 Being able to collaborate is claimed to be a core skill for students as well as for teachers. Besides the concrete how-to of using tools that enable collaboration, there's also a learning curve in how to work together collaboratively on the social level. Good experience in tackling these socio-technical challenges was gained with the free and open-source tool HatchDoc over the last three years. Compared to collaborative writing tools of big ICT players, HatchDoc is closer to a web page than to an office document and thus enables the mixing and remixing of rich media sources of various kinds as well as easy publishing on the web. This way, it empowers learners and teachers to collaboratively develop content in an OER mindset, meaning that their work is intended to be published on the web later on or being developed in the open while others can watch and participate. Hello and thanks for your interest in this video. My name is Axel Durkopp. I work as an advisor for conceptual and technical development at Hamburg University of Technology for the Hamburg Open Online University. In this session, I want to give you a brief insight into the technical and pedagogical potential of using HatchDoc for teaching and learning. Thus, this presentation is divided in two parts. First, I'm going to give you a very short introduction to HatchDoc and its potential as an ad hoc website and OER editor. Second, I'm going to discuss three different use cases HatchDoc was used in. You will find all sources mentioned in this video at this address. Now, introducing HatchDoc. In this part, I will show you how to start a HatchDoc. I'll show you the simple beauty of Markdown. First, I want to embed images, videos and H5P content and add a Creative Commons license before you publish the HatchDoc on the web. What is HatchDoc and how can you use it? As you can see, I'm at demo.hatchdoc.org, which is a demo instance from the developers in order to let people check out the potentials of HatchDoc. All you need to do to get started is click on New Guest Note without any registration or login. This gives you, after a short while, a pad with a cryptic URL you see here, which is also the URL that you would share with others and it's difficult to guess this URL. So, share this URL with others and many, many people can collaborate on this pad at the same time. In order to save some time, I've prepared a pad with some content hosted at my university as this is a free and open source software. It can be hosted wherever you want to for yourself. We have it at our university, which is quite handy and this is what I use here. So, three main aspects of this view I want to point out. You have a two-part view here on the left-hand side, which one might call the source code view. You write markdown. In my references, I will point to some good sources where you can learn more about markdown, but in a minute I will give you a short introduction to the beauty of this simplicity. On the right-hand side, this is the rendered view of this markdown, so this is what comes out when you do this on the left-hand side. And there's also a publish button that we will use at the end in order to really make this public and shareable, for example, as an OER or as some kind of landing page for whatever reason. We will see this later on. Another point that is important is for you to learn more about Hashtag. There's a question mark right here. When you click on this, you will get some help on markdown and also on the features that Hashtag has and that I cannot mention in this video here. Please look for yourself. And last thing is there are three different views. This is the one that you would probably share with others to attract them to the content and not to the editing. So if you want to inform people about the content of this document, you would share this link. If you click on this one and share this link, this might be an invitation to collaborate on this document because you show people where and how to add content and contribute to this Hashtag document. Well, that's all for now. Let's have a look at markdown. As you can see, there is an icon bar on top which is comparable to the icon bars in office text processor programs and other programs that you might know for writing. But the main thing is that these icons cause special characters. In your text to be inserted like hashes for headlines, like dashes for lists and asterisks for bold and italics. There's also some kind of special markup for links, which you can find here and all the other tips and tricks you will find under the question mark help that I showed you. Well, this is in short what markdown is. So it is a way of writing text and putting special characters in between to cause the rendering of this website here and we're in the browser. So this is also a website as this is. But if you click on the I here, this looks more like a website. And this is what I like so much about Hashtag. It's not an online text processor. It's some kind of a website generator. It's very easy for people to dive in without knowing HTML to write something on the web and finally publish this. It's always just a one pager can be very, very long. But the killer aspect, the killer feature of Hashtag is that many, many people can work on this single document together be authors of the same text of the same website and have perhaps the idea in mind to share this later on on the web for others to profit from it. Now, let's see what makes this potential of being more a website than an office document. What makes this so big? First of all, I want to show you how to easily embed an image here. I've prepared one for you, of course, cat content. This is clear and I just drag and drop this image here to this tab with my document and drop this here. It gets uploaded to the instance of my university. And this gives you the possibility to, for example, ask your class to please find all cat images on the web and collect them here. It's as easy as that. Within minutes, you will have 20, 50, whatever cat images or whatever images here because it's an easy way to have a picture gallery of a certain object or whatever the idea might be. So this is very easy. Of course, this deep linking is not very nice as I did it, but as you have seen, instead of downloading this image, I just copied it over so it got uploaded again to the Hatch Talk server at my university so there is no deep linking here. The question is, do I have the right to have this document, to have this image in my pad? But as long as I have not published the pad, this will not be found in search engines, this document. And as long as this scope is protected or something other than freely, this won't be a thing that might cause legal problems. So at this moment, this is really a safe space and you can really collect things here because they don't appear in search engines and won't be found unless or until you publish this Hatch Talk. Now, what else is possible here? Let's add a video to this document. So I scroll down to get some free space here and as we are on a website, it's easy to, for example, embed an iframe. So I take this video here and click on Share and click on Embed. And then I take this here to copy it over and paste it here. And now I have the video in my Hatch Talk document. Also a very nice assignment for students to ask them, please go to YouTube and find everything you can have on web development or HTML or whatever the assignment is. And they bring back a collection of videos that they like, that they can create, they can write things about the video here and within minutes you will get a list of lots of videos that you can use for the class or for later on or have a curated document of certain videos. Now, and this points to this iframe here, which is a classical HTML element that makes it possible to embed other web contents into a website or as you can see here in the Hatch Talk document, this points to the potential of this editor because whatever you can have as an iframe can be embedded into a Hatch Talk document given that the server where the content comes from allows embedding, but yeah, most of the times in my experience this seems to be possible. Now, another example which makes Hatch Talk, for example an interactive document for learning is embedding H5P content here. So another space here, I have prepared another example with H5P content and as you can see this is the example of an interactive video. So I can click on Embed to get me this iframe mark up here and I paste this at this place here. Well, it is a little bit too wide and there's a solution for that. I use a service that is called Embed Responsively which is great because when I post this iframe mark up here and click on Embed, it gives me some mark up, a little bit longer the mark up, but as you can see what I have from that is I will have a responsive container here which also looks great if you open it on a mobile phone. So that's it, so let's see. This is the document and if this is what you want to publish, well, go ahead. I would say we should add some Creative Commons license as it is good style or best practice in OER context. So at the bottom of the whole thing let's add a new, well, I scroll this up for everybody to see. Let's add a license and I've prepared the license generator of the Creative Commons website and I just grab this here, copy it over and paste it here and as you can see at the bottom of the page you have a clear signal what people can do with this document. Of course this video and this video and the image should be under Creative Commons. This shouldn't be a problem here because I checked this before so this is a Creative Commons document video, this too and this image is CC0 so now I can click on Publish and publish the document on the web and this is the link that you would now use for example in social media or in your learning management system or wherever you want to share this document on the web. As you can see it counts the views here and if you want people to edit this note they can click here but if you don't want others that you don't know to edit the document please think of using this scope selector as I call it where you can very easily decide on who is able to see and to edit this document. Now that's all for the short introduction to how to use HatchDoc. Please refer to the Help page that I showed you and to the features document here and also to the slide example because you learn a lot from looking at the source code of these documents of how to work with it and what else you can do from a technical perspective. After this short introduction to HatchDoc I want to talk about my experiences in three different scenarios. First I use HatchDoc for teaching scholarly writing in class. My experience is that when I start from the first session in a semester with the conception of an assignment of a term paper students have much better results when they finally write the paper than they have when they start at the end of the semester and deal with the assignment for the first time. That means that at the beginning of the semester I set up a HatchDoc document with a scaffold of what they should think about for their assignment and then I ask them to copy this scaffold into a HatchDoc document that they host individually for themselves. If they want to, they can share the link to this pad with the class. We do this with a chat tool called MetaMost that we use to chat in class. So most of them does it but they share it also with me and this gives me the possibility, the opportunity to add references that I think they should have a look at or read or I can ask them to find a good research question and comment on this research question. So from week to week I have a look at these pads and make comments on what the progress is that the students have in their pads and I can give short assignments of please write an introduction or please find five relevant sources that you think you can use. And this iteration over the development of their term papers finally ends in a good starting point for really writing the paper and my experience is that it's really fun to write, to read their papers when they hand them in because they were planned together and it was not something like, well, some surprising thing. And to give you just a short view of how this might look like you can see this here. It's in German but please just have a look at the structure of this. So this is what I do with them. I call this in document chat. In other tools you might do this in the margin but this is not possible in Hatch. So we do it this way. And you can always have some comments on the text that the students wrote here. And yeah, as you can see this is full of thoughts and comments and links that we have found the student and me sometimes other students as well. And this is important also because it makes the writing process not a so intimate thing as it usually is. It gives students the possibility to open up their writing for others in an open source way. So release early, release often and let others have a look at your writing. And sometimes this makes it better but quite often the biggest task is really for the students to open up their writing. But this is the social level that I was talking about which is important here. And here is something that students can learn from this small example to work in the open on the web if they want to. I don't force them and perhaps find out something about the advantages of release early, release often and fail often and fail fast and all these things that you can say about open source development. The second experience I want to talk about is using Hatch.Doc for developing learning material together. So this is more a staff member thing meaning that colleagues work together for example on a learning material, an OER that needs to be prepared and published finally. And with a colleague that I coached in developing a learning material for a learning arrangement that's called collaborative ideation we used Hatch.Doc as you can see here. So this is his document where he and another colleague wrote down everything from first ideas to project management, project management things up to content and as I showed before real media embedding like this timeline here that you can see is also an iframe as I showed before or an H5P element that they wanted to have in the final learning arrangement. And this gave them the opportunity to do some kind of rapid prototyping without the clicking and learn management systems in order to see this and to see the results and without needing to share back end access of complicated content management systems. It was just the link that they shared among them and with me so that it was a very, very good way of discussing every week in a geofix discussing the content development. So and well this is a very long document as I said before this is perhaps an advantage as well as a disadvantage but as you have these anchor points here you can absolutely jump to these headlines here you can share the anchors for example in a chat and discuss about certain things here and this is the sketch and this is really a prototypical sketch that then was transferred into the content management system of Hamburg-Opernan University where you can see the same thing that I showed before the timeline but this was then a certain point in time where they really copied over the whole content of the pad before they reworked in this Hatch.Document for conception and for collecting the media and then transferring it over. There was a great process without all the barriers that back end clicking of content management systems have. Besides this pad they also had another pad that I want to show because it gives you the impression of what I mean with Hatch.Document can be used to build a website right away so for four workshops they hosted they needed to announce what was happening they needed to announce where the entry points to boards and pads and other sources were and so they created in Hatch.Document some kind of a landing page that you can see here where every information for the four workshops is embedded and they could easily correct this even why they were hosting the workshops they made it possible for others to work on this document as well during the workshops and had a very very low barrier collaboration style in working on this document. This was posted on social media and as you can see it was viewed quite a lot of times here and this is another example from this project with the use of a Hatch.Document to publish a simple website. The third and last example I want to talk about is the collection of information with learners in synchronous and asynchronous session style. As you can see in the references it was a course on robotics and AI where learners met in a learning circle learning circles by peer-to-peer university and there was no OER in German on robotics and AI that we wanted to use in this learning circle for the learners to walk through as the peer-to-peer university concept of learning circles supposes. So the decision was well then let's write the material ourselves. So we started with a Hatch.Document with no content and discussed everything we knew and wanted to know about robotics and AI in the group while we were in a video conference tool with a Hatch.Document open we put down everything that we were speaking about all the links that we shared all the thoughts that we had on these links we shared them in the chat and we added them to the pad and after six weeks we had really a pad that we were proud of because there was so much thoughts and discussion points and links in it that we thought well let's go on with it let's try out what can we do with that and everybody agreed in this group agreed on let's publish this as an OER let's see perhaps someone needs the collection of these links and our thoughts and as you will find in the references I will show this here for you we made a little book out of it which was quite easy because the pad was written in Markdown and Markdown is a language that can easily be converted to other formats like HTML or PDF documents or even slideshows now what we did here and I just scroll through it that you can see what came out of this this is the content of our pad we put some work in it to make it look like that but not much because it's the exported pad and some emails that we had written together converted to a PDF document and published as an OER with the DOI so that others can use it so that was another great experience having Hatchdog as this a website like editor which makes it possible for learners and teachers alike to add whatever they find on the web collect this, put this together, create this and finally perhaps not necessarily but perhaps publish the whole thing for me Hatchdog is not just another tool with great features to collaborate on texts it is more a website editor than a writing tool for office document like texts it has the possibility to publish what you wrote at the end on the web make it findable in search engines and share it with others in a very easy way you do not need a web server to upload the website because it's already uploaded technical feature, great but the second thing that is from a pedagogical perspective even more important I think is that it is a vehicle to learn collaboration on a social level so you have to be brave and courageous to really write while others are watching I don't say that this is what one should or must do but if you really want to find out what collaboration means on different levels this is a way to check this out so negotiating while you are synchronously working on this path and this is something that I really like about Hatchdog that it is a playground to learn about yourself your openness towards others towards your digital identity on the web and how far you want to go with your content, do you want to publish do you want to keep it for yourself all these grades of working with the tool are given here besides many other features that perhaps you find out please get in contact with me if you like Hatchdog and if you have experience with it you will find my information in the references so thanks for watching