 Okay, greetings folks. As you all know, and you can see on the screen, I'm made angel. Let me get myself centered here on the screen from hypothesis and sorry for the late start, but as usual, we had a little bit of technical difficulties which seems to be happening in every session today, which is fine. No, no, we won't point fingers, no pointing fingers. It's all good. We've all had technical difficulties, especially over this last year when we've been asked to do so much unusual things, even though we're also used to it, there's still the possibility of national. Yes, it's national technical difficulties days for any point in time. So here we are. At any rate, I'm so honored and pleased to be able to have these folks here with us today for this informal featured educated office hours. And so we have with us here Miriam Cortez Cooper, who's from the Rocky Mountain University of Health Professionals. I myself am a Colorado native, so I'm very happy to have Colorado represented in the house. Are you, you are in Colorado, Miriam? No, everybody says that Rocky Mountain is actually in Utah. Oh my gosh. Well, as a Coloradan, I'm gonna have to take a little bit of umbrage with that given that the Rocky Mountains don't extend over to Utah, but we're gonna let that slip for now. And so I'd also like to introduce Karen Nichols, who's from Boise State. And so we're at least representing the West here, though I'm actually located in Portland, Oregon right now. So we have multiple Western states at play here. And before I kind of launch things off with our invited guests here, I just wanna say that this session, we've really tried to design this to be a kind of informal drop-in kind of almost like coffee hour where folks who have experience using social annotation can kind of talk with folks who maybe are less experienced and we can kind of talk about maybe things around pedagogy or practice. There's a separate session that just ended that's sort of for more technical details. So hopefully we won't have to delve into that too much, although we're always willing to entertain a technical question. And so I thought I'd start by kicking things off with Miriam and ask you if you would just briefly describe what your role is at your institution and how you came to know about social annotation and start using it in your practice? Yeah, I am an associate professor and teach in a number of courses that are all related to forming doctoral students in physical therapy to their entry-level students. And really somebody came to me and said, hey, look, you wanna try out this new tool? That's really how it came down to. And I was excited to try it because I love having articles, journal articles that our students would have to read. And it was always kind of an issue that when students are first learning how to read an article, like how do you go about it? And so it was just a really easy way for me to highlight and say, oh, this is really important. So I started off there with just highlighting and getting students kind of used to that to then posing questions in the margin for students to have to answer. And then also having, and then eventually also using it as discussion points for students to have in small groups. So that's kind of how I got into it was just somebody asked me, you wanna try it out? And I'm always willing to try anything. So that's how I did it. Oh, that's great. And it's really, I know that your institution was one of the first sort of institutions that was focused on medical education that adopted hypothesis formally. And so you guys are kind of pioneers in that respect. And it's really been interesting to see other institutions focused on medical teaching and learning have sort of picked it up. So we'll still warrant that in a second, but let me give Karen a chance to basically do the same thing and just introduce yourself. Let us kind of know what it is you do on a day-to-day basis there at Boise State and maybe talk about how you got to know social annotation and started using it. Sounds great. I teach in the business school at Boise State and I teach in management. Predominantly strategic management, but I also have an innovation and change course. And I'm a recent academic. I lived in the software industry before and I love all software tools and I'm more useful the better. So it was a, I teach fully online courses to non-traditional students. And I'm not a huge fan of textbooks. So I like OER materials, but I was like, how can I get the sound of a guns to read it? And I was searching for a tool and our center for teaching and learning put on a workshop and included in it was a blurb on hypothesis. And I thought, oh, this is good because, hey, I can get them to read it. You have to post, annotate twice per each article. I can do something like that and say, you've got to do something. And lo and behold, they did. So I don't know if I'm going to answer your next question name, but they went so far above and beyond what I expected, what I asked for. And I was fairly vague with my, you have to annotate twice per article. And that's all I said. And they were going into these paragraphs and writing it. So last fall when we moved online, I tried it with my MBA course and they're not as pliable potentially as undergrads. I better be careful here. I don't know, it's in our audience. But they went full in and they did the same thing. And I'm just like, I have no idea what the magic of the tool is, but I'm in. I'm sold. That's great. And I also, Karen, behind you, I see a guitar and I'm wondering if do you do musical numbers at all too during your work? It's a cello. Oh, a cello, even better. It's a cello and I have set myself the task of teaching myself the cello. Lessons would be much better. So at the moment, I also enjoy the view of the cello. Oh, got it. I can do a twinkle, twinkle, that's it. That's right. Well, maybe. More than I can do. Yeah, that's more than I can do too. Maybe we can have a little, I think we might not all know the words though. So maybe we can have a little session a little bit. I've heard that the cello is the instrument that is closest in tone to the human voice. And so I actually went to a yo-yo ma concert once. He's pretty good cellist. I've heard. Kind of. Yeah. Well, what I really love here is that we've got two folks who are really focused on kind of professional disciplines. And social annotation and hypothesis in particular have sort of maybe had their deepest roots in English and composition as disciplines and kind of branched out from there into other kinds of humanities and social studies work. But I have always had it in my mind that it's really in a lot of the professional disciplines where social annotation can become really, really valuable because I had actually originally thought of law where so much of law is about deep textual analysis and interpretation, right? But reading is really fundamental to every discipline. And in the professional disciplines in particular it seems like so much of what is necessary. And I'll get your thoughts on this in just a second. But so much of what is necessary is for students to start to learn how to work in it, think through professional situations and issues and concepts in a group setting with other colleagues whereas some of the other disciplines may call for more kind of solo activity, if you will. And so I'm wondering if you've found the social aspects of the annotation to be particularly fruitful in that kind of professional setting and maybe start with Karen, I don't know. Unless you're not ready. No, that's fine. I don't think I've taken full advantage of that yet. So it is happening organically. So this point in time, the way I'm using the tool is I'm kind of have at it, here's my expectations and go to town. And I've been really surprised at the conversations that have happened. So a personal post, there'll be replies, they'll go back and forth. And I've been super impressed at how that's happened. I think one of the things that I like about it, I'm not totally gonna answer your question, Nate, but it's that I can group together articles and they're not academic articles, Mary, I'm just to be and I love your idea that I've already been thinking about how I'm going to use that. But I'm using more like HBR, Harvard Business Review, just some of the more popular press articles on the profession of business. And I can put them together from different sources with different viewpoints so we can get that juxtaposition and they can discuss it between themselves. So like here's one that's for, here's one that's against. How about it, go enjoy and read. So that's kind of been my approach. It's worked amazingly well so far. Well, it does sound like there's kind of like a natural social conversation that's starting whether you like it or not, right? Just by the virtue of the material that you pick, the students that you have and the affordances of the tools. So that's awesome. What about you, Miriam, do you have the social aspects set up? They have just because oftentimes you get students that don't want to be wrong. And so if you pose a question, there's a one right answer and when you're really trying to get away from that, when I pose questions in the margins of papers, like I said, I highlight it, put a question and I have them in groups. And so then they, because we have 50 students, so having 50 students all annotate on the same question just becomes crazy. So I get them into sections. So they're usually like five students or so in each of these different sections. And so they can have these discussions within their own sections when we look at those. And they can do it asynchronously. So I can just put that out as an assignment and have these questions and then students can answer them. And there's not this feeling of like, oh, there's only one right answer. They just are voicing their opinion in a way that is related to the question I put. And there's just no bad feelings about it. If I could just add on to that too. I tend to teach non-traditional students and that ability to share their experiences really, really comes out in the annotating in me. Oh man, and this happened to me, hopefully slightly more professionally phrased, but not all the time. They can give their examples and really get that social learning, which is awesome. And I find happens remarkably often considering it's not a requirement of the assignment. Yeah, on occasion when I, like I said, if I'm looking at like social determinants of health or something that's a lot more, that's not as cut and dry as some of the sciences are, then definitely there are those shared experiences that you're talking about, Karen. I think one of them was looking at the impact of sleep on overall health quality. And so some of the things you're talking about was like, okay, well, think about multifamily homes and is a person sleeping in their own bed, how many kids or how many people are running around and what's the outside noise and what's the ambient lighting, like all of those sorts of stuff in there or it's just a lot of really nice chatter and discussion in that article about that aspect. Yeah, something that every human being can sort of relate to, right? This is how much sleep one gets and whether or not it's enough. And what impacts it and like, okay, your partner snores, okay, maybe too much information on that. But just everybody sharing stuff about like, oh, yeah, okay. Something I can relate to and add on to. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so Miriam, you talk about kind of delving into some more cut and dried science, which I'm sure is a big part of your studies there. Are you reading mostly in textbooks or are they scientific articles or what kind of materials are you assigning in those cases? Yeah, there's scientific articles. And so for them, it's a new thing to do as well and to start parsing through that, what is good about it, what is not so good. And it's a wonderful way, it's a wonderful tool to start teaching them. And again, they're not so much in that instance where I'm using it for the first time for them to start looking at an article and critically appraise an article that it's easy for me to highlight and put things up there for them to see before then I have them to start doing the same thing. So. It sounds like you do a lot of preceding of the work, like adding your own questions to kind of get the discussion going. Right. Got it. Yeah, well, a real deep scientific article is a pretty, it's a kind of reading that not a lot of people have had a lot of practice doing. So I can imagine that some guidance there works well and it's like we've heard other educators talk about how the practice of reading is sort of an assumed skill but there are different kind of models and templates for how to approach reading in different contexts like with maybe scientific articles. And so it seems like you're kind of using it in this mode where you're kind of modeling a certain, you're calling attention to ways that one might read this article that can lead them down a path that they may not have traveled before. Can I ask Maryam a question? Sure, yeah. No, this is a free form discussion. Maryam, when you say the term was seeding, you're doing the pre-work. Are you able to copy that from course to course or do you do it each time you teach the class separately? Oh, it has been fun learning how to get it from one course to the next. But no, because I'll have 15, 20 annotations on an article and I'm like, oh, I do not want to do that twice. So Matt from, I guess from, you know, I annotate has helped me go through the back door on Canvas and be able to copy over my stuff. So it can be done. He has helped me twice in doing it. And I think now on the third time I'll be able to do it by myself, but I'm not 100% sure. That's very interesting just because I kind of like to do that. But yes, the prep work sounds a little bit daunting. Yeah, yeah, it's been awesome. You've, I think you're probably talking about my colleague Matt Dricker who works a hypothesis in our support. Sorry, yes. Yeah, no, no problem. And, you know, you've hit on something that I think as an organization we've realized and that's that there is this need to kind of have templates or templated readings that you might move from course to course or from reading to reading if you have multiple groups, like in your case. And so the work that you've been doing, working that out now is gonna be really helpful for us to figure out how to make it into a tool that everybody can use more easily. So we really thank you for that assistance and trying to get it right because it's so hard to design software to do something if you don't have real kind of, you know, examples of what people need in front of you. And so you've brought one to us. So thank you for that. And maybe Karen will be bringing more. Well, you know, we've got a couple of questions now from the audience and I'm gonna bring this one up on stage here from Chris so we can all see it and read it. I'll read it out loud. So depending on what and how they're annotating, I'm curious if Miriam has noticed that the visual part of annotation has helped in the memory aid and students practical work. This can be done in other settings as well, but in this text-only environment, you know, maybe even like thinking about the idea of the degree to which highlighting something helps, maybe having a conversation into it might help. Yeah, you know, that's a really great question. And I haven't assessed that like, okay, so is learning better when they are doing that, highlighting and responding and answering questions. You know, certainly I do, when I do my quizzes for, you know, tests, I mean, I do ask questions that come from the article. I think it maybe is less daunting when I do that, but I haven't really said, oh, do students learn that or do more students get that answer or get that question right? Because they were engaged in it would seem to make sense of doing that. It's a good question. Yeah, and feel free to jump in if you have anything to add in any of these, Karen. I've got another question teed up for you though, so yeah, and I would just follow up with that, that there's just starting to be a lot more deep research into what the impact of social annotation is on various kinds of student success. And so that question about whether or not the act of annotating can have an effect on other student performance, you know, or assessments is kind of an open question so far. There's tons of anecdotal evidence that there's a lot of benefit to it, but the really rigorous studies are just kind of starting to kick off now, including one that's happening at Indiana University. And it's just the first year or the first semester of it is coming to a close or just came to a close, I guess, this spring. And so we'll start to see some outputs of that. It is in the English composition discipline as opposed to, you know, the medical, but I'll put a link in just a second about that too. And we've had a scholar in residence, Rami Kaldir over the past year who's been helping kind of foster educators who have research questions and to try to think through how those might be pursued in a kind of more formal way. It gets, as you know, it gets pretty complicated with IRB and, you know, all the different kinds of things that one might do if one's gonna really do a formal study. So Karen, another question has come up here from John and I'm gonna pull it up on, say, this one is short, but maybe sweet. Have you ever used social annotation to practice case analysis? And I haven't, and that's primarily just because I don't use the case method for teaching. I think it would be an excellent tool to do so. I think getting the students, whether they be in teams as Miriam's done or doing it individually, my classes tend to be smaller. I tend to be certainly below 30, but I think it would be an excellent tool to discuss cases and get into the depths and keep pushing each other as the students go through it. But one thing, I just wanna go back, Nate, on whether there's a benefit for the social annotation. So one of the clear reasons why I wanted to use this, well, there was a couple reasons. What was discussion boards? Can I be really blunt? We still have blackboards. Discussion boards. Technically this is being recorded, but because these are like, oh, we've got that, we've got that one. So discussion boards, I find for me, are a real challenge unless I'm in there two or three times a day, nudging them and egging them on, and I'm going, oh my goodness, this wasn't my thought of a full-time job was to keep students going in the discussion board. It's really hard to get them engaged in a discussion board, any kind of thing like that. So I actually do use a separate tool. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to mention it, but for discussions separately. Okay, and then I have the social annotation and it's meant to really focus on the reading. And what I've noticed, A, the discussions all over have improved, and B, their assignments and their work. Just because they're actually reading, I have a better discussion board tool, I have a social annotation, I'm giving them lots of opportunities to think and talk and integrate their learning. And then when I have to grade their assignments, it's just so much better. So from my perspective, it's a total win. Do I have actual proof? Mine probably would be grading time, just because their assignments are better. And I'm focusing on the finer grading elements that you need to better critically analyze this versus you don't understand that term, go back and read the text. So it's just a different level of discussion that I'm having with the students, with the vast majority of the students. This is not the panacea or the silver bullet, but it definitely is a super strong tool. I think that's my long answer to a multiple questions. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. So again, more anecdotal evidence, if you will, that there's kind of an improvement. And I'm interested, particularly in this element of how the fact that there's a new way to engage with reading has led to these other kind of benefits, even in discussion forums, right? And in the assignments as well. And it's almost as if we've been assigning readings for centuries, millennia, right? But it's always been difficult to motivate people to get deeply involved with them. And when they do, it's difficult to know that they have, except through the degree to which they can bring it out in an essay or an assignment or a test, right? And so this is one of the things that attracts me to social annotation as an educator is just this idea that it gives us a new powerful way to actually make it worthwhile to read, right? Like it gives people a new motivation to actually wanna go to the text and read it. I can grade it, they provide grades, they can enjoy the camaraderie. And even for the fully online courses, I'm actually gonna use it in my in-person MBA class in the fall. So I'll let you know how it goes because I'm wondering what their feeling about it will be. So an MBA, professional MBA, which means again, non-traditional students, they either buy in or they don't. There's not a whole bunch of middle ground. So we'll see what happens. That sounds like my group of students, Karen, they either buy in or they don't. And mine are all face-to-face class. So mine, I do this with my face-to-face classes. Yeah, I was actually gonna follow up on that a little bit. And maybe start with you, Miriam. So because a lot of people, I think, especially over this past pandemic year, have really used social annotation, mostly in like an asynchronous remote context, right? So could you talk a little bit about how you weave it into a synchronous face-to-face class? Yeah, and it's not really all that different than getting small groups together asynchronously instead of doing breakout sessions or whatever. Well, you find in that too, but anyway. But yeah, so they could, and this was actually before hypothesis developed, the ability to create sections in Canvas and then have the small ones. I would get the students together. They would discuss the information and then they would type their responses from their group and then another, of course, I had five or six groups around the room. So everybody was typing in and kind of having that conversation that they were doing it on the side first. But I mean, even face-to-face as a class prep assignment could be part of that, like Karen said, I am not a fan of the discussion boards in general. And so if I could have an article and the students have a discussion on the article, I would much, much prefer that and see that than to have a discussion board on Canvas. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, I guess the thing that I always come back to is how so often in a discussion board you are talking about something in a text, right? Or maybe you're related back to something in a text and yet it's not there, the text isn't there. And so you have to go somewhere else and maybe copy something or if try to, some complicated reference to it or something that's so handy just to kind of move that whole discussion, right? Right. Yeah, and I'm wondering too, Karen, if you say that when it comes to the fall, you are gonna have a face-to-face class and you're thinking to also use social annotation there. Do you think it'll be different than, you'll use it differently than you have been remotely? I don't think so. I'm just curious as to how it be received. So in, how do I express this? I teach the professional MBA capstone class and it's an awful lot of hands-on working on a project in teams. So traditionally this class didn't have a lot of reading associated with it. It was more, we've learned it through the MBA now we're going to apply. And yeah, they still need to do some reading. This is my third, you're teaching a class now. So I'm very confident that we still need to do some reading. And again, I can prep them just like Miriam was saying. It's a pre-class warm-up. It's go ahead and read the articles and a tape before you come to class so that we're all on the same footing is the goal. When everybody was online, they expected to do online work. I think they still will. I think they'll still be fine with it. I've found it wonderful that really I've had to do zero prep, zero training, zero anything with a tool. There's just a link. It's click on the link and annotate. And I think pretty well, I do give them links to the help menus and things like that. But I haven't had to do a thing. And I don't think I've had to answer a question yet unless I've goofed up the PDF. And I have done that a couple of times. Easy to do. You shouldn't blame yourself. The PDFs can be tricky, right? And that's what I like just because I can put them all together and it's a little bit tidier. I'm old school. Who knows which way, but it works out. It's just been such a good tool. I am hoping that the students in the fall will just go, oh yeah, this works fine. It takes me a couple of hours. I go through it and now I'm ready for class. One thing that we've heard some other educators say even here at the conference is how it's a little bit like a flip classroom situation in the sense that if the students are doing reading beforehand with social annotation, there's kind of a layer of discussion that happens maybe even before you get into that synchronous discussion about it. And so that when you finally do come together, whether it's face-to-face or online to talk about it live, you're actually starting from a different place than you might have been before because there's been that social annotation conversation going already. Is that? Totally. I'm totally assumptive that they have done the readings and they know what I'm talking about. So I think again, the compliance, it's probably not correct, but 99% of students do it. So it seems to be an easy task. I either willing to do it, they're able to do it and they do it well. That makes sense. Well, here's another question to shift gears a little bit. I'll bring it up on stage for Mark and I'm gonna rephrase it even a little bit. I'm breaking this into two questions, Mark. So forgive me if I'm misinterpreting here. But so one question that I'm sort of curious about is how if you have grading or assessment attached to the act of social annotation itself, so are there like assigned numbers of annotations that need to be made in order to get a grade or is it a class participation kind of thing? And then the second question is maybe this thing about getting credit for prior learning, which is somewhat of a separate issue. So maybe Miriam, can we start with you about your assessment practices here? Yeah, and I really have just been as more participation. So of course, when I first started using it, it was like, okay, I wanna see five highlights and you can just, in the reason why you highlighted it, just something really basic, just try it. And then I was like, okay, let's graduate to the next level. And that's like you, like I said, need to answer a question, but it was really totally on participation and not, okay, you got five points if you completed the assignment. And of course I would scroll through everybody's to kind of see, but I wasn't grading quality of the responses that I will say. Our students tend to be quality students anyways that they're gonna give me, they're not gonna give me junk. So that's more than probably the nature of my students. So definitely did not have anything other than participation points. Got it. And I don't know if there's any prior learning credit in your institution, maybe not for medical stuff. Yeah, no, not really. Thought the kind of thing where, yeah, I treated it by own headache. Can I get prior learning experience for that? Yeah. What about you, Karen? Do you, how do you work the social annotation into the actual assessment in your course? And then what about the prior learning question as a separate thing? So I think I'm kind of where Miriam said she started with, which is I do give points and I do tell them how many annotations I expect. I'm both an easy marker and a bit of a hard marker, i.e. if they do the work, I'll give them 100%, no problem with that. But if I say I want an annotation per article and they try and put the five annotations in the first two pages of the first article, yeah, they get credit for half an article. So I pay enough attention, this might be a little bit of an outline, but I find if I nail them first, early on in the class, things go really smoothly after. So I've learned to grade hard in the early stages and then I can relax by the end and we're all happier. I don't do the quality with grades, i.e. because if they do the work, they get 100% so I won't give them more. But the student has now put a marker and I try and let the students know, it's easier to do in a face-to-face classroom. But if I know your name at the end of three weeks, it's either really, really good or really, really bad. And the social annotation is a way to make it really, really good. So even though you can't get more than 100%, you've now got my attention and that's kind of fun because the learning and the teaching will go to a different level. So I can't give them points, but I do try to provide some way to incentivize them to work a little bit harder or go beyond. Yeah, Karen, I agree because it's usually embedded in an assignment when I give that. And so the feedback on the assignment can just be high praise. It can be like, wow, you're doing some really nice critical thinking. I like how you're doing this and you just give high praise and that will continue. And then for the individual that was kind of superficial, you kind of say that, you're like, well, you met the criteria. What I'm looking for is for you to wrap your game up just a little bit more. I want to see this, I want to see that. And that's just the gestalt kind of piece. That makes sense. I think people are getting a really good handle on how this was working in both of your practices. I'm wondering if anybody in the audience would actually like to join us on stage and be part of the conversation because we also have that ability. It doesn't just have to be my giant talking head and these nice folks. And while we're waiting, if you all want to think about that, I saw that Shana, who I know is a, I believe at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, she had gestured toward this anecdote that folks are saying that they get 10 minutes back in class from social annotation that are sort of, is not spent maybe on the basic parts of the reading anymore or something like that. I see a lot of nodding. I was gonna say, I think I get two to three hours of grading back a week because I teach condensed courses. So I teach seven weeks instead of 15 weeks for the fully online. But just because they've ran the material, it's just so nice. So now when I asked for the assignment, they're actually at least better using it. We've just clicked up a level and it's fantastic. Let's head pounding. My forehead's filling out now. It's not quite so fast. All of that keeps the wrinkles down on my, when I do it to myself. So I, you know, that's actually maybe the first time I've heard that, particularly that way, Karen, where this idea that, I mean, some people talk about, well, some instructors talk about social annotation being a bit of a burden because it's this new area where you have to spend time interacting, right? Where you might not be replacing anything but adding it in. And so it's more work. But what I hear you see saying, Karen, is this idea of the actual, the time spent grading going down because people have done the reading. And I think that's the first time I've heard that. I mean, some of the other folks on our team might have heard it from someone else, but I think we're constantly in conversations with educators having this dialogue about, well, does, is it gonna make my work easier or is it gonna make it harder? Is it gonna be more for me to do, right? And what I'm hearing from you is it's actually maybe decreased the decrease. Yeah, I find now we've been using Blackboard and the integration of hypothesis and Blackboard from my perspective was very good. We're moving to campus in the fall. So we'll see. So I might need to hold off a little bit on that, but I do believe just having that nuts and bolts that they've read the materials. And in the annotating, I'm not asking for a 10 an article. So it's not like I can still guarantee that they've read every paragraph, but they had to do something. So at least I'm better prepared. And it's fairly easy for me if I read an assignment and it's just totally off base. It's okay, you didn't do the readings, go back. So I find it less frustrating, quicker time. And actually, I may be mispronounced your name. I'm not sure if it's Shauna or Shayna. Sorry about that. I should know better, but yeah, she's agreeing that that's what they're seeing the same kind of thing in Minnesota. And that actually led me to like a whole other question and that is, oh, first I wanted to say Karen, that I think you'll find the transition from Blackboard to Canvas to be probably better even, only because we've been able to do some things in the Canvas environment that we haven't been able to do in the Blackboard environment. And Canvas is actually a little bit easier to work with from a tool integration standpoint. And so we have a tendency to roll new things out there first and then bring them to the other LMSs later. So you may, I'm hoping fingers crossed that you'll be happily surprised when you get onto Canvas. Not that we're trying to plug Canvas here or anything. Every LMS is fine or agnostic when it comes to that. So, but that led me to this other kind of idea and question that I'm wondering what you guys think about. And that's whether or not, just as teachers in your practice, if by using social annotation and kind of getting that extra level of engagement around the reading or at least knowing that there's that level of engagement about the reading and being able to kind of make it visible and interact with it. Is that changing what you think about assigning as readings at all and maybe start with Miriam? I don't know. I'm just throwing this at you out of the blue so you might need to think about it. I think if I understand you correctly that you're asking if the fact that the students will be doing social annotation, if that changes like what article I pick for them to read. Exactly. Yeah, and I would say, no, I'm not that exciting. I mean, I don't have really typically controversial readings or so there are a lot more cut and dry. So I would say no, some that would be richer for social annotation versus I'd say no. I'm sure Karen probably has a lot. Might have a different take on it, but no. Potentially. First off, I'll say that I love OER, so Open Educational Resources. And so hypothesis can, I don't wanna say mimic, but do some of the things that the big textbook publishers are trying to do, i.e. to make sure that students actually read the materials, but this isn't a more social environment. I get to choose the readings, I get to put them together. I'm currently developing a course on entrepreneurial management, and it's all the boring nuts and bolts stuff. And I'm really looking for a two hypothesis with that, because I am putting in some readings that are, I wanna say theoretically scaffolded, i.e. I'm hoping that they are scaffolded there in my brain. Let's see what the students think about it. So easier, harder, harder, and I have one where I take five articles, which is a fair bit for undergrads who are in a condensed course, but I'm hoping that they'll be able to help each other go. But wait, isn't this the same concept that we used in the first article? And I told them that there would be multiple concepts and terminologies, but we'll see how it will work. So I'm hoping the answer is yes, and that I don't think I would have had the nerve to give them these readings without the social annotation capabilities of that. There's no wrong answer. I can write in here, what the heck is this all about? And I actually don't get dinged by the instructor. Other students come in and help me figure it out. So yeah, I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so do you, when you bring together your different texts that you've selected, it sounded like you're primarily bringing them together as PDFs inside Blackboard up till now? Yes, so I have been and I know there's other ways to do it, but I make it one assignment so I can group everything together. And I think that's still a small vestige of my control issues. I am being slightly silly, so. No, not at all. I'm really totally appreciating your perspective here. I'm just, oh, I really wanna, would you be willing to come up on stage, Shauna? So you can at least correct your pronunciation, my pronunciation of your name. You're saying all sorts of good stuff in chat. Oh, wait, we have a raised hand. Yes, that means that we can invite her up on stage. So I'm gonna bring her up on stage so she can finally school me on how to say her name correctly. Hello, we see you and hear you. I'll move to my other camera. I'm sorry, I don't mean, I'm sorry I'm putting so many comments, but your Miriam and Karen, your comments are just making me put so many ideas through my head. So I really appreciate this conversation. And Nate, you were right. It is Shauna, so spot on. Okay, great. I respond to anything, so. Oh yeah, me too. I'm just like, don't call me late for dinner. So actually while you're here, Shauna, if you could explain a little bit about what your focus is in Minnesota, like what is your work like? And kind of answering the same question about how you got involved with social annotation. Yeah, sure, happy to. Well, I'm an academic technologist, so I'm not faculty, I'm not teaching, but I support all of those of you who are. And we got involved, we had been pursuing hypothesis before the pandemic came, and then when the pandemic hit, we said we need something else to add, you know, to give faculty another tool in their toolbox for teaching. And so we did a pilot with hypothesis, and hypothesis was fantastic. I work in the College of Liberal Arts. We have 14,000 students on the Twin Cities campus at the University of Minnesota. We did a very limited pilot, which is what let me, which is why we did these evaluations. We did evaluations both in the fall semester and spring as a way to decide if we were going to pass the university for some money to support this. So that's where we did focus groups with faculty who used it. We had constant contact with them through the semester and did student evaluations. So that's where my reflections are coming from, is from these, we had about 30, I would say 30 to 35 faculty use it each semester about there. Interesting, and is that faculty across different kinds of discipline? I mean, I know you're in liberal arts and sciences, but... Yeah, liberal, philosophy, history, languages, world languages, English, composition, religion, I said. You know, that actually brings me to a question that could be a really big help to me, Shana. Maybe if you could help. We are having a world languages panel here, and we have some really great faculty who are gonna be joining that. But the one thing that I'm missing because I had somebody pull out is somebody, a world language teacher who's working in a language that doesn't use a Latin alphabet. I don't know if you have anyone. I did not have anyone try that. Oh, no, I did. I did have a Russian in Russian. I did have a Russian professor. Yeah, do you think they would be willing to, at the very last minute, pop into something? Let me pop a mini-mail-in-city. Okay, no pressure. If nothing else I could get some feedback from him, I'll be there tomorrow, so. Okay, great. Trying not to take over the comments again. Oh, no, I mean, this office hours is supposed to be exactly this where we just kind of casually get together. And so I really appreciate that you've been so active. And I'll just say that one of the reasons, when it comes to world languages, obviously you can annotate any text that is annotatable in any language can be the target of annotation. And even there are some difficulties in languages that move in different directions, so up and down or right to left as opposed to left to right, but it's all sort of solvable. But one of the real big strengths is the annotations themselves can actually hold almost anything, certainly in terms of language, any alphabet, any language in those alphabets, also equations, and you may have also been using pictures and videos that I was gonna actually ask about that. I see that we're actually getting really close to the end of the hour and you guys probably all have other stuff to do. And so I'll just stop with that and say, and I'll ask all three of you now that Sean is up here too, starting with Miriam, Miriam, do you have a favorite annotation that you've come across that you could kind of talk about that you've seen a student do? Putting you on the spot, boom. Yeah, I don't know. One that really stood out. Like I said, I can't think of one in particular, like I said, I really enjoyed the annotations on the sleep. Just all of that discussion was really, it was good. And have your students mostly been making textual annotations or have there been things like pictures or videos or equations? Mostly all textual. I'm the one that will add in other links to other articles or links to other entities. If the article mentions something that I don't think that they'll be familiar with, then I'll go out and get that resource and put it in the annotation. Right, yeah, linking is the, seems like one of the first kind of advanced things to learn is making a connection out to another text. What about you, Karen? Do you have a favorite annotation that you've come across? So in one of the weeks, you just have to talk, we're in business, right? You have to talk about leaderships and supervisors. So the stories that come out are just great fun about the best and the worst bosses that they've had current, past and sometimes even they're thinking about the future. So those are probably some of the best ones that I've read. I don't have any off the top. Off the cuff. Yeah, well, we wouldn't want to violate student privacy. If you ask again, I just might go back and start getting a collection of the best annotations. Yeah, well, we wouldn't want to violate the student privacy either. And do you find your students going beyond text in any of their annotations? No. No, so something to go for, non-traditional students, which tends to mean, even though we call them non-traditional, it tends to mean they're very traditional. So it tends to be very word-based. But yes, I should try and get them beyond. I am also very word-based. So it fits with my being, but I will keep nudging them. The links are a great idea. Bonus marks for links. I just might try that. Yeah, great. What about in Minnesota, Shana? Have you seen it in the end? I know that you may not see them day-to-day in your work, but. I don't see it day-to-day, but I'm in regular conversation with faculty who are using it and the focus groups and the meetings we've been doing. So yes, there are some who have been really encouraging using the linking, absolutely, but the dance class that they talked about in the research section, she really encouraged them to find video to express and illustrate what they were talking about. So I love the images and we've really been encouraging it to get beyond text. Yeah, that's really, when I heard there was a dance class, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, oh, I think students struggle in other technology, I use students really struggle to be able to use visuals to explain their thinking or to explain how they're thinking and analyzing visuals. So I love the meshing of annotation of a text with visuals. I was just thinking, I could get them to put in a chart, find a chart, because we're about data and the visualization of data, not quite as nice as dance, but it could work, find a chart that represents this article. Oh, that could be fun. Yeah, thank you. You can also sometimes seed this activity. I've seen some educators do this where they'll start off the term with a very informal annotation thing just to get everybody's feet wet. And it'll almost, I don't want to say it's a joke, but it's like a very light piece of reading that's maybe related to your discipline, but isn't a deep reading. And the goal is just to have them annotate it with images that express their reactions to different parts, just as a kind of practice that, because the image linking in images can be a little bit tricky. It's not as obvious as it might seem at first. So giving people a little bit of practice can be a good thing. Well, I know it's, we've now hit the top of the hour. And so I only recently learned what that meant. I, the top of the hour means the hands are at the top of the clock. I guess I was raised by Wolf. So anyway, we didn't have a lot of clocks. Thank you all so much for coming here. I really appreciate it was a great discussion. And I welcome you to please be in touch. If you have questions for hypothesis, you know, I hopefully how to get a hold of our support. I know that Matt is a special favorite of some people and he's with us. So thank you so much. And I'll let you say goodbye and get on with your day. Great. Thank you. Thank you.