 Hello everyone and welcome to Liquid Margin's Community in Composition, Annotation and English Education. Thank you all for being here. Today's guests are Laura Roche, PhD candidate in English, rhetoric at Indiana University. Alex Penn, visiting lecturer at Indiana University. Ramey Collier, assistant professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado Denver. I'm also proud to say that Ramey is our 2021 hypothesis scholar in residence. I've got a guest moderator today, Justin Hodgson, associate professor of digital rhetoric in the English department at Indiana University. And with that, thank you for listening to this introduction and housekeeping and now I'm going to turn it over to Justin. I'm going to start by taking a moment to sort of introduce you to how we got to where we are. And then maybe sort of situate some points in relationship to the connections between social annotation and writing studies more formally. But this, this project, which is now a nine member research team, right looking at, I don't know it grows every day I feel like I'm picking up people like I'm collecting cats or something. You know, we, we started in the spring redesigning our online first year composition course, which is, you know, a standard composition course like any other place but we have a multitude of options within that frame but we wanted to expand our offerings for online. And this was of course before the pandemic disrupted everything we had a plan, we were going to make some quick changes and as part of those initial conversations we thought, we would like to improve the level of engagement students have with some of the text that we require them to read that they then use to think through some of the key ideas and concepts from the course. And so we were making progress and Alex and Laura were on on the project team redesigning our online class so they both have extensive experience teaching online and teaching our W 131 course. And then we decided, you know, after the pandemic hit that we would take our little boutique offering and scale it up for the entirety of our freshman composition course which is roughly 60 sections of first year composition per semester, covering about 1,250 students. And so it became very evident right away that we needed to make some some changes to accommodate not only the different kinds of instructors who would be teaching this course. But people who've never taught online but very specifically instructors who've never taught it all before either. So many of them are first time teachers and the first time space and the first time online. And what remained, I think consistent for us across was the potential value we saw in hypothesis for helping recreate some of the community and engagement that occurs in our online space. And so this is literally one of those moments in life where the cart was actually before the horse, because as we built this thing. And they had dawned on us that we're going to have this huge data set now, all the students are participating in online through our canvas course. They're doing all their annotations and hypothesis and and they turn all their assignments in through these two digital repositories for the most part. So we would have access to everything they've written for the class that's greatable and part of their development, as well as all their annotations and that's when we reached out formally to working with Jeremy Dean and hypothesis and he in turn connected us with Jeremy to figure out well what what could a research project look like and what would it look like and how could we actually discern things of value from this process or product. But the reality is we just have way too much information. And so like we should do something with it. Okay, we should figure out how to make something out of this. And so we began this journey of trying to figure out what that looks like. And the more I've got everyone on the board we're all on the same page. I haven't missed these steps yet. And so then we began the process of going through IRB. And I have battle wounds if you'd like to you know they wear them deeply trauma through IRB. It's an ongoing fund service for those you've done IRB before. And, but we we got approved for our study got approved our protocols are in place and starting as of yesterday I think officially. So we are at the first stages of actually making sense of what we have and what hypothesis is doing but we have a lot of hypotheses, no pun intended about what the study might reveal to us and that includes not only thinking about social interaction as a writing activity, but as well as like the process of how those activities and impact student writing, how they lead to things like community development how instructors are teaching it, how that process relates to the engagement, whether or not they bring it up in a synchronous class. And so that's the larger frame as a quick, maybe a quick overview Alex you want to break down a little bit like how is our course work in terms of the structure so the people get a sense of, you know, the synchronous asynchronous kind of dynamic. So the current model we have is a mix of synchronous and asynchronous fully online instruction. So we ended up with our model because we had courses converted a little bit at the last minute in the fall, they were originally taught three days a week so we ended up with a model where that first day a week was replaced with asynchronous instruction and activities, and then the other two days were replaced with synchronous instruction via zoom. And so a place that a lot of the hypothesis stuff is happening, in fact, all of the built in assignments is in that a synchronous Monday class where normally students might in the regular classroom, read an essay over the weekend to come in and discuss it. What they do instead is read the essay over the weekend, make some annotations as they're reading, and then before coming to the next class, respond to their peers. So that is sort of both replacing the discussion that would normally happen synchronously but then also preparing students to have a little bit of synchronous discussion but to start in a more advanced way when they come to that synchronous zoom class. Does that sort of help for I am muted. Yeah, that's perfect I just I think it's important to understand the context within which we're using the tool. I think most folks who who know anything about social annotation will tell you it makes sense that it would connect to a class that involves reading text and writing I mean I don't think that's a stretch. I think about how it operates in the online space for us it's really critical to the experience it provides more so I think, at least as we approach it as designers, it was about the experience more so than just, how does it help annotate and engage the content. So it's a really fun dynamic to think about we were replacing an in class discussion component. Five times a semester with a social annotation activity that will lead into an in class conversation as a way of augmenting that experience and so that's sort of, I just want to make sure that listeners or viewers in the future would understand. It's not like a regular class for us it's this unique hybrid that was supposed to be innovative and fun and it was but then it became this one size fits all box for every instructor and W 131. And so that's sort of how we how we got there. And then of course we brought on Rami, and he complicated everything for us. But you know I mean you want to give some background to sort of what you see going on with our study like, and how it fits a little bit with some of the larger conversations. Yeah, you know I will and I just want to know first of all, how long I know to thanks Justin to you, Laura Alex just the whole team at IU because you know, in regards to the really dynamic that's happening at Indian University right now, and the work that's just in describing in the Department of English with social annotation this is a really large scale kind of fundamental shift and how students are interacting with texts, interacting with each other and interacting with their curriculum. And to do so at the kind of scale that that Justin and Alex and Laura will describe, and to do so really with a lot of intentional pedagogy instructional planning approaches to assessment. This is really unique and what has made me so excited about this work and I think what's really excited hypothesis as an organization is that across the board. So many schools K 12 and higher editor adopting social annotation because it's such an effective kind of replacement for the dreaded threaded discussion forum. There's a lot of excitement around really using social annotation to support the kinds of learning practices that we know social annotation encourages it encourages meaning making encourages textual analysis encourages peer to peer collaboration. And it's a really useful way of setting up future writing activities such as composing essays and thinking analytically. And so again there's just a lot of enthusiasm around social annotation right now, and the, again the real intentional approach that Justin and Alex and Laura the whole team at IU the whole team of the department which has taken to make this a kind of department commitment to really support a whole host of instructors again Justin mentioned. And we're talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of sections across multiple classes. Our work will, you know, ultimately touch not only thousands and thousands of students but potentially hundreds of faculty instructors. And this is a really consequential endeavor that we're embarking upon here. And so yes, there are a lot of questions to ask a lot of interesting research that we can do but I just really want to kind of start by pointing out just pointing out that this is really a unique kind of educational situation that that has kind of emerged in Bloomington and also online and we're just so excited about that. So just again, thanks there for that for that. We had a project in mind and it keeps growing every time we meet just you know. So we started out with W 131 is our focus and that's probably the primary area of our conversation today but for folks who might want to know we, we have expanded our data collection and our inquiry practices to include a series of literature courses introduction to fiction introduction to poetry introduction to drama, I believe. We have a couple other what we call L 200 classes that are related to the critical reading and writing. And then we have another section of classes called the W 170s which are topic specific courses that actually count for W 131 credit. And so we are including them. I think it's also important to recognize that IU, we have what are called two foundations courses two courses that are required by every student, no matter what your major and discipline and W 131 is one of those two foundations courses so it is required by everybody. And I think if, as this works, and it may end up causing us to also think about how social annotation could be pushed backwards towards our ACP credit and other transfer possibilities as students bring credits into the university to count for this experience but that's sort of the bigger bigger frame. You know, Laura, you want to take a minute to talk about like how this works in practice in terms of what is what is our actual hypothesis activities look like, could you break that down for folks. Yeah, so students in 131 at least will read five different texts throughout the semester, and they are responsible for using hypothesis to annotate those texts. So a lot of the instructors will prompt the students with a few questions to consider as they're reading the text some even plant questions in the text for students to come across as they're reading, but for the most part it's pretty student it there the instructors do, for the most part very little when it comes to actually guiding the student discussion it's very much student run and I think Alex and Justin and even rainy can speak to the advantages of that from a pedagogical and just like emotional perspective. But the, it's a pretty low stakes assignment as far as we've designed it I think it's worth maybe like five points. But it does hold the students accountable for doing the work because there's this sense of performativity involved where they have to converse with their, their fellow peers they know that people are going to be reading what they've written along. Beyond just the instructor looking at that and so it promotes more thoughtful I think engagement with the text and conversation with the students as a whole. Perfect. Let me within within our, again the two course that we have kind of like two trees if you want to think about that way we have the 131 side where instructors do their own thing and then there's all these other courses that have their own variation as well. In W 131, our actions with hypothesis require students to do three additive annotations and two responsive annotations. In each one of those additive components those initial sort of engagements with the text are framed around either prompt that we've provided as a generic prompt or the instructors customize. The second one's around a discussion question that the instructors are supposed to add themselves based on their theme and the readings they've chosen. And then the third one I think is a make it ask a question of the text. And so it's real formulaic and it's meant to be a starting point from which instructors work, not meant to control what they do it gives them some grounding to begin with and we did this all last semester. My hope and expectation is this semester when we're gathering data for the first time that those who had the experience last semester now feel more comfortable taking some liberties with reshaping those questions or reshaping those prompts to fit maybe a little more systematic with what they do pedagogically but also with their content and delivery. So that's sort of like the nuts and bolts of it all right from a compositional standpoint are our conversation begins really with how can we improve student writing right and at the core we want to help students not only to develop as writers but to develop, you know, critical thinking analytical skills and practices and our entire W 131 course as a core element of IU is built around analysis for the most part, learn students learning to critically read a text and to apply those ideas elsewhere. So one thing that's remain true in my years here at IU is that the better students understand those critical texts they choose that are chosen for them, the better they apply the ideas there's no, I mean there's no substitute for clarity of thought when it comes to being a solid and excellent writer, and you know that that approach to helping them understand the text is sort of where everything began for us because so much of their success in the class is dependent at least in part on how well they're able to read and understand and then leverage the ideas from those perspectives so we wanted to give them an extended space to think about engagement that doesn't just require the instructor to drive that process. And I think so far, given that we had a bit of a was it was it a workshop professional development activity yesterday, and we had about eight or nine instructors show up some of which have used it some which hadn't and given the conversations I think so far the preliminary presentations are it's working quite well right, at least from those who showed up but it's it's it's interesting to think about, you know the experience students are having and how that activity in social annotation is working for them in class or in this case from the instructor's perspective, what are they noticing what are they not and so I thought maybe we could go to go back to Alex a little bit here to talk about her experiences because of us. Alex is the only one that's actually taught this course with this tool. I taught the online course and help design it but we're not actually teaching it last semester so Alex is the only one of us here with actual experience on the ground for for this activity. Is that Rami doesn't teach for us right so no matter how much I keep asking him to he doesn't just sign up. You know, you know, so, Alex, could you walk through a little bit like you know what has been your experience how did you approach it, maybe help folks get a sense of you know the ins and outs of your encounter so far. It's helpful to give a little background. I've been teaching online for a few years now in a slightly different version of this course that did not use hypothesis, and so, you know, I could see that students maybe didn't have as much engagement with the text as they would in a traditional classroom where maybe we'd hand them paper texts or require them to print paper texts or give them paper texts or something like that. You could also see that even though we have these synchronous classes where we met face to face and where I was able to form these personal connections with students. There was also this problem where students weren't really connecting as much with each other as they would in a traditional classroom and I was really struggling with ways to facilitate that. So to enter hypothesis this past semester hypothesis really allowed me to do two different things more more I'm sure but but two of the things it allowed me to do that I really appreciated war. On the one hand, got my students much more engaged with the texts and at a nitty gritty close to reading level so that when they went back to write their essays they could really incorporate details from the texts and and they just have much better engagement with the texts in class discussions and in their writing. And then on the flip side hypothesis created this space for my students to be with each other and hear each other's ideas and respond to each other's ideas where I was largely absent so I didn't do a lot of responding to or annotations I would grade them there's a very easy way to grade them in canvas but then that like did not show up of course so what they were seeing on the text was each other's ideas each other's comments each other's questions are very favorite my very favorite prompt that we had for them was ask a question of the text and very quickly I think students realize that really they should be asking questions to each other about the text and so I have one beautiful little example here if I can find it. We were reading Foucault, an excerpt from from birth of the present on panopticism, and one of my students asked this question that had four other students then respond to it she said, What do you think are some of the psychological effects of thinking that you are always being watched, but never actually knowing if you are. And so a whole bunch of students responded to this in really interesting ways that helped everyone understand the text better. And then in turn use that text to analyze our films, so I would say from for me my experience with hypothesis has been very positive in both practical ways, increasing that contact with the text that we always want, but also increasing the students contact with each other which has been really nice to see. Excellent thanks Alex. Yeah, it's, I mean we've been over this sort of practice and process and in terms of what are the what are the best outcomes what are the best forms of engagement and hopefully as we learn more from, you know, not only our instructors but the way we are analyzing and looking at information from them and from the student perspective we can get a better sense of actually what is working well for them, beyond just how well the tool itself is working and so I think the pedagogical component is absolutely important. We had a question, I think Jen had asked in the chat about seeing an example and in the system so I want to share my screen real quick and just show what it looks like for us in the W 131. Let me see if I can make this happen today. It's a tech event right so this should probably fail miserably the way right that's how it's supposed to work. We'll just share that can I assume we can all see that we got a non okay. Anyways, in our typical. This is actually a course from last semester, so I can show you some things but I can't show actual annotations because it would be a FERPA issue. Identifying students in that way but the basic structure is we have a weekly module set. This is what they do before the semester begins and gives them information and and things of that nature and we have resources built into our canvas modules for instructors on how to actually connect or stitch a text to a hypothesis you know how to use hypothesis hypothesis in the classroom we have some of that training material but for us it really begins sort of week two. We have this thing called Monday peer engagement which Alex mentioned earlier and Laura kind of went over a little bit. And we initially called it collaborative annotation because well we didn't know there was a thing called social annotation we this is what we thought it was a collaborative activity is the way we're thinking about it. So you would the students would see this all the green is what they would see. They would click that activity there and it would open up this act this assignment. And so it's week two gives them the purpose of the assignment, and then it breaks down their specific task, you know three annotations and two responses so each text they engage they have to have at least five sort of creation activities with it, or five engagements. And then the additives have the prompt the question and the asking a question frame that I mentioned earlier. And then the responses are basically respond to two of your peers and so students would come through here they have our little design canvas space, and we had all these fun little images and whatnot to make it a little more visually engaging. And then at the bottom, they would click this button. It's not working right now because it's currently blocked it so I don't accidentally open up hypothesis. But this is a button that would click and link out and that would open up hypothesis for the essay in a new window and the students can annotate it, how they see fit from that point, like any other hypothesis activity. And so you can see here like on this one we have the question this is I think on Cohen's essay on monsters, right. And so the question is why did I assign this essay for a class about monsters is the theme of the class and so that's the frame frame so far in this process Let me see if I can see that. Okay. Time for you. All right, so I'm gonna stop sharing to that. But it's, yeah, I mean it's it's relatively seamless process in canvas for those of you who are canvas users there's two ways of a stitching or creating a hypothesis activity there's one as an assignment, and there's one as like just a module element is an external tool. However, he want to use the speed grader function, which I highly recommend if you get into that process, then you need to actually set it as an assignment so that you can work individually through students annotation So each one of our students are required to do five, and in speed grader I can quickly pull up Sarah Smiths five right and I can just see them and. And for most of us I think our approach was we really thought of this more as a completion activity not a can I grade your intellectual engagement. And the process being it's an opportunity to to not only intervene and highlight things that are successful really great questions and bring them to discussion but also really. I think the phrase is it was course correct right. If a student is sort of drifting really far off from the point or as Alex often says, I asked him to identify the thesis and they almost always say the counter thesis is the thesis. You can insert your own comments at that point, privately in the speed grader with the tool but if you spending time with it at all you're probably familiar with this process as well but so that's our, that's at least one of our examples. I don't know exactly how it looks like in in all the literature classes because they, they have more control over their own design, whereas this is a campus shell a canvas shell blueprint course that we push out to all the instructors in 131. And it has all the design to features in it, but it's a that's the basic basic process so far. If I find if you don't mind jumping and picking up on a point that Alex mentioned a few moments ago, she was talking a little bit about some of the decisions that she's making as an instructor in her class with her students in response to the kinds of annotations and thank you for reading through that thread that was really awesome to kind of hear students thinking through that. I want to mention that given the course context that both again Laura Alex and Justin have also spoken to at this point. One of the interesting things from from my perspective as a researcher, but again also somebody who has taught with hypothesis in many of my classes for many years now. There's actually not a whole lot that's well known and well documented about how to teach with social annotation. Period. There's just not a lot out there, you know, first liquid margins. This webinar series is now filling a really urgent need. Again as social annotation becomes a more popular teaching and learning activity, particularly in higher education. There is a need to begin to kind of capture these anecdotal stories, you know, perspectives from professors kind of instructional moves. It's really important to make these stories more accessible, and to do this kind of like public, you know, sharing of practice as a way to kind of reflect upon effective instructional that said again is actually very little research about how educators actually plan their instruction, teach with assess and then reflect upon the use of social annotation. That literature really doesn't exist again we know on the student side of things that social annotation does a whole lot and we can get into that and that's again related, but distinct. And so what I think is so generous of everyone at at Indiana University, and what is just such an important commitment on behalf of the department and all the instructors has been a willingness to say, This is an opportunity to really also study faculty practice to begin to learn a little bit about some of the examples and dynamics that have come up so for example like again like Alex was sharing how much do instructors kind of step back and let their students kind of own the margins and kind of try and make a meeting on their own. What does that really look like and what does it feel like and how do you kind of plan to create that kind of flexibility. And when do instructors step in to try and tell people that they can't quite identify the right thesis and the right argument and so these are all things that we hope to learn as we not only study what students are you are learning, but also what instructors are doing. Had the mute sorry. The, you know, a rainy you raise a interesting comment I think the most fascinating thing about our workshop development thing yesterday with this the faculty who were teaching with this and I you came specifically from the questions and challenges instructors were having I think, you know it was a nice professional development moment to help guide folks in the use of the tool, and to think about its practices but I know Brian one of our instructors had mentioned, and then a couple others echo this sentiment which is they found that the students would do these really great annotations in the hypothesis activity, and then not want to repeat their information in class, but they felt like they didn't like why would I regurgitate this we already had this conversation in the threads. And so, you know this need to think about what does it facilitate conversation, or is it the beginning part for a larger or more extended conversation or moving in a new way. And so, you know Brian had some really interesting ideas about how he is adapting to that and, and looking for gaps and moving the conversation forward but I would I never like as we started this I never anticipated this, possibly closing discussion right in the classroom discussion, but it does raise those things those questions like you know how do we teach with it what do we do with it how does the, what practices are available that we know that might be best practices. And then how does it work across disciplines so me writing is one sort of frame, but you know I see this having obvious implications in history and sociology and, and any of the courses that require a sort of critical reading as a fundamental component of their course I just, I don't know the I think this question about the teacher thing, the teaching side of it is at the root of what we are after I know Laura that was one of your interests when we first started right. Yeah, in general I'm really interesting really interest I'm really interesting. I'm really interested in writing pedagogy. And so I am always sort of thinking about how do we get students to do this better how and how do we do it better how do we write with more clarity how do we convince students to write with more clarity without losing depth of thought, something that I have heard is an be an issue with students using hypothesis is not that they don't want to repeat what they've said, but that their annotation is significantly more thoughtful than how they write about the text in their essay so talking about, or sort of building on what Justin said about this being the start of the critical thinking process, rather than sort of the climax of it I am really interested and I decided to be a part of this project, because I want to figure out how we can help students understand texts as things we have conversations with one on one like me with the text, and I think hypothesis helps facilitate that because the conversation is larger than just the student and the text at the beginning, so that they can eventually evolve into writing an essay about the text that is foundational that does sort of go back and forth between I thought about this, and then from, I thought about it from this perspective and then I thought about it from that perspective, and sort of continuing the critical thinking process, rather than stifling it. If that makes sense. If that makes perfect sense well at least to me but I'm also a scholar in writing city so this is in me that's a, I mean one of my areas, we're we got about 12 minutes left I think right for any is that correct, we're going to 1245. Yeah, and I'm wondering if we should maybe open it up to yeah that's what I was thinking, if we could go to the q amp a that would be great if folks have questions that we can respond to or maybe help with, or at least tell you how we broke it. I would like to just ask a question because it's really germane to what you were just talking about about the conversation taking place in the annotation space, but then students like already said that, do you think in any way there's a generational influencer, so that this generation is more maybe comfortable speaking in the digital space. It just occurred to me when you were talking about. Yeah, I mean I know that, you know, in writing studies, for example, Lester Fagley did some work in the 80s and 90s about the role of chatting the use of chats and classroom spaces, and how that enabled voices in ways that it didn't, but it wasn't really necessarily generational was more about access to content engagement and actually having a voice in class so the more reserved introverts felt more comfortable as it was his claims right. And I think I initially I would say there might be something to that idea about students and their use of digital technologies, you know the quote unquote myth of the digital native as I like to call it. But at this point I think the pandemic wrecked all of our baseline. So, so if the idea was students were inherently more digital, they are excessively more digital at this point right and. I don't know to what extent that might play a role but that might be something for us to, I mean to look at. If we could find other studies that show maybe generational engagements. That might be a nice way of thinking about this. I'll just pick up quickly here and kind of invert for any question because, you know, for any I see your question is echoing, you know, really deep questions about practice, which is the extent to which educators are comfortable facilitating different kinds of in different kinds of settings and I think that if educators feel comfortable doing so students will kind of rise to that occasion. You know actually another member of our research team who's who's with us today Chris Andrews who's also at IU and is a learning scientist and getting his PhD looking at educator practice teacher learning. So we had this conversation yesterday following this PD session, which is that this dynamic between opening up a social annotation conversation that is digital is asynchronous that is in the margins, where students are actually having very rich, deep, meaningful conversation. And then they come to class. And the question is, does their instructor expect them to regurgitate what they've already said online, or has that instructor themselves. gone through a kind of reflective professional loading process, so that they understand it's time for a new kind of discussion out when we come together, whether it's face to face over zoom or it's face to face in a classroom when that's safe to do again. Does an instructor understand that there's one conversation that was the kind of rough draft thinking the kind of like maybe meaning making that Laura was just talking about I'm speaking back to the text, but I'm also speaking with my peers in to that text. And then what happens in that classroom conversation that is both different from, but connected to and building upon what happened online. And so yeah I don't know for any if it's generational, but I think that our team is also, you know, again thanks to and others are very interested in making sure that instructors have the kinds of dispositions and the kinds of skills to kind of sequence these kinds of discursive based activities to make them very meaningful for students that include social annotation but it uses that as a way to kind of augment other kinds of collaborative learning activities. That's great I just typed in the chat like as you as you're describing it makes me think of all the flipped classroom practices right and how instructors have to adjust writing has done that for a while right but, but this is like hypothesis come becomes like a flipped classroom kind of component man I think that's that's a great. I don't know I'm intrigued. I put notes down I'm going to revisit this later this is how it works right. I know we had a question, Nate you would you had mentioned I think Nicholas had a question that you wanted to bring up. I mean, and Alex was sort of riffing on it too. And I think it was, you know, around this, it sort of grows out of the discussion you just had in a way about how can discussion be different. Right, and it's part of it is this idea of, you know, our students, and because of pedagogy, being kind of trapped in a world where they're treating each learning experience as kind of a singular modular activity and how do, how can we draw connections across modules in a course or even across courses or across, you know, academic careers and you know can social annotation play a role in that. Yeah, that's a good one. So there's a in writing studies we have transference as a as a one of the core concepts that have emerged in the last you know, I would say decade and a half. Transference of skills transference of rhetorical capacities from the context of a writing class to family other classes on campus but then beyond the academic frame. I know we, you know, in W 131 we create it's a thematic thing, and the idea is to try and intentionally we've theme theme based elements and engagements and skills from unit one to unit two to unit three, and their activities that are designed for that. They always work. And, and if you get into when when education gets defaulted to canvas, right. If it's completely controlled by canvas and zoom, then it inherently orient students around modules and completion activities, rather than sustained engagement and so it actually takes significantly more effort to create that integrated kind of female element or through line, and how it works and it doesn't a regular face to face classroom. At least that's been my experience teaching online. And I haven't done it with hypothesis but overall that's been been the place but Alex you had some things you mentioned in response right what what did you have to say. And I must say this is largely hypothetical at this point because in the fall. I don't think I did this but it's something I want to do going forward is ask my students as one of their three annotations for every text I want to ask them to make a connection, either from another text we've read or a class discussion we've had, or to the real world, or to another one of their classes which I think there's some research around this being like a place where a lot of learning happens for students where they start making connections between their classes. So, you know, that's not like a immediate solution to this much bigger problem but I'm hoping that'll help students get in in the mode of thinking about how these learning experiences can go from being these discrete modular things to being these more interconnected cumulative things. Go ahead, right me. Are you sure. Okay, it does fall to in my opinion, the instructor to facilitate the those connections and to encourage the transfer of thinking and knowledge because students are so used to compartmentalizing not only their courses but the course work within their courses like in a test based culture. Students are learning learning learning, taking the test for getting to make room for more learning learning learning for another test. So, something that brought me into writing studies was the practice of mindfulness and encouraging students to be actively aware of the thoughts that are coming in that might seem unrelated but are actually tangential to and connected with the core. I don't know text that's being studied so encouraging students to sort of follow the distractions and think about where they're taking them and not I guess not discouraging somebody who's reading Foucault in their 131 class from thinking about how that applies to their psych 101 course that they're also taking so really keeping it open ended and saying yeah that's a really interesting question. Even if you don't answer the question like Alex was saying letting students respond to students is a really valuable way to continue the conversation. That's great. I'll keep this really brief which is just to say that you know to Nicholas's point here into again the comments have not been made. I think one of the unfortunate side effects among many of the educational aspects of the you know shifts to everyone online pandemic pedagogy. Everyone's now a digital educator is that there will be I think for many students are feeling that online learning is increasingly highly structured. Formal by default, very modular and sequential in a way that really can, some may perceive the limit the kinds of divergent interest driven and messy learning that occurs, you know, wherever maybe. I'm not too late here but I think that there are actually few, but some very useful learning technologies that show a very different possible future for digital online learning and I think that social annotation is certainly one of those where social annotation to get to this point right now certainly what Alex is just mentioning about making connections. Social annotation is inherently about these associative trails, these way in which cognition is distributed and stretched across people that you're in conversation with resources, ideas, and all of that occurs over time. You can't by definition be bounded necessarily to a class a semester, you know, modular one readings to module two readings, etc. And so, you know, once higher ed writ large kind of moves into whatever post pandemic phase of teaching and learning. We may eventually find ourselves in the next few years. I think that there will need to be a kind of pretty radical reset on what it means to teach and learn online. Once everybody's kind of again out of this emergency mode. And I think that few technologies and few practices will actually survive as kind of very meaningful things that we should continue to do. But I believe that social annotation will be one of those things. That's great. That's great. I mean, it's 1244 I know there's at least two more questions I think we want to touch on real quickly. Before we run out of time, and I'm happy to stick around for an extra few minutes just to respond to some things. The first one is Muffy had a question and I just lost it it was about how much time to faculty spend training students because you should notice that. I just hit the button and it all disappeared. Essentially that students are not digital natives I don't care what anyone tells you they didn't come with some grand ability to work with technologies. They might have an affinity for making things work, but many of them don't have any experience with your LMS and so for them it's a whole new learning curve. This online course design our very first day was required to be in person, and we would, we would walk them through all the technological considerations they would need for that class was a full class day of here's how to make this online class work. However, in the pandemic moment that is no longer the case. And so I can say that our faculty don't, we don't they don't intentionally provide a lot of training for students to use the system. So we have built in training modules into our canvas shell that students can view or walk it walks them through how to access certain materials, or how to participate there's even I think it once as a quiz like are you prepared for online learning like that kind of basic level of not only technological support inquiry but also conceptual inquiry. And so I think that we would all benefit more if students had a little more hands on training for how to use standard university technologies. But, and maybe actually since we touch every student maybe the the freshman courses where that should occur. And now it's it's sort of instructor dependent and then they mostly rely on the the few training module elements we have for students in our and the 131 design at least out of the other courses we work with, it's different but so that's that's the framework there. And the, oh there it is I lost it. The chat moves so fast. Alright, and then the way one more question about was that yeah the central question on and Curtis says, new kinds of discussions, which makes him ask, what are some of the things that can and should happen in the synchronous session that follows and builds on the asynchronous hypothesis session. And so that's this question so I'll leave it to the others here who maybe know more about this but what should what should happen in the synchronous classroom Alex you've done this what what is your go to strategy. Well I typed this a little in the chat. And I want to be sure we get to Rami kids or Rami sorry Rami because I know he has sort of some different and more interesting solutions but at one very simple activity I like to do is either by zoom poll or chat students vote on the answer to a question either a question that students have actually posed in in their annotations or one that comes out of their annotation so like one, an example of one that could come out of the annotations is like some people identified the thesis as this and some people identified the thesis as this and some people identified it as this which one of these do you think is the thesis. So if you do that a zoom poll like it pops up and then you can say like okay people who voted for this one, you know what made you think this so like that's that's the or it could be much simpler like so and so asked this what do you guys think vote yes or no in the chat. And then the nice thing is, if you do that kind of voting in the chat, you know who to call on you can be like oh so and so you said no. Why did you say no, because the sort of impromptu participation impromptu un-muting is harder to do in the zoom space and there's just some very little practical things but I think Rami has some much more interesting ideas you can probably share. Alex and I you're the expert here I'll just, you know just really briefly, you know, say that I put a few ideas into the chat but I really I'll just raise as a question, which is that I know a lot of people on this column perhaps a lot of people you know who are joined us in the webinar or who will watch and listen to this, I think are just really interested in the fact that these social annotation activities they don't kind of live alone. And they are going to be paired with other kinds of learning either assignments or activities that are very likely also collaborative or social in some way. And again, I think that there is not yet a kind of knowledge base for what that can look like. There again is very little if any research about what actually is effective in pairing these kinds of social annotation activities with other kinds of classes. I know what I've been in my classes, I love hearing Alex and Laura, Justin, Chris is you know here as well I kind of riffing out like what may work for them and their students. But I think this is a really important, you know, conversation to continue thinking about is how do we not only facilitate these really rich conversations with social annotation, how do they connect to the other things that we know we really care about as educators, and what we ultimately want our students doing. I think that including hypothesis hypothesis or social annotations in the writing classroom specifically changes how students fundamentally think about writing. When you picture somebody reading or writing they are doing so in isolation like it's the, it's a hermit in the corner, frantically scribbling, you know, or the, or reading, I suppose, it's a, it's a, it's thought of as this isolated activity when in really everything, all the research and writing studies shows that it is a social activity. When you're writing you are inherently responding to something whether it's your own thoughts which are a product of your environment, or somebody's comment and hypothesis. So it sort of forces students to think about the relationships, not only between them in the text but between them and their classmates, between their classmates in the text that it humanizes writing and reading practices in a way that I think can often and easily be overlooked. I'm going to jump in this is such a great discussion but I'm going to jump in we are over time we can keep going if the panel wants to keep going but I just want to let everyone know that if you have to jump off. You know, feel free to do so, but I just want to be a little cognizant of the time. Yeah, no my next meeting doesn't start till one so I got a few minutes, very good. This is great I mean I think you know I part at the core of what we want. We hope our research will do is to illuminate. Maybe some initial responses to these kinds of questions I don't. I don't think we have any great answers in terms of like definitive claims yet but I think we all have really wonderful interesting ideas about how we might do it or how we might extend it. And in our own specific context, and how that works I mean I'm, I teach mostly with digital media digital writing digital rhetoric, making things for media and I'm going to include hypothesis one of my courses this semester, and I'm going to have them focus on adding images into the text as a core component I don't know what that looks like and so I'm intrigued to see how badly I messed this up, right. I learned so much when we fail fail fundamentally right it's like I always talk about fast failure fun failure informative failure, and I really embrace those things as key components of how I teach and so I think taking chances and trying things and realizing that didn't work is just how we get better. Yes, they should be informed and position, but ultimately like oh I think this could work and then you're like no no that did not work at all. And that's how our online class got built right so if it's I think it's in its third iteration now of design and proofing so. But these questions have been fantastic I really appreciate everybody showing up today and asking us questions and you know poking and prodding the inquiry. So that's great. Well, I think we should probably wrap this up we're almost at the top of the hour, but I just want to say thank you to our guests you've been wonderful. Alex, Laura, Justin, Ramey, and thank you to everyone who attended. There will be a recording of this I put that in the chat but I'll just repeat that there will be a recording of this on the hypothesis website probably this coming Monday the 18th and okay day. Before or before that, and we'll also be on the liquid margins YouTube channel. I also dropped in a chat on a link earlier to another webinar that we have for people who just wanted to see. Have a more specific walkthrough of hypothesis as a tool and a demo. We do have another webinar series called hypothesis 101. We'll wrap up on January 20 next Wednesday. So look for that. And I will just say goodbye and thank you for coming to liquid margins this has been a really great show.