's has skyrocketed but frankly those are the students that were already doing pretty well using everything and they
00:38:45
like hypothesis i would totally you know say that i've had a few comments that seems to indicate that this is something that they prefer to just reading along um but the uh but the thing that i have been
00:38:58
noticing is that students that i'm pretty sure given the circumstances especially in the last few semesters would have been f's um have managed to kind of stick with the
00:39:09
course a little longer because there is a way for them to participate for them to build learning even if they're not completely aware that they're doing it um
00:39:21
so that to me um that to me was a for this past year especially it was a big win um because one of the big concerns i had going into this was college is expensive and you know
00:39:35
i know that some of you are coming i didn't say this to them directly but i mean talking with colleagues it's like i know that some of my students are coming with damn near insuperable obstacles to being able to focus on their learning
00:39:47
and you know my worry was that we were going to see like this bottoming out and that bottoming out like the bottom half of the class just doesn't make it across the finish line
00:39:59
um and you know that obviously is going to be largely around socioeconomic you know fault lines that you know we have in a public university
00:40:12
um so this to me uh is i don't want to oversell it i mean like i'm sure that there were other there may have been other ways to have accomplished this but at this moment
00:40:25
this tool i think was really a lifeline for at least my classes are generally about 25 to 35 students so typically in a class that size i'm looking at
00:40:37
five to seven that are weaker in terms of their preparation and you know really it's keeping you know four or five of those students
00:40:48
out of maybe seven um on the boat uh on on the bus on the boat on the transportation system moving forward so i don't know um i would love to see some i know you guys probably do quantitative analysis
00:41:01
um but it would be interesting to hook that up with you know what the um ultimate course outcomes are uh because i i haven't done this myself because i've been changing the way i use hypothesis
00:41:15
over and over but now with that i feel like we're really settling into a more solid you know consistent pattern that's something that i'd like to to really check out because you know at least anecdotally that seems
00:41:27
to me what i'm seeing in the classes is as keeping more of the students with me longer that's amazing um i would love to i love that anecdote but i would love to substantiate it with a study in some way
00:41:39
um so i we are looking for folks that are interested i don't know if you teach multiple sections sylvia and so it seems complicated right if you really feel like this is helping struggling students like why deprive one you know section of it
00:41:52
um but that would be a way that we might be able to prove some of what you're saying and but we certainly heard that elsewhere um so we're going to turn and try to foreground some things from the chat i will say there's been a request uh
00:42:04
several requests for um your assignments that you teach with um to be shared and uh christy's already dropped that in the chat and maybe um sylvia and rachel if you guys have assignments you'd be willing to share we
00:42:17
can follow up with folks if you don't have a direct link right now um but there's also one question that i wanted to surface around um and we could cover this a little bit it sounded like christy uh you and you
00:42:30
shared your assignment but you you're a little more more laisse fair in uh in terms of what you're asking so you give them examples and then sylvia it sounded like pretty sophisticated in terms of like first passes this second pass is this
00:42:42
and rachel you talked about a specific assignment you know with a with that one um clinical model uh so the question is what specific guidelines do you uh well this one there's one that's specifically around specific guidelines for the safe
00:42:55
space um that you mentioned rachel and how you cultivate that and i think it's contained within the question that um that's not just a hypothesis you've also obviously created a culture of that in your course more
00:43:08
broadly for students to feel that comfortable but how do you set up the assignments let's let's let's start with that so
00:43:20
one of the things is i have to explain what is hypothesis because the students many of them never used it before so that's first and foremost but also um in in nursing
00:43:32
students want to know exactly okay what do you expect from me what do i have to do and i also teach larger classes so i don't teach huge classes but you know i would consider 60 students to be a larger class so they need some kind of
00:43:45
structure and some kind of parameter so i do assign a rubric and in the rubric i have like three areas that i look at and they can get a total of 10 points so they start out at the top they can they start out with
00:43:58
their full 10 points and the rubric basically says you know this is why you might get a point deducted and i look at substantive entries is one topic then grammar and spelling it's another one
00:44:10
and then participation is the third but when we talk about substantive what it really means is that you know whatever the student is annotating they're they're adding meaning to the conversation so i give them some
00:44:22
examples like reflect on the reading um what do you think pose a question is something in there really making you think you maybe you don't understand it connect the reading to what we're
00:44:34
learning in class or you know your life or what you learned in another class so they'll get a point taken off if it's not substantive you know like christy said they can't just say i agree
00:44:47
and then for grammar and spelling you know i i'd like to see it have you know good grammar and spelling but i also in that column i put you know that you can use emojis you can use texting language
00:44:59
um i want you to convey emotion so conveying emotion is important and you won't get points taken off you know for for doing those types of things and then for participation you know i
00:45:11
have to be a little more structured with nursing so i'll tell them i want to see a minimum of two annotations and one response to a classmate but to encourage participation and that discourse that we get with
00:45:23
social annotation i say but you'll get one extra point if you actually have more than your required annotations that's good and i actually want to fold a question into this one since you you
00:45:37
contained it there rachel which is how do you set it up and to grade or not to grade are you grading them or how are you grading them and christy you've already sort of answered some of this but i did want to uh i mean you can repeat a little bit of how you set up the students for for
00:45:50
using hypothesis and and you mentioned that you're sort of a pass fail grader for this assignment but i remind tell me if you do what rachel does which is um encourage replies uh to try to encourage that
00:46:03
discursive aspect or uh yeah tell us a little more about how you set up your assignment um so like i said it's just my five minutes pass bill [Music] and they
00:46:15
get credit for any type of annotation so i actually i i linked to my uh specific instructions in the chat um i tell them that they can reply to a classmate um that's really all of the kind of
00:46:29
encouragement i give them and i do get in the beginning of the semester my students are like but how many do you mean like really uh i mean as many as you would like to
00:46:40
do um so in the first week they're a little like hesitant about that um but i found that i really haven't had to kind of push them to reply to classmates i have some students that some weeks go in
00:46:52
and they only post replies to people um and then other times people will have a mix some students don't really reply as much and just annotate their own thoughts really heavily so
00:47:04
i really get i found that i really get a mix even without providing them a lot of guidance i um there's always a pretty rich conversation going on often with like multiple
00:47:16
back and forths or even more than one student like you know replying to one annotation so yeah i haven't i i don't like have an issue with using a
00:47:28
rubric or anything i just didn't want the students to get very hung up on getting a specific grade i wanted their um score around this to just be encouragement to to go into the
00:47:42
readings and do the assignment um as a kind of informal conversation so that was my reasoning there and it's it's worked pretty well for you know my specific course so anything more about your um
00:47:56
how you tee things up and whether you're great or not oh i'm sorry was that for me yeah just uh i've got a cat crying on the landings um
00:48:11
yeah so uh i i teach undergraduates um and they're they're wonderful um you know uh i wouldn't run the assignment the same way for a graduate
00:48:23
class i have used this kind of tool in graduate courses and you know i don't do it the same way but i get tired of having the how many annotations conversations so um so what i did uh at what i do what i
00:48:36
started doing is at the start of the semester i said there are going to be x number of hypothesis activities this semester the first phase is always the same five annotations i give them like these are
00:48:48
all acceptable kinds of annotations you can reply you can ask questions you can comment you can bring in additional things i generally don't uh pay much attention to grammar and spelling uh in that
00:49:01
instruction because i know that when i'm actually grading them i'm not gonna have the time um so you know for that for my purposes it's like okay you know i'm gonna care about your grammar in other places but not here
00:49:14
um and the uh uh i go through um and this is the part that kind of happened by accident um but i don't know if you can see these um so
00:49:28
i kind of developed for myself a little spreadsheet that i print out x number of copies from and in the prep time before i walk into the classroom or start the zoom meeting
00:49:40
i would sit down and i would go through all the annotations for the reading that we were going to be discussing and i fire back comments and i answer questions um so the students know that i am looking at this
00:49:52
you know within you know within six hours before i'm walking into the classroom so um and of all the us grading and as anybody who's had a class with me can tell you i am sometimes very late with turning in
00:50:05
grades i am never late with that part of the um uh of the feedback because the way i see it is the whole point of this is the high touch is that they feel like
00:50:16
they're getting heard and they're being seen so if i don't deliver on that i've just cut the legs out from under my my efforts um so the uh so yeah so i i do
00:50:29
actually this one is pretty good um but i do little notes for myself like this person only posted four out of five annotations the first phase is always the same five annotations um the second
00:50:42
phase is always what are you doing with me in the classroom and then the third phase is always the follow-up which changes from week to week so i was trying to reduce the complexity
00:50:54
because what i was finding for some students was i don't want to have a conversation about how many annotations and talking about this many annotations for this reading and this many annotated that was just
00:51:06
bogging everybody down um i don't think i do think that would be a useful strategy in other settings um so let me be real clear about that but in this in my particular case it was just needless complexity
00:51:19
so uh so the first phase is always the same the third phase uh gets released to them and sometimes um my favorite thing to do although i can't do it every week
00:51:31
is i will post direct questions back to them based on what i am seeing in their annotations and then their follow-up phase is to write a you know 150 200 word reply to the
00:51:45
question that i have left for them and is that question sylvia happening in an annotation yeah yeah okay so um this is yeah you are very high touch and it's very impressive and your anecdote
00:51:58
about coming from st lawrence rutgers is uh is wonderful um so you are annotating i did want to ask that question to others like and again one of the neat things about hypothesis is it's used in a lot of different ways a lot of different courses and in many ways
00:52:11
there's no no right and wrong but i'm just curious rachel and christy do you annotate as well or do you let that be the student space and and stand back and and watch or follow up in other ways um to annotate or not to annotate alongside
00:52:24
the students is the question christy rachel target so it depends on how busy i am at the time so sometimes i'll jump in and i'll annotate other times i don't so yes and no
00:52:38
but i do enjoy the annotation part of it with such large classes sometimes it's hard to do that so i divide the students usually into groups for an annotation assignment um
00:52:50
an lms system makes it easy to do that and once they're divided into groups then i can kind of go in and i have their their small group that it's easier for me to have a to make a comment and i'm not making a comment on you know 60
00:53:04
individuals as opposed to oh i see what you're talking about within your group and maybe you know ask them another question or add to their conversation yeah that's great christy
00:53:18
um so i usually don't go and participate in the annotations mostly because they don't get the notifications from hypothesis and i want to make sure that they see what i'm saying so i'll i will
00:53:31
either reply to them in like the private canvas comments or i will make like a broader um comment to the class in an announcement or something like that so i tend to stay hands off in annotations
00:53:43
but make sure i like they know i'm reading them in some way yeah yeah just to clarify um the the annotations that i post back to them are not the grade um right the uh
00:53:57
the i i have actually some boilerplate that i work with um so the first uh the first thing that goes back in the comments is this is to acknowledge that you did the five annotations or you weren't completely
00:54:10
successful with the five annotations the second paragraph is this is what you need to do for the follow-up and the third paragraph is if the follow-up is done and it gives the due dates um so
00:54:22
i try to keep the uh the conversation i try to keep the conversation in the annotations kind of like what i do with them in the classroom and i'll say this um you know because as i'm getting older and the anecdotes are
00:54:35
piling up in my brain um responding back to them in the annotations means that i have you know imparted that funny little story but i didn't take up class time to do it um so
00:54:48
you know i kind of dropped it where i thought it would do the most good and then i can kind of let it go um so yeah it's uh but it's a it's a balancing act it definitely is a balancing act i could go on all afternoon with this
00:55:01
conversation it's been amazing uh so many different pieces to jump off from i know people have other places to go and we've already pushed past our time and i see franny and nate coming to tell us to wrap it up so i just want to thank you all for a great conversation and for
00:55:14
your long-term collaboration around social annotation uh and teaching and learning which is you know really been a privilege to be a part of thank you thank you for having me yeah thank you so much really enjoyed it
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