Waiting..
Auto Scroll
Sync
Top
Bottom
Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:07
welcome to liquid margins this is social annotation strategies for large courses i'm your host franny french today's guests are melanie walsh she's assistant
00:00:19
teaching professor in the information school at the university of washington and go huskies um scott johnson professional assistant professor of history and undergraduate
00:00:31
history program coordinator at texas a m university corpus christi and kevin richards assistant professor of teaching clinical outreach coordinator for the department of germanic languages and literatures at
00:00:45
the ohio state university and then our moderator today is jeremy dean he's the vp of education here at hypothesis and with that i'm gonna stop sharing and turn it over to jeremy uh thanks franny
00:01:00
thanks everybody for being here um super excited about this conversation uh best part of my job is talking to instructors and students about social annotation so this is always a great opportunity to do that
00:01:12
i'm especially excited though because we have introduced some features and some practices that better enable large courses to use hypothesis i think everybody here is
00:01:24
using hypothesis and canvas actually maybe except for you scott are you in blackboard all right so canvas and blackboard but we're here really to talk about hypothesis um and how it can be used in in large courses um that's that's the focus but i
00:01:38
want to start generally and just hear a little bit from each of you guys about what you teach and a little bit of your teaching philosophy and then we'll dive into the social annotation of it all so maybe we can start with you melanie
00:01:52
sure um thanks for inviting me to be here so i teach data science and data ethics and digital humanities classes at the university of washington this quarter i'm teaching our introduction to data science class for
00:02:05
the undergraduate informatics program at the uw um and so we do a lot of technical work with data science but we also do a lot of readings which is where i incorporate hypothesis um
00:02:19
i'm teaching a smaller masters of library science class where i'm also using hypothesis i now use hypothesis in all my classes because i feel like it's the best way of facilitating discussions
00:02:32
about readings that i have ever found but i've used it in my other classes uh that i teach as well including information ethics and and policy um and i guess a little bit about my teaching philosophy at least when it
00:02:45
comes to data science um the the main book that we read in the the data science class is called data feminism and so there's this commitment to engaging with ethical questions and
00:02:59
questions about justice and not only to have it be strictly about data science so doing those readings and having that kind of like um you know engaged discussion
00:03:11
with the students and between the students is a big part of my philosophy i would say uh let's hear from you next scott hi uh thanks also for having me on here
00:03:25
i teach a variety of history courses um i'm trained as a french intellectual historian and so at least from where i come from in my teaching i have a big commitment to
00:03:37
analyzing dissecting understanding texts and that was one of the big initial draws for hypothesis for me especially at the beginning of the pandemic to get students annotating working through texts uh from home socially
00:03:51
distanced um but one of the main sorts of courses i teach here at a m corpus christi is a big learning community history course so history course paired with writing studies and then seminar
00:04:04
um and in my history sections i have up to 175 students depending on the semester and so one strategy i found really helpful for that really large type of class setting
00:04:17
is to have all the students do their reading through hypothesis beforehand and so they before they get in the room they've already had discussions with each other marked up the text and then when we get into class we can then break
00:04:30
things up in the different interactive activities sometimes using hypothesis in the classroom and then sometimes doing other things kevin hi uh i'm kevin uh i uh i teach in the
00:04:47
german department uh so some and i've kind of become like a specialist for their ge courses uh and kind of increasing enrollment moving those onto distance learning sort of styles
00:05:00
uh and uh and so one of the main questions there for me was how do you get someone who is taking the course not to feel like they're kind of alone at their kitchen table how do you like connect them with others
00:05:14
and so been using quite a few different strategies and technologies to do that and when uh hypothesis then became sort of at least it was sort of like an experiment i think that last semester
00:05:27
uh is offered and so i wanted to try that out and it looks it looks like it's done a really good job so i use it in my fairy tales course we have about 300 people in that and i break those into groups
00:05:41
with canvas it makes it pretty easy um and uh and yeah so they're able to not only like kind of have discussion about the texts but also
00:05:54
they're able to kind of develop their their thesis or like take like use notes from these annotations to develop sort of their papers that kind of come then
00:06:06
after after sort of like five weeks each five-week session or five weeks of section um but yeah uh i think that's that that's sort of like just in general uh what what i do
00:06:19
that's great kevin i'm gonna keep it with you and ask each of you guys to tell us a little bit more so i the reason you were chosen to speak today uh was partially by me combing through the data of our of a current cohort of folks
00:06:33
using hypothesis and really looking at course size and what were the largest courses using hypothesis and uh and being the most productive in that regard so large courses with lots of
00:06:45
annotations essentially so what i'd like to do is here you gesture towards this kevin tell us a little bit about and you know melanie you complicated by saying you're teaching different courses hypothesis so that you know seminar style course
00:06:57
didn't hit my radar but you know it's there um tell me about the course that you're using hypothesis with the topic um the size i think we got that from you kevin um but then also a little bit about how you're you know integrating
00:07:09
hypothesis specifically what you're asking students to do so maybe if you pick it up with that last part and then melanie and scott we can hear a little background on the course as well yeah i wanted i wanted students to sort
00:07:21
of like you know have it replace not entirely replace discussion but add a second sort of aspect a second sort of area where they could have that kind of engagement with each other
00:07:32
and reading especially if it's online can be like another place where they feel isolated so having social annotation is really a great way so they can see like and engage and get different perspectives
00:07:45
connect with each others and even what each with each other and even when it was uh in person i had the sense in like large lecture halls that the students were only getting the perspectives of those people who were like next to them if i like asked them
00:07:59
to do something in class and then readings like completely not so i think even like if this were in person i would still continue with the social annotations for the readings and so what
00:08:10
i've done uh is uh i made sure because it's a fairy tales course i thought that that would be sort of the easiest way place to implement it because most of the texts that we use are out of uh
00:08:22
out of copyright so i could pretty much take translations update those translations make sway presentations out of those so it also is a little bit more presentable and broken up
00:08:34
for their reading and then uh going into canvas i would create use the tool to create create sort of the the assignment and
00:08:47
then divide create discussion groups or reading groups probably about eight to nine people per group uh and and then uh that would just divide those up
00:09:00
the very the very first time i went through and kind of provided sort of a model for like what the expectations were for the annotation and provided sort of like an example uh and then did that for all
00:09:12
the 37 i think 37 38 groups that there were there um so that's a lot there's a lot to kind of manage like all those groups so i did that the first time uh it would be nice if there's a way to kind of like maybe
00:09:24
there is and i haven't like found it to to uh provide one example that goes to all the groups that i have in the in those you know so that would just save time and maybe i would do that then for each reading kind of provide sort of
00:09:37
like an example or question or direction uh and so i then considering like the massive amount that would be required to grade something like that a massive amount of time i would uh i set
00:09:50
them into like five week blocks and that's sort of like just how i break up the semester so then in a distance learning course it can get kind of tedious especially in the spring where uh people start getting like sort of uh exhausted around week
00:10:03
to break those up where we sort of like renewed sort of section that we're doing each five weeks uh so four weeks they have readings all the readings are socially annotated and then the fifth week they can catch up on
00:10:17
any of those readings so if they missed some of them they can have like a week where they can go back and like fill in the gaps and that's also the week where they where i do the grading and to grade that i will take from each
00:10:29
week just a sample like a random text usually it's the text that i think is the most difficult you know that maybe like that they need or the most important one and then i'll see like how they've how they've annotated on that
00:10:42
the requirements for me are that they have at least three sentences questions they can be questions or responses but they should be three sentences and they should be a substantial content not just like you
00:10:54
know like hey this was great uh what color was the hair of that character you know things that like really get get more to it and so that reduces the amount of like time i spend in in actually reviewing what they're posting
00:11:06
and so i get sort of a sense for their grade and then i put that in for the and i do that so every five weeks so i have like sort of like a little break in uh in the other other areas of where my
00:11:19
attention would be but i think that's sort of like is a very general sort of outline of how i how i use it um and it's been encouraging to see like their engagement and then when people are kind of off i
00:11:31
will like just say hey if you go back and redo this they get the practice of it and then they know like what they what's expected going forward that's great kevin um i love the point about
00:11:44
reading can be isolating i think anybody i've certainly felt that at times and fortunately stuck with it but i worry sometimes that that's the time when we lose some students when a particularly dense or difficult reading is in front of them and they
00:11:56
don't have community to support them and some kind of interaction to help them through that they may drop off at that point so again just to review um
00:12:08
what the courses you're teaching your largest course which i've won the largest one you use an hypothesis in um the topic the size and a little bit about how you're using the tool and i think you've got all that kevin i'm pretty sure so appreciate it um
00:12:20
but let's go to uh melanie and excellent scott sure so the the big class that i'm using hypothesis in this quarter it's called foundational skills for data science there are 200 students who are in it
00:12:34
and in this class uh i have each week one reading that the students are required to make two annotations on um similarly they're required to make a substantive
00:12:47
annotation and this can be a comment or a question or a reply to another student's comment which is something that i think the students really enjoy so i'm really glad to be able to include
00:12:59
replies to actually get that kind of dialogue going that's one of the big motivations for using hypothesis for me in the past when i had done canvas discussion boards or you know like used
00:13:12
wordpress to have students try to have a discussion in a blog forum students would just like repeat the same points over and over again after a really complex dense or interesting
00:13:23
reading and it's really hard to like encourage them to engage with specific passages and that's able to happen much more organically i feel like in hypothesis um where like you can really just zoom in on particular passages that
00:13:36
you're interested in so so yeah two substantive annotations and i give them like a whole kind of uh buffet of suggestions about what that might mean like you can make a
00:13:48
connection to one of our lectures you can make a connection to another reading you can bring in your personal experience as long as it's done in such and such ways so i try to provide some guidelines for
00:13:59
for what's required um and then i i suppose the way that i use it oh so then for the large lecture courses what has been essential for me is similarly um we have eight different
00:14:12
sections that the students are in they have lab sessions every week so i organize them into those eight sections that have about 25 students um so the students are only annotating
00:14:24
within their section and they can only see the annotations from those other students um i'm kind of curious about what it would even be like to have 200 students annotating one reading i think
00:14:35
that i've just assumed that it would be far too chaotic but i think it could be kind of an interesting exercise in some regards but um well i don't mean if someone else is doing that i'm very curious to hear if you're doing that uh
00:14:48
but yeah just 25 students a piece for me and the main way i've been using it is just to um i basically review it as i'm
00:14:59
preparing for the lecture and i can see like what are the big questions that students have what are the big areas of confusion what are students excited about so it can really help me like have them lead the discussion or like
00:15:13
know what's going to be kind of a vibrant discussion in smaller classes i'm also able to like note down okay a student made a comment about this or i'll remember that a student made a comment about this and i
00:15:26
can like you know reference them by name if the discussion is kind of flagging and be like you know i remember that you you know had something to say about this can you elaborate on on this point that you made
00:15:37
in a larger lecture course i think that's a little bit more challenging but i can still kind of sometimes remember specific things that i know students were talking about and i can say you know a lot of you were saying and i like
00:15:50
doing that just being able to say like i saw a lot of questions about like this and it is like one way of like acknowledging like i'm i'm invested in your conversation too um that does lead to one
00:16:04
ongoing question that i have about the way i'm using hypothesis which is that like i have wondered to what extent i should try to be replying to their like actually be textually part of the conversation in
00:16:16
the margins like in a large lecture course again that's sort of impossible for me to do but i've thought about should i have my tas for each section kind of jumping in more and say and like really being
00:16:28
active so anyway that's an ongoing question and then in terms of grading i have the tas grade the annotations each week based on that kind of substantive um like
00:16:41
annotation rubric and with canvas and speedgrader it's pretty straightforward um and i think it goes pretty pretty quickly for them um so yeah i think those are the that's
00:16:53
like the main way i'm using it in the data science course that's great melanie i actually had a couple a follow-up question to follow point before we get to here to tell us a little more about how you use it scott um when you said should i
00:17:04
be part of the conversation basically um that was one of your ongoing questions did you mean that sort of pedagogically like should i let this conversation sit and see how they're interacting and not interfere um or is it good for me to be present like
00:17:17
just from a pe was that more of a pedagogical question like how much should the teacher be part of this discussion yeah i think it's a pedagogical question and that's big because sometimes like i do think it's great that they
00:17:29
because at this point i don't often actually reply to what they're saying in the margins i mostly just do it in the classroom or in discussion um and i do think it's nice to like let
00:17:42
them have their own discussion with each other so that i'm not like you know um yeah sort of disrupting that like camaraderie that they're building together but sometimes
00:17:55
um i wanna like affirm or acknowledge that someone's made a really good point or sometimes i see some like a student saying something slightly problematic that i
00:18:07
kind of want to like clarify but then i don't i don't want that to be the one time that i'm jumping into the conversation and make it feel like this student is really being called out like in particular um so
00:18:19
yeah i guess it's a kind of array of things right and and now i just wanted to go back to one thing kevin said i mean it takes all kinds it takes all kinds kind of situation right different texts different pedagogical moments where the teacher
00:18:31
should be present or should be interactive and one where it's nice to step away i think it does all situations but kevin was mentioning maybe pre-populating some texts with comments um you know signposts or
00:18:44
something like that or a prompt that uh that would help guide students or you know elicit a response from students and so we see that as well we could get into those different approaches and i did by the way kevin just want to register the
00:18:57
feature request embedded in there which is if i've got multiple groups and i want to post such a signpost or question i have to do it end times right now with hypothesis and be nice to ship
00:19:09
my annotations to all those groups so that was registered just want to make sure you got that um but there was one other thing you said uh melanie that i wanted to follow up on
00:19:21
[Music] and that was and forgive me for sort of testing a market testing a kind of slogan for you but one of the things i've been thinking about with large courses in hypothesis and both so
00:19:33
far as i'm hearing it you guys are using in this way is does the hypothesis canvas groups or blackboard groups integration um enable those larger courses in some ways to feel more like a small seminar
00:19:46
in the sense that you can sort of as you described perfectly melanie like with a smaller group you can call people by name and really you know bring them out and honor their their points of view and and elicit more you know depth from their from their ideas and obviously the
00:19:59
more and more people that are in the room um the much harder it gets to do that i mean do you feel in some way that this tool was making that larger course a little bit more intimate in that sense i don't mean to totally prompt you too
00:20:12
much to say yes to my marketing spoken but uh let's say one more thing about that and then we'll turn to scott yeah definitely i think like intimate is a word that was like in my mind before this conversation and again like
00:20:26
especially in a data science course when we have a lot of technical material to cover but we also really want to like address these more conceptual theoretical questions ethical questions
00:20:39
and like give that you know uh it's due i think that this is one way that we've been able to achieve that to some extent um i do think like another way
00:20:51
i don't know i i've just been thinking about how i should probably be incorporating my tas more into my thinking about this and like potentially have them engaging with the
00:21:02
smaller sections in the lab sessions again we have a lot of technical material to cover so that's kind of specific to like my class and how it's a little bit challenging but um yeah i would say intimate for sure
00:21:15
yeah and i guess another aspect of that is knowing where the group is at or knowing the different places the group said it's much easier with a smaller class you're like okay we're all confused about this concept let's zero in when you have you know 300 students it's hard to know
00:21:27
where are people struggling and maybe that becomes a little bit more visible in this with this tool all right scott uh we're wanna know a little more about your course the size and uh as melanie and kevin have done a little bit
00:21:39
about how you're using hypothesis in that course yeah so my main course uh this semester the big one it has about 120 students and it's modern us history so from reconstruction to the present
00:21:52
and it's framed as a history of the present course so explicitly ditching a textbook narrative and focusing on big themes like structural racism rule the united states and the world identity inclusion belonging
00:22:05
immigration and then also changes in economic thinking in the united states so because of that framework each week they have very specific
00:22:17
readings from different experts that i'm able to pull through the university's institutional databases ebooks journal articles that sort of thing and with hypothesis i get them to engage
00:22:30
with those texts ahead of time before the class begins in all the ways that kevin and melanie have suggested substantive annotations although i've become a little bit more lenient on what counts
00:22:43
as substantive because i want to get students to think of that the text is sort of hypertext so i have some students that absolutely love picking out old people historical
00:22:55
figures and then finding their pictures or finding videos of them and i'm beginning to count those more and more as substantive in different ways a couple times i have had to email those students and say you've done
00:23:07
this three weeks in a row maybe try to switch it up a little bit but i absolutely enjoy that and especially when i get students to think critically enough where they can generate their own meme on the content i think that's
00:23:19
fascinating in part because it gets me to engage with what the current memes are and forces me to think differently and get inside my students heads but also because it shows them processing and
00:23:31
trying to interpret the information in creative ways um i unlike melanie and kevin actually still this semester have stuck with the large group format and so all 120
00:23:43
students are in the same room discussing with each other uh and when you at the end of the annotations that week when you look at the text it can look
00:23:55
like a mess um but i explicitly walk students through how to hide annotations use the little eyeball feature if that's like too intimidating or too confusing how to keep annotations private for
00:24:07
themselves in case they want them for their notes but then because there are so many different seminar sections that have their own community in the learning community i want to use history as a way of
00:24:20
bridging those sections together and so to think of them cross-section cross-study group as a as a big point of discussion that said i think in coming semesters i
00:24:33
will probably play with the small group feature just to see how it works to compare it but as of right now up to this point i have sort of been happy in the chaos and i think the
00:24:44
students are happy to see what people in other sections are thinking and talking about with the text um happy in the chaos i love that yeah but it is i'm really glad you
00:24:58
brought this up scott because you know i did notice this in the data right and that's part of why i was really glad that you responded is that melanie and kevin are leveraging our small group functionality in canvas which also exists in blackboard so they can break
00:25:10
up these larger courses both of them into you know eight or nine groups for those 300 200 person courses and then they really do end up roughly the size of like a seminar but you're you're doing what melanie was wondering about like these texts i've
00:25:22
got 120 students um you're happy in the chaos and i think you point out one of the really great reasons uh melanie if you were wondering why sometimes is that um you know connectivity across section
00:25:35
right when you have all those i mean that's it can get messy and i think it's so interesting that you teach people to navigate the mess and the chaos scott but there's opportunities for connections um and more generative more
00:25:47
generation of ideas when the more people are there as long as you can can navigate it um i think that's a super interesting contrast here but i'll be interested to see what it's like when you uh try the blackboard groups
00:25:59
functionality which we also have and of course you could go back and forth between having well this text we're going to do it all together in this text we're going to do it in groups and in fact you could do some texts both ways right you could say like
00:26:12
let's all dive into this as a course and then maybe break up into sections to read it differently or read it again or show what we got from the chaos um
00:26:24
scott in the chaos though are you happy grading the chaos are you not grading the chaos no i am grading the chaos in part because i like using uh hypothesis in that diagnostic way
00:26:37
that melanie discussed so seeing what questions students have before we get into the classroom that week um to sort of fine-tune what we're going to discuss and work on together and so i really want to go through all
00:26:51
of those annotations myself i think it's like any form of braiding it can be rewarding as well as exhausting um and i think i'm just uh well trained and getting through the exhaustion um
00:27:04
but i do think that um there are ways that i can improve getting through both the grading as well as um sorting through everything in those diagnostic ways this semester i tried to get my students to use a
00:27:18
hashtag so every time they wanted me to explicitly respond they had a pressing question i wanted them to either hashtag professor or professor reply it didn't really work yet so i think i need to
00:27:31
be more mindful about getting them to think about that and play around with it um but yeah i i partly want to be their grading so that i can see everything explicitly
00:27:43
it's it's labor on their part and you want to honor that um really interesting point about the hashtag and i think melanie if you if you do venture out into the full group um you know using a tag um can have a
00:27:56
number of different benefits right you're talking about um adding questions so that you could search for questions and make sure that any questions that come up are answered by you but of course on any reading there might be sort of
00:28:08
different thematic or theoretical approaches that you might want students trying to foreground and they could use you know this group is in 120 students or 200 students is going to do the feminist approach and this this group is going to
00:28:20
do the marxist approach or whatever and you could track that by those um by tags uh even in a large group um well i want to open it up for questions before our heart stop at that um quarter
00:28:32
of um so i just want to give each of you a chance to um say one you know last sort of share of the earth thinking about hypothesis and and you're teaching there's something
00:28:45
that hasn't come up in this conversation that you'd like to share or um you know request of hypothesis since you have our ear and we can be held to it publicly that you've made a feature request like kevin did um you know last thoughts
00:28:56
before we open it up to the to the to the large audience that we have here and some questions that are already in the chat and kevin let's start with you just any not final thoughts final thoughts kind of like some things
00:29:08
that jogged my memory too i thought uh really i want to just reiterate also something that melanie had mentioned is that you get like sort of you can take sort of like the temperature of the course through like looking through the
00:29:19
annotations and so we do a live session mostly it's asynchronous but then there's a live session every week at the end of the week and so using the annotations you can really see like what's what could lead the discussion what
00:29:32
could be some really good aspects to talk about what's being maybe misunderstood or what can generate more more dialogue and discussion so yeah i just wanted to like yeah yeah i think that's also a very good way of
00:29:45
using uh the annotations and what they can offer i did just want to clarify one thing is it correct to say kevin you're fully online with what you're teaching right yeah so the two courses i teach i teach
00:29:59
a holocaust and lit and film course that's also dl and then this is a second and so uh trying to combine sort of like the opportunity for it to have like this that live sort of
00:30:11
synchronous discussion but also have most of it be asynchronous um uh that's that's the way that i'm teaching at the moment and scott and melanie your courses do
00:30:22
have a face-to-face aspect are you also online yeah we're in person this semester in person um i did i get to get ill at one point so we had to switch online and hypothesis was great
00:30:36
for that so scott since you have the mic uh final not finalish thoughts before we open it up to the to the audience for questions any reactions to what your colleagues here shared or any joggings as kevin
00:30:49
mentioned um i think it's great one that three different different types of courses at different institutions with different students and
00:31:00
formats are all using it in very similar ways i think it speaks to the flexibility and adaptability of the tool um at this point uh and i don't want to sound um like i'm padding uh the team's egos too
00:31:16
much uh but all of these sort of things that i really wish hypothesis could do when it first emerged a couple years ago i think the team has actually been working on uh with the one one big request being tagging video and
00:31:29
i know that's sort of the the next big step but also uh as someone who knows nothing about coding i can only imagine how difficult it is to actually get working thanks melanie
00:31:44
yeah sort of building on that point actually i feel like my final comments are kind of in the vein of uh like sort of in the vein of a feature request but uh one thing that i thought so in
00:31:56
the data science class we're mostly just reading uh chapters from an online a book that has been published online it's like pdfs or it's the chapter online but in some of my other classes
00:32:10
we've been able to have students annotate youtube videos by having the transcripts next to the youtube video through the docdrop.org link and we've also had some podcast
00:32:23
episodes that have transcripts and that's been really fun to do so i've started to get excited about maybe in the data science course as well incorporating other kinds of media um for
00:32:34
students to be able to annotate and i think another thing i was thinking about is annotating images which i think has been another feature request and i've thought about like you know it'd be great to have a data visualization that the entire class
00:32:46
could annotate specific parts of it and ask questions so um i guess yeah one thing for me is like continuing to think about how i can get creative with what how we can use this tool
00:33:00
cool yeah and i think there's some great ideas here even though you are using it in similar ways and i did just want to shout out scott about that idea of using images and memes and things in annotations um i'd love to do for any a
00:33:12
session uh sometime i don't know how we choose the people for this but maybe scott could come in and speak to his you know each one of you said something about substantive right i want a substantive response and i bet if we gathered your definition of that they'd all be a
00:33:25
little different uh scott was sort of suggesting that he has a maybe a more expansive one like it could be a an image and i i totally agree with you and i also agree that like if you keep just putting the image of the author like i want a little bit more at some point but
00:33:37
it's not a bad start so maybe an episode on what is a substantive annotation um and certainly would like to call your definitions uh here but uh frannie any questions that have come up in the chat that we could foreground
00:33:49
here uh yeah and some of them have been answered thank you to the panelists who already answered a couple of the questions but um um ying fan um wants to know what
00:34:01
prompts are you using for the data science course for annotation yeah i saw that question in the chat and i really appreciate it because i'm not to be honest i'm not really using
00:34:14
prompts at this point i've liked the suggestion about being able to have like a prompt populated in each reading so yeah in previous courses sometimes i
00:34:28
have had quite specific questions that i wanted students to answer but the way that i've been using it so far has just been like letting students kind of lead the discussion and find what they're interested in and
00:34:39
um i i basically just discovered that i didn't need to be providing prompts because they are able to like really latch on to what what they are interested in but i do think that it could be
00:34:53
it could be um useful to to bring back in to like have a more guided discussion potentially but um no no real prompts at this point
00:35:05
i think a lot of it is in that how you define substantive you know like i want you to annotate so what does that look like it's not necessarily a specific scavenger hunt it's kind of a methodology right i want you thinking writing reacting to the reading in these
00:35:18
types of ways rather than search for a specific thing or answer a specific question yeah that's well put uh and then um manny fernandez um it's not so much a
00:35:34
question i don't think it's just a comment but um manny you can let me know if i'm reading that wrong but um using a tag group a b and c and seeing which group tagged the document the most
00:35:47
participated the most would be kind of fun for freshman class within the guidelines of course um i don't know if you want to roll with that or not
00:36:02
you're all you all are here because of the voluminous annotation of your courses so uh quantity did matter for your attendance here but um i'm not you know do you guys put a number on the annotations when you
00:36:15
somebody said they say three annotations right do you guys put a number on how many and do you ever have groups compete or does it become competitive uh i think what's kind of interesting is when so i have like a minimum of there's
00:36:30
quite a few readings they're fairy tales so there's we cover quite a few of them in a week and then there's one scholarly article they also have um but what's interesting is like there's a minimum of one per reading and
00:36:43
it should be like three sentences but some people go way beyond that like they they really use it as a note-taking function and then also respond so that you know in i mean it's
00:36:56
about the third of the class that goes beyond um and uh yeah i just find that they they are just like very much more engaged in in part because of the annotating
00:37:07
feature yeah i require students to make two annotations but i love when they go beyond that and i don't think it's competitive i wouldn't describe it that way it uh to me it seems more like uh
00:37:21
like organic and communal that students just want to say oftentimes it'll be smaller things since they're not required but like lol haha this makes me think of something and it's it's really like feels more like an actual conversation
00:37:34
so yeah two required but i love when they go beyond i love that melon it reminds me something you said earlier right the that i don't want to take put words in your mouth but sort of basically that this is a little more organic than the
00:37:46
discussion forum in terms of generating conversation i think that's true because of the textual referent that everybody's sort of grounded in but also just in the way that people are responding to each other um and uh you said something about there's something about discussion
00:37:58
forums that sort of suggests everybody repeats the same thing and maybe just the way that conversation you know literally is sort of tracking from up from a particular piece of text and
00:38:11
then in threaded conversations just you can't just repeat like there's it's going in a direction and you have to follow that direction and continue it or take it in a new direction but you can't just say the same thing which by the way would happen if
00:38:24
somebody in the chat said like can you have everybody hide their annotations first and then reveal them later it'd be an interesting thing and of course you know then you know kevin wouldn't be able to just you know
00:38:35
repeat or crib off of what scott said but of course what you'd end up having is 15 people all being like this is what's happening here instead of one person saying this is what's happening here and this person's saying they disagree and the other person's saying i agree with
00:38:48
person one and it turned into an actual discussion of the meaning um scott i want to give you a chance to respond i'm not sure where this question went in terms of volume and rubrics or if you have a what direction to take it and
00:39:01
i say students need two to three uh annotations and then i give them uh bullet point suggestions um asking a specific sort of question um showing their analysis responding to
00:39:14
someone else's question that sort of thing um but i think if i were if i were to ask students with everybody annotating in that big class uh to do more than two
00:39:26
or three then i think it might be become unmanageable for me uh and even more chaosy yeah and like the other um people on this call i there are always students who who end up
00:39:38
with like 20 or 30 annotations um which is great uh but if i i think if i made it a competition in that large format i think i would probably drown in the deluge of comments there's a good question just to end up
00:39:52
clear george asks you know how do you deal with the repetition right of people saying the same thing are you on the lookout for that or is it organically being avoided um or do you have to intervene good yeah i think what's kind of interesting
00:40:04
is like they often will highlight parts of the text and then comment next to it so uh they're not really unless you're responding to that highlight um they're not really repeating sort of
00:40:17
the same sort of comment because it's really it's associated with that part of the text um so i i haven't like encountered that um and that's kind of amazing that i haven't encountered that and it's such a
00:40:29
large group and i think it's because it's tied to specific uh you know sentences in the text with the this real estate is taken and i i need to kind of build on that real estate or
00:40:41
else claim some new real estate um i know somebody had a hard stop so i'm just going to cut us off there and let frank uh clock us out i could keep going this is a really enjoyable talking to y'all yeah it's 9 45 probably going toward 9
00:40:54
46 any second now so um i just want to thank everyone here um for joining us today this was such a good discussion always just goes by so quickly so thank you melanie
00:41:07
scott and kevin and thank you to jeremy dean such a good moderator and aaron holding down the chat and nate as well and becky was in the chat too
00:41:19
calling so um there will be a recording of this hopefully that'll be available next week and um everyone who registered for this will get uh an email
00:41:32
with the recording link so um thank you very much for coming to liquid margins today
End of transcript