 But we're going to move on to our mini keynote now from Annalis Espinosa. I'm just going to briefly say something as Remy comes up to introduce his colleague that I've been working for the past couple of years on an LMS app at Hypothesis. And I think it's a key piece of tool, you know, a key piece of our toolkit for working with universities. But it's a very limited one. The LMS itself is limited and what Hypothesis can do within the LMS is limited in terms of what Hypothesis can do on the web and what Hypothesis can do for learning in more complicated spaces, both physical and social. And I think I'm looking forward to hearing how Manuel is using it. So Remy's going to talk more about Manuel than Manuel will talk to us. Yeah, it's lovely to see everyone both here in Denver and I know that we have quite a few folks who are joining us online. So thank you for everyone who's with us. I just wanted to very briefly introduce a dear friend and colleague, Dr. Manuel Espinosa, who is an associate professor at the School of Education and Human Development here at the University of Colorado in Denver. I met Manuel early in my career and I've been at CU Denver for five years now and certainly found a kindred spirit. It was only though in the last few years that my interests in annotation and thinking about how to use collaborative knowledge-building processes were perhaps resonant with some of the work that he's been doing for years that we're telling you about. And through just the fortune of being able to have honest and inspiring conversations together, we've found I think a very novel way of thinking about the use of Hypothesis outside of necessarily a kind of more traditional classroom, but for I think a very inspiring use in the broad field of education. So Manuel's here to inspire us to tell us some stories about his work and to again, as Jeremy was just mentioning, provide a bit of a kind of counterbalance to how we might think of the many uses of collaborative annotation for the, I think, the kind of core purposes of education. So having said that briefly is really an honor and a pleasure to welcome my friend and colleague Manuel Espinosa. Please. Hello, everyone. My name is Manuel Espinosa. I'm an associate professor at CU Denver and I'm here to talk about the right to learn undergraduate research collective and the role that Hypothesis plays in our work. Maybe I'll take 10 minutes to talk about the history of the group and then 10 minutes to talk about the work. But on the train here, it hit me that I was, I've never spoken this sentence before in this particular, I've never spoken the sentence that's about to come out of my mouth. I've never spoken it before. But really, I guess what I want to talk about here is the role that Hypothesis plays in human rights work for us. Let me tell you about right to learn undergraduate research collective. We now have four generations of undergraduates who are part of the group, 12 years. The first four years, we didn't even have a name because we didn't know what we were doing and when I say we, that's stretching it a bit because it's me and one other person, me and another another young woman who is she was a migrant student that that I met when she was 17 years old, going into her senior year in high school. And she visited my office after the after the summer program that we offered in 2006, she was undocumented at the time. And she said, what is it that we can do about this? And it wasn't she wasn't just worried about herself. She wasn't just worried about how she would get a scholarship or raise the funds to get to college. She was worried about what is it that we can do about everything with respect to spreading this idea that education is a fundamental right of personhood, irregardless of a person's social or legal status. Right. That's really what it means at the human rights level. There's no qualifications and there's no exceptions. By virtue of the fact that you being human, you are entitled in the broadest and most noble sense to an education that matters, a meaningful education. So she would come to my office and we would talk and we would leave confused and leave more worried. We knew that for us that the solution was not to put on just another summer program, which was a good thing that we did. We did that for 10 years, helping 35 to 40 students every year get college credit, irregardless of their social and legal status. But we wanted a larger scale change and we were at a loss for how to do that. At some point, I can't tell you how many times right to learn over the last 12 years has almost died. It's been on the respirators. It's been in hospice, everything, and it's always recovered. I'd have to give credit to this young woman, her name is Tanya Soto Valenzuela. She's the heart, really, of the right to learn group. But over the years, we needed more people. So we would get them from the various classes I would teach. Students would become interested in the kind of research that we were doing and they would ask, can we help? Can we join you? And I said, I don't have anything to offer you. I don't have any grants. You know, I can't offer you a wage. I can give you books to read and buy you a sandwich from time to time. And then they would say, that's fine. And that's fine. And they would follow because of the question. They would follow because of the purpose and the goal that we were after. And at first we didn't know what the goal really was. It emerged really, really crystal clear, I'd say, about four years ago, that we were trying to, we had it in mind that we needed to not just put forth the idea that education was a fundamental right of personal, but also seek change within the Colorado Constitution for its protection. And if you're familiar with the Constitution of Colorado, we have an education clause like all the other 50 states, right? It's not a, there's nothing in the edgy, nothing about education, the federal Constitution. It's a matter that's left to the states. So what we have in Colorado, the mandate is that the state of Colorado provide a thorough and uniform system of free public schools. That's from 1876. And what that meant at its best, its most ambitious or most charitable read in 1876 was that every young person would be able to have 100 days of school in 1876, outdated to say the least now in 2019, right? So we thought that's what needs to change, right? It's that normative framework that needs to change. For that we needed an argument. So we set about the task and it became clear to us that what we were doing all those years, those three, four generations of right to learn undergraduates that we were becoming dignity scholars. And we needed to know what this term meant in legal terms. And in moral philosophical terms, in poetic terms, we needed to get better at it than anyone else. So we started on five by seven cards. This was like, this was pre hypothesis, you know, we were borrowing a method that was used in the research leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education case. It was inefficient to say the least, it was rich, but we would spend the first 30 minutes of our of our bi-weekly meetings simply trying to catch up on what happened in the intro. And it was just like, you know, we would take, we would take a step forward, but it was a very laborious step. Dr. Collier and I end up having a conversation about how hypothesis can help. And you're familiar with it, you know, it's, you know, you can, the ability to read socially, to archive and to curate and to really disperse the mind, to make the mind truly social in a way that you can see, right, in a way that's tangible in some ways. So our goal was to become dignity scholars of the highest order with my undergraduates. And we set about to study, I'll give you one example. We wanted to see how it was used, its content and its criteria and landmark cases to see again, right? Its antecedent uses, because we had other ideas for it in education, but we had to get very familiar with how it was used in previous landmark cases. So we took one case, we studied a couple, but here's, I'll talk to you about Tennessee versus Lane. Tennessee versus Lane is a case from the 1990s about a man named George Lane, who was summoned to court in Tennessee. He was, he had a subpoena to appear, and he was also in a wheelchair, so he gets there and there's no way for him to get to the second floor. So the guard offers to pick him up and take him up the stairs and he says, like, hell, you will, I'm not going to be picked up, I want access, right? I don't need charity here. So this ends up becoming a dignity case, right, that that very act of offering to pick him up on not even, you know, summoning him to court and then not having the means for him to participate in government was an act of humiliation from the part of Tennessee, from the state of Tennessee to the person George Lane. So what we did was we acquired here the court record in Tennessee versus Lane from the district court all the way to the Supreme Court. We said, we're going to read all of it, all 1700 pages. And everywhere that we found the word dignity, we would try to figure out what it meant and even where it was not found, right, because there's this, there are equivalent terms, let's say equality, right? Equality is like, if, if dignity is the mother term or the mother value, equality is the daughter term or the daughter value, right? It's the, it's the, it's an equivalent expression. So even where dignity, those seven words, seven letters will not be found. We wanted to understand how the term dignity, it's content, it's criteria, it's equivalent expressions in those two cases, probably close to what 3000 pages of documents, right? Interviews, oral, oral, oral testimony, amicus briefs, district court findings, oral arguments at the Supreme Court. We needed to understand whenever it came up, what was its content, was criteria provided for its usage, you know, and are there, were there equivalent expressions that we could then use to make this argument for education as a fundamental right of person who tore the end of amending the Colorado State Constitution. So let me show you where we're at right now. If you look at all our annotations in the first go round, which lasted about three, three, about four months, that really is just the tale of how right to learn got smarter, how we got, how we came to be intelligent as to the use of dignity in these two court cases, especially Tennessee versus Lane. What we're doing now is that we're putting together the handbook. Have you ever seen a concordance, a biblical concordance, it's the same kind of thing, right? Whenever you see it here in Greek, well, here's what it means in Hebrew and here's what it is in English in the King James version, right? We're doing the same thing. When you come across this use of dignity in Tennessee versus Lane, here's what we think its criteria, its content is right. Here's where you see how it compares to the use, to the use of dignity in another case, like Lovato versus Colorado, which then helps us understand how plastic and how malleable the term is. It's, it's hard for us to even think about, you know, dignity is a normative planetary fact, you know, it's persistent, it is also contested, right? So it's still in formation. It's very well established, but it's also very much contested on the daily level. And we're trying to get good at it for the purpose again, for this very practical argument. What we have in the Colorado State Constitution is the mandate to create thorough and uniform system of free public schools. But what if you could replace it, you know, with a clause along the lines of that, the state of Colorado shall provide an education that is in harmony with the dignity of the human person, an education that is useful to the person. That would change the, the, I think the playing ground for legislators, for parents, for teachers, and for the students themselves. If they walked into school knowing that what it is that I'm getting here is not in a court, is not what it's coming to me, is not what I am, I am entitled to, you have different kinds of resources in order to make an argument, to have an argument in our world. If you can make an argument about this, my sense is you can also make an argument for your own existence, right? It becomes easier to do that. And for us, hypothesis, I wrote it down because it was, like I said, this, this stuff, I hadn't thought about it in this particular way that hypothesis was playing this great role in this human rights work that we have. But dignity is what makes our argument comprehensible and intelligible. The human mind makes it possible, but hypothesis makes it realizable. It helps us to organize our thinking into archive and curate it and carry it on. It allows us to see what conclusions we have reached, it allows us to learn from our past actions and in the steady expansion of our collective mind. And that's what I had in, that's what I have for you all. So I'm really happy to be here and I'm so sorry that I have to head back soon. I have class to teach like in two hours. But whenever hypothesis comes calling, then I, I, I respond because they've been good to us, you know, it's hard to imagine our project doing what it is that we're doing now without this particular tool. So it's a human rights tool for us. So thank you. And from my hypothesis, I was curious if you, in the course of doing this work, there are undergraduates annotating, correct? And have they taken the annotation practices they've used as a part of this project and moved them into other parts of their scholarly work? They have, they have like many hypothesis groups, because we have a couple of English lit majors and it's lends itself really perfectly to close readings of the text. So we have a couple that do that. And I, you know, it's a question I, I just know that sort of by happenstance, but I, I would like to ask the other ones how they, what other use perhaps they make of hypothesis outside of right to none. Yeah. But yeah, I have seen it in at least two of our members. We have 10 total members. Another question. I can see from the screen that you're using a private call to teach about this obligation. Yes. I'm curious, since you're trying to make this, this argument that you're using a hypothesis sort of as a process tool, you got to know each other or where you're going to go. You can see the hypothesis specifically useful as a public tool for advocating for the, for the changes that you want. So to say, making public room of students, they're entertaining these documents, sharing them on through the sharing and also sharing the law makers, every citizen to see, can be influenced by that, not it's just a process of knowledge production, but it's a statement of a lot of those who do not believe in it. It's something that has come up for us. You know, we have part of the strength of right to learn and also part of its, I wouldn't know if, I wouldn't say its weakness or anything, is that we've been single-minded, right, for 12 years that we needed to create this argument and certainly that we have all these sort of affiliated ideas, right, wonderful ideas for making it more, more public outside of our group. It's just that the study that we have to engage in, you know, is so intense, we have to understand constitutional law, we have to understand the dignity literature at the international human rights level, the anthropology and sociology of learning itself. It's just been, if you can put more hours in the day, brother. We have multiple different private groups, also now public groups, so there you could have a right to learn public groups that was read only for the world, lawmakers, right, but it's readable by members of your particular community. That's cool. So you guys can go out and annotate all over the web and you know, use your annotations as added to see that others can read, but you have sort of a branded, focused group of playing members, seven members that are doing that work. Yeah. So we should follow up on that, because I think we get powerful attention. I like the idea, I'll bring it up at our next meeting in two weeks. Yeah, yeah. Hi, my name is Janet. Hey Janet. I was wondering how you came up with like how much time did it take to sort of set up the tags and sort of make the norms around using it. And how do you onboard when you're processing it? Months and months and months. Hypothesis for us is if you're like if you read Piaget, if you read Bogacki, those lines of thinking right around human learning. Hypothesis for us was an invaluable mediation or artifact, right? And what in it allowed us to relate in a different way. So the way that we get there is by this process of bidding. We make bids. We had to reach consensus. So a person would make a bid like they would highlight a portion of text and say I think this portion of text emphasizes the way that this particular jurist explains the criteria for dignity, right? Why it's even possible to even use it in this particular instance. And then they'd have to get four yes votes, right? And there'd be a lot of disagreement as well too, but they'd have to get four yes votes for us to come to a consensus. And then we would then we'd be able to say okay at least now we can say that we have come to this understanding with respect to this particular portion of text. And it falls in this major category. It's about content, criteria, or is it an equivalent expression. It just took months for us to work it out. But now we have I think that for us was the goal. You know that's how we became of we became of one mind that did not necessarily have to agree on everything. And that for us was invaluable. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the question. All right, problem any. Thank you so much. Thank you both.