 As everybody knows very well now, I don't even know why I keep saying it. I'm maybe Angel from hypothesis and I am really honored to be able to moderate this panel discussion on social annotation in world languages. And it's a really complex topic. So we just have a couple of panels here. We're hopefully gonna be able to dive in pretty deep. That's what I'm hoping at least. And we'll get to that in just a second. But I wanted to just pause for a moment and have us all take a deep breath. I don't know how much of this conference you've been participating in both my fellow panelists here and everyone who's in the session participating. But this is day four now. And I think when we get involved in these things sometimes we don't take a pause and just relax for a minute and just bask in the moment. So we have an hour and a half here. So I think we can just take a moment to just recognize where we are and focus in. Take a deep breath and then maybe move forward with a little bit of calmness and tension. So I am super honored to have both of these folks here. I'm really excited to have Rosario Rojasalazar here who I haven't had a chance to collaborate with much yet but I've been desperate to do so. Ever since I got wind of all the things that she's been doing in Mexico. And so I'll have her introduce herself a little bit more in depth in a second. But I also really wanna offer us a very big honored welcome to Federico Pianzola who is joining us. And I'm not actually sure where you are if you're in Italy right now. Is that true? Yes, I am. Okay, because I know that you work internationally in a lot of different contexts. And these two fine folks have been working with social annotation using the languages other than English, world languages that we might say. And in really interesting and creative ways that we're gonna delve into that really deeply. But before we get started in their presentation let me just give each one of them a chance to introduce themselves and give a little bit of context about where they're calling from and what their main set of practices is in education. So I'll start with you Rosario. I'm really happy and honored to be here sharing with you some of my experiences using social annotation with my students here in Mexico and in Ecuador in Spanish. And I'm a professor of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Mexico here in Mexico. And I'm an invited professor in Ecuador in La Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador. And besides that, I am related with topics of open science, open access and digital humanities. Then I don't know if Federico is going to present himself or I'm going to. Yeah, let's hear from Federico first. And I really, I apologize in advance that we're gonna hold this conversation in English which is maybe strange to do but since we're gonna be crossing a lot of different language boundaries. No, no, no, no, don't worry. I hope you could understand my English. Absolutely English, okay. Absolutely perfectly. I know it's better than my Spanish although I do speak a little bit. So Federico, if I could ask you to do the same sort of thing and give us some context. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the invitation. It's an honor and a pleasure. I've been learning a lot in these past days. And so as you said briefly, I'm from Milan, Italy but I'm also working in Seoul, South Korea at Saga University. And I'm currently doing a project comparing the relationship between Korean young people and Italian young people with technology in relation to how they read literature and especially how they read the fiction. And so I've been exploring how they deal with the phenomenon that we call digital social reading more broadly. So not just including social annotation but also posting reviews using Instagram like with the phenomenon called Book Instagram or reviews on YouTube. So many different kind of ways of using social media and digital media to read and to talk about the decision. That's so great. And certainly we don't need to just focus on annotation here. We can talk about all the different kind of social learning and digital reading things that are going on, social reading, all those words mixed together in different ways. And it's so great too that both of you cross so many different boundaries, not only in languages but also international boundaries both working in at least two different countries and maybe more. So I welcome you on that level. So if I'm not mistaken, I believe that Rosario at least has a little bit of a formal kickoff that she wants to do for her piece. And so, and Federico, I'll just check with you too. Did you also have something a little more formal? Okay, great. So let's hear from Rosario first. Then we'll go from Federico and then we'll move into the discussion mode after that and get involved with the audience as well. Does that make sense? All right, so I'm gonna step back here and meet myself and give you the stage, Rosario. Okay, thank you. And I'm gonna share my screen. Now I'm gonna talk about this social annotation with word languages. Particularly I'm gonna talk about my experience using hypothesis here in Mexico and a little bit in Ecuador. Okay, then, okay, this is the topics that I'm going to talk about. The experience before the COVID-19 in Mexico and Ecuador, and then some things related with this useful tool during pandemic, it was crazy. And then the resources and tools that we have been using and the sharing social annotation with colleagues all over in Latin America. And I'm going to share with you some voices of my students. Okay, first of all, okay, I started to use hypothesis for social annotation even before the pandemic started. I was happy and I didn't know. And in the case of Mexico, I just started to work with pre-graduate social sciences students from my political science, sociology and communication in a course related with qualitative methodology. The average of the students were 19, up 23 years old. At first they were surprised using this platform because they are used to reading from photocopies. I don't know in your countries, but here in Mexico or in Latin America, it's really common to use photocopies for reading and it's so sad. But they easily solve the learning curve. I was so happy. And they were very enthusiastic read and they read more than useful and share with other. And I'm gonna share with you some of their experiences and their voices at the end of this presentation. But in opposite, in the case of Ecuador, as I told you, I'm a professor there in a master degree on urban planning in a methodology course too. And they are a little bit older, no? Between, I don't know, 27 and 40 years old. In a face-to-face course, the use of the tool implied a lot of challenges both due to the digital skills of the students and the platform in English. And they made a great effort, but their annotation were very few and I think they were like not really enthusiastic, no? I don't know if that was because of the, because they were older than the other students or because I really don't know, but okay. They tried to do that. I don't know if I tried to compare the case before the pandemic between Mexico and Ecuador in a face-to-face course. In the case of Mexico, they were very young students related to digital apps. Then for them, because they are very young, it's not a very new thing to use a digital app. They consider the use of social annotation as a game and have fun with that. And they study disciplines involved in the development of communication and argumentation skills. So social annotations are really interesting for them. In the opposite case from Ecuador students, they were middle-aged students, most of them parents, almost all working in the public service in Ecuador, which lead time to learn digital skills. The use of social annotation is an activity that they could skip. They are used to reading on paper and do not have much interesting in changing. Their professional profile is, or where geography, architecture, engineering, they don't consider their development of communication skills as something central in their training. Probably because of that the difference, I don't know, in the experience or it could be explained. Now, what happened before the pandemic started? It was a, I don't know, a really big, big challenge. In the case of Ecuador, the high levels of contagion in the very beginning of 2020 and the lack of organization at the university forced the suspension of activities for a couple of months. Upon the return from activities, some students left school. And we discontinued the use of almost all digital tools but video conferences. But in the case of Mexico was different. The school semester had already started when the pandemic, when the lockdown started. And we had a couple of weeks working when lockdown began. We had started using hypothesis. So the switch to emergency remote learning was easier. However, summer emergency action had to be taken. I mean, we needed to prepare, or in this case, I need, I prepare different tutorials of the use of, for the use of hypothesis and other tools. We opening a public group in Sotero with all the course readings, all available in open access because the libraries were closed. Then we needed to take care that they could access to all the bibliography. And we share experiences of social annotation on Twitter and TikTok. I don't use TikTok, but the students they wanted to sharing TikTok and okay, it was okay for me. And they try to tag the authors. Very few of them answered, but it was funny. And then they made some videos about the learning experiences and posting the blog that we have for the course. And it was a very, very interesting experience. Which one was the resources and tools that we use? First of all, in order to integrate the bibliography in one place, we used Sotero because this was an easy way to share and access the bibliography. This group is open. If you want to, I don't know, to visit it is the link is over there. And the students didn't use any bibliographic reference. Then it was a little bit difficult, but at the end that they learned. They keep the key importance of open access was, I don't know, relevant. Because I needed to adjust the syllabus because not all the text can be unnoted. Some of them there were not available or suitable to make annotations with Sotero or other it was only on paper or there were some bibliographies that were not available or no have the rights to share. Then we adjust all the syllabus and it's over there. Then the students go to Sotero and identify which one is the bibliography and they open this bibliography all of them in open access. And then they open or the hypothesis extension and start to make the annotations, the social annotations. The other thing that I started to do was some resources to reduce the learning curve. Some tutorials, I made a lot of tutorials. Some of them are the ones that are here. We had little time to adapt the face-to-face course to a virtual one. The tutorials in Spanish were decisive for the students. And I upload all the tutorials to YouTube. Why? This is a tricky answer. I made a survey among my students and I identified that 40% of these course students access their classes online via their own cell phone data. In Mexico, I don't know in other countries, but the use of social networks, including YouTube, does not consume their cell phone data because of that this was important for them. I don't know these resources were in YouTube. Okay, then after that I made an hypothesis tutorial. There is the link of this tutorial because at the very beginning, the students had some doubts or questions about the use, but I was not with them. Then because of that, I started to do this tutorial. And then this hypothesis tutorial in Spanish was seen by teachers and students from all Latin American countries. That was really surprised because I didn't expect this success. Then due to the interest the UNAM, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, which is not my university, this is the biggest university in Mexico, asked me to organize a workshop in Spanish to share the use of this tool. Remember that we was in the middle of the pandemic and all the professors and the students were looking for tools or some helping, I don't know tools in order to continue with the classes. Then we started the social annotation and then we opened of course this group. And the social annotation allowed to fill the gaps of not being able to talk face to face due to the lockdown. Then it was really interesting because I was using hypothesis before the pandemic and after that. And I identified that after the pandemic for the students were more important the social annotation because they could share things that they couldn't share because they were isolated in their own houses. The students committed themselves to using the tool and there were some of them that tried to get other teachers to use it. But that was not possible due to the digital skills gap among the teachers that was so, so sad. Then when we started to share this annotation with colleagues all over America was thanks to the Unam organization of this workshop. It was held in I think in August of 2020. The workshop as I told you was organized by the Unam library. More than a thousand people attend the workshop. I was really surprised. I couldn't imagine all the interest that these kind of tools could be, I don't know, could be have. There were teachers and students, most professors and students from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Spain. Wow, it was crazy. And all of them at the end of this workshop agree on the need of resources in Spanish to facilitate the use of this kind of tools. Then I want to share with you some of the voices of students. I don't want to take a lot of time, but if you want, I can share with you, I don't know the links, but they post some posts in the blog that we have for the class. This is a couple of them. The first one called Hypothesis, a revolutionary way of doing reading checks. And the other one is the unbearable likeness of being a student online. And they, in this case, they share in their own world words, the experience of use of this tool. This is really, really fun. If you want, I can show you some of the videos that they made, was really fun. I don't know, making some songs or poetry or joking about the use of hypothesis and the way in which they really appreciate this. They are a lot of videos and are really, really fun. And this is some of the experiences that I can share with you of some of the students. There are a lot of them, but then I want to share some of them. In this case, Alan Colleen, he is a student of communication. He said, he's saying, using hypothesis forced me to read more carefully, to think about how the ideas are related to other topics, to add questions about the text and to think of examples to share in the comments. Without that doubt, this exercise required more concentration and time than doing a summary or just reading a PDF. And he continues, in other classes, we do readings, but there are not many ways to ask questions about the specific point or to know what the classmates think. When we use hypothesis, all of these could be done before class. I thought it also requires a lot of commitment and punctuality on the part of students. Also, since we use hypothesis in class, I have seen that they have used in events and in conferences beyond the university, I study art, so it was good to have a training in using it first with the group before using in more spaces and public. And he's another student. He says that using hypothesis help him to do more specific analysis and various perspective of digital content that not only help him or them, consider perspectives from the academic community. I think it's a very practical opportunity for a practical dissemination of knowledge and opinions of daily content that we read without having to separate ourselves from the text to follow the comments and the highlight of ideas. Mara, she is a student of political sciences, and she says, we made a group with the hypothesis and wrote some comments in the text so we could read what other colleagues had written. That gave us an idea of what caught their attention in the reading. The same thing did not always catch our attention. There were also occasions when we only make a paraphrase of what the author was proposing, perhaps that did not speak of our critical capacity but of different interpretation of a single message. It was interesting to look at a single object from perspectives of your college from other careers. And Andrea, she is starting a communication too. She says, using a hypothesis has been of great help for academic matters. I can identify perceptions and the point of view of other people who have consulted the same patients or documents. Thanks to this practice, I had new recommendations for articles that they complement my research and work. And she's continued. I don't want you to take a lot of time. Veronica, she's a professor and she says, discovering hypothesis as a tool for a web annotation was to move from pencil to paper to a layer of the web that allowed me to connect with my students making more efficient the time invested in reading and reviewing the text. And there are a lot of comments related with this. If you want, I can share with you the links of the videos Okay, the videos are in Spanish, then it's a shame, but they are really, really fun. And I think, I don't know, it was a great experience. And is that all in my part? I don't know, if you want to continue talking or sharing other experiences, I'm here. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much Rosario. That was fantastic. And I think we'll, let's hold on to some of the ideas and thoughts that came out of what you were talking about. I think some people would really like to see some of those examples that you brought forward. Let's hear from Federico first and then we'll, we have plenty of time. And so we can come back to some further discussion and delve into some of those examples. That's okay. Okay, thank you Rosario. It was amazing to hear about your research. And I want to have all those links and check what you did with your students. I will share my presentation now. So my goal is more related to reading fiction, as I said. So it's a very different kind of text. It's not necessarily related to an educational activity. So people can read fiction whenever they want. And the challenge here is to how to bring social annotation into the reading of fiction. And is this helpful? So what I try to do is that to create a reading experience and which looks like reading an e-book or even more a printed book. So I created this digital book using RStudio and the bookdown package, which allows me to create this book format with the font as a series. And there is a table of content on the side that you can hide and can be adapted to various needs also for accessibility like exchanging contrast, increasing the font. And it's a responsive kind of text. So it can adapt it to different kind of screens and mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. So I wanted to really help students being able to read whichever format they wanted and with whichever devices they prefer. I did this study in comparing how people, how students, university students are reading fiction in Italy and South Korea. And the size of the classes was very different. In Italy, it was an undergraduate course. So we had a lot more students. You see, 111 who participated. While in South Korea, it was a master course, very specific, so we had just 17 students. But it was quite successful. I think there was a lot of conversation, even though they didn't have almost any experience using social annotation tools or digital social reading tools more broadly. So they don't read fan fiction modes. They don't post reviews online. Their use of digital and social media for reading was really low. And to measure and to see how they differ in the use of social annotation for reading fiction, I used both the quantitative methods analyzing the comments, but I also used quantitative methods. So I used questionnaires to measure their experience. And I have the data only for Italy at the moment. So I used the social annotation scale developed by René Kallier and others, which has two dimensions, perceived learning and the sense of community. And so the range is from one to five and the question is like, how much do you agree with this statement? And the mean was quite high, it was four out of five. So even though they didn't have any experience with the social annotation or very low experience with social annotation, they thought that using social annotating fiction helped them learn more about how to interpret the text and how to engage with the text and also how to empathize with the characters we will see in a minute. And then the second dimension is the sense of community. So again, the scale is from one to five and the mean was a three. So a bit more than the mid-value. So again, the sense of community was something that emerged during this experience. So the fact that students were able to talk to each other made them feel more part of the classroom. And another dimension that I measured was that the factor called the intrinsic motivation. So how much the people were interested and enjoyed the activity according to their personal attitude and their individual interest in using this kind of tool. And again, here in the range from one to seven, which was allowed for the replies, the mean value was 4.20 days. So quite above the mid-value. So it was a confirmation that this kind of tool can be successfully used for motivating people to engage in a different way with fiction. So I think to conclude, I think it's a possibility which is also available not only in English speaking countries, but also in Italy and in South Korea, even though the context of the educational context is very different. Because in Italy, we have policies which are very liberal and pushing a lot towards the adoption of new technologies. Whereas on the other side, in South Korea, education is more conservative as a more conservative approach. But at the same time, they have maybe the most developed ecosystem of digital services and digital infrastructure. So they do everything with mobile phones at the moment. You really can cover all the aspects of your life with mobile phones and even different kind of entertainment. Web tools, which are web-based form of comics are very popular in South Korea. But still, I'm notating socially text, it's not a practice that is so common at the moment. So I think there's a space to introduce this technology and this kind of practice is more broadly, even within educational context. And yeah, I also asked the students how they would like to reuse recommended this tool. And you see that here, it's even higher. They had such a good experience using this tool that out of seven, which was the maximum, 5.6 is the mean value that people scored on this scale. So they really would like to use this kind of tool in other courses and they also willing to recommend this to friends and other classmates. Coming to the kind of annotations that I found to this text, they're really wide and I didn't find any particular difference between Italian and South Korean students. So there were intertapsal references not only to other books, but also to other media. So films and songs or other cultural references. There were references to autobiography to interpret some parts of the text, maybe, but also more direct response to the behaviors of characters. And maybe you're aware that some researchers, I think Tom's and Poo, they developed this model of three kinds of affordances of social annotation like social, literary and linguistic kind of annotations. And I found all of them in various ways in both Italy and in South Korea. So interpretation of literary details, linguistic reflection about the meaning of certain words, maybe comments about the witness activation, both emotionally, imaginatively, and as a kind of reflection on the text itself, but also actualization. We use the text from the beginning, middle of 21st century, both in Italy and South Korea. So readers actualized the content which of the stories is set maybe 150, 60 years before the actual era. And then again, interpretation of character behaviors but also aesthetic evaluation of what they were reading. And also more on the social aspect, there were requests for help with interpretation of the text. So again, peer learning is quite a valuable affordance of social annotation. And yeah, generalization from narrative episodes. So starting from something lived by a character, they were trying to extract or abstract some more general truth that could be applied to their own lives. And but also activation of previous knowledge that is needed to interpret some literary devices, some conventions of literary genres, for instance, or even some behaviors that characters have. So that readers had to resort to their previous knowledge to understand what it means to behave in a certain way. I think that's it for now. Thank you very much for listening to me and I just want to drop a note here about a book that it's available for open peer review at the moment on the MIT Press platform. So where I summarize the work that I've been doing in the previous years, and it's in open access now and it can be annotated by all of you. And I really look forward to learn more from your own practices with social annotation so that I can improve this book and make publish it eventually. Thank you very much. That was so interesting, Federica. And what I really love here is the difference between the practices that Rosario is talking about and what you're doing, but different and complementary and some interesting things coming out of them. And I'll just ask, is the book that you just gave us the link to, is that published in the same platform that Raimi and Ontario published annotation in? It is, it is, it's in the same platform, yes. I got the inspiration from them. I was already thinking about publishing in open access and doing open peer review and I found the perfect tool when I read their books. Great, yeah, and I'll just put out to folks, that's the Pub-Pub, it's a publishing platform called Pub-Pub, which is sort of funny, right? And it has its own built-in annotation technology that isn't the same thing as hypothesis, just in case anybody goes there and is like, wait, it looks different. I did a little bit of peer review on Raimi and Ontario's annotation book and found it to be really a rewarding experience. So definitely encourage folks to also do that with Federico's work. So I have a, I wanna start things off first by asking what I think might be a kind of basic question. And first, thank you so much for giving us all the context of what you guys have been working on because now like I can, I really fully understand, I think the, well, not fully, but I understand more about the background of what you're doing. But let me ask this first and maybe start with Rosario. So when we're talking about annotating and social annotating and reading, especially in different languages, there's a whole bunch of different possibilities, right? There's the text itself and the language that it may be in. It could be in more than one language, right? And then there's the annotation space and annotations themselves have the possibility of being multilingual, right? And so I'm kind of curious, and I'll have Federico follow up on this too, but when you and your annotation work with the students, and I realized that it crossed many different boundaries, so there may be many different examples here, but were you primarily annotating works in, say, Spanish or some other single language and then annotating also in that shared language or was there multilingual reading and annotation going on? It's a multilingual reading and annotation. In the case of the, okay, it depends in the course that I give here in Mexico, we should say related with methodology, qualitative methodology, the students, they are very young and they are so enthusiastic and they could read English, but it's a little bit more difficult to write or speak. Then because of that, I can share with them some text in English, for example, for they are any problem, but they make all the annotations in Spanish, you know? Then it is a little bit crazy, but for them it's easier. Some of them, mainly those who, I don't know who has some skills in English, probably they can make the annotations in English, but I leave them, I don't know, as they prefer. If they want to annotate in Spanish, it is okay for me or if they make the annotations in English, it's okay for me too. The thing that is crazy and they were surprised because they thought that probably the authors who they were reading, you know, would be interested in knowing the annotations and they were very, very few authors who, I don't know, who give a response or a feedback. And I think that that was because all the authors of the text, they don't have Twitter, for example, then it was really difficult to find them or they don't understand what the social annotation is. But there were a couple of authors who answered and they were so happy, really, really happy because they felt, I don't know, important in there. And yeah, it was interesting. That makes sense. And so it really sounds like you've got the multi-lingual juice flowing for sure. And so we're the only two languages involved, really just Spanish and English then on one side of the other. Or were there any indigenous languages at work? No. No, okay. I'm always digging for other little nuggets too. I was really trying hard to have another educator here who worked in some non-Latin alphabets languages, but actually Federico may be able to weigh in on that. For example, excuse me that I interrupt, but in the case of Ecuador, for example, it was different, the students is much more difficult for them to read in English. I don't know, probably because they were older or they are not habituated to, but all the texts that I share with them was in Spanish and some of them made the annotations in Quechua, which is the traditional language of Ecuador. Wow. And he didn't understand, of course, anything because I... I would love to see that. Quechua, yes. I've never seen an annotation. Yes, I'm gonna look for that. Okay, yeah, I would love to see one of those. That would be awesome. Does that use the Latin alphabet? No, no, no. It's the same, yeah. Yeah, same one. Okay, all right. So same kind of question to you then, Federico. I'm wondering this multilingual aspect. So the texts you were reading and the language of the annotations themselves, was there a mix there or what languages were going on? No, in Italy, we have been annotating Italian literature texts in Italian. In South Korea, it was an international program taught in English. So even though there is a lot, there are a majority of the students are Korean, it's all taught in English and the texts that we are reading are also English texts. Even though a strong knowledge of Korean culture and Korean history is required to understand the texts. So of course, elements of Korean culture emerge. Just maybe there are some mixing of language, of English and Korean, but students have to write their comments in English. But they tend to also to practice their transliteration skills because they have to learn to translate Korean into the Latin alphabet. And so they tend to use both English, they tend to use English, the transliteration of Korean into English and also some Korean words or sentences when they cannot express themselves perfectly into English. So there's an interesting mix there. Yeah, that is interesting. I was wondering actually if, so there wasn't, was there any reading or annotating in Korean? No, for this classes, no, because it's all taught in English. Right. I'm just curious if, because I believe you were using hypothesis outside of an LMS environment, is that right? Do you know if any of your students went on to use it in other contexts? I asked them about the intention to use it or the previous use of digital annotation tools, but I'm not sure if they're using hypothesis or some other tools. But it was, and as I said before, Korean education is very conservative. So there is a very little innovation in terms of digital technologies introduced apart from video lecture and you just listened to the professor talking. That makes sense. Yeah, I was really, I'm very interested in the idea that annotation gives this annotation layer, if you will, introduces a new space on text, right? Where there can be a multilingual interchange, which I just, I find that to be like a fascinating area that we probably haven't really fully explored yet, although you all are both on the forefront of it. I did notice that Diego is sharing some interesting statistics that he's compiled about the use of Spanish in particular online. And yeah, that was actually my motivation for wanting to learn Spanish too is because it is so widely used. So one thing that I always think is a little bit interesting to maybe try on these panels, if you guys have questions for each other. So Federico, I don't know, as you were listening to what Rosario was saying, did it, did any questions come up for you that you wanted to post her? Yes, I mean, I was, you're using this for, I saw in the slides for teaching quantitative methods, qualitative methods in, so it's a social science class. Do you know if the students that were using social annotation also for other classes, or if they adopted them, this tool for their personal use? No, that's a shame. When they discovered this tool, they were at the beginning a little bit surprised. And then they loved, not mainly during the pandemic because all the sharing that this make possible. But at the end, some of them told me that they wanted that other professors use this kind of tools or another kind of tools, but all the teachers, all the professors were, I don't know, they didn't want to. And I assume that this, because of this digital skills gap, I suppose it's a problem related with the professors. The age of the professors, all of them are really old, older than me. And they are not really, I don't know, related with this digital topics. And most of the students during the pandemic have been so, I don't know, disappointed because the virtual classes has been so boring, so bored, so bored, no? Because the professor is talking like this during two hours, and they didn't use any kind of, I don't know, tools or things or whatever. And even the students asked them to use it and they rejected. And the university didn't, I don't know, push the professors to do that because it's difficult. It's not, I don't know. It's not in the culture, I think. I suppose, I don't know. I suppose that it's related with the age of the professors. I don't know. But actually, there was now a very active association, no profit association in Italy doing annotations of literary texts on Twitter. So they normally did, they had shared a calendar and when defining the time when they were reading chapters of books and then they were creating comments about the books. And they were able to involve some very active teachers, even like over 50 or 60s would. So in this case, I think it was not a matter of age, but the role of the teachers was very important in having students being motivated in writing comments and sharing their thoughts about what they were reading. And many people have already stressed this in the previous days, in our talks, but the role of educators is really important for the introduction of these kind of tools. And as you were saying, Rosario, the fact that there are no tutorials available in Spanish that you had to create them to make students and learn how to do that, it's really a shame. And we should do more to make these tools available in other contexts in other countries. Yes, that was surprising to me because I made that tutorial that is in YouTube for my students, thinking of them in order to help them. And then when I started to see that was a lot of views and there were a lot of people all over Latin America, I don't know, asking me about the tool. And I said, no, I only use it. I don't know who are them. And it was crazy. And with that tutorial, I realized that there is a lack of resources in other languages, mainly, I don't know, I'm thinking in Spanish too, because there are a lot of people in a lot of countries that are speaking in Spanish. I think I was reading the collaboration of Diego de la Era, and he says that is the second more spoken language in the world. Then I think that, of course English, of course English, but I think that probably if, I don't know, we try to make an effort or to collaborate in order to produce much more resources in Spanish, could be good. And I think that another, I don't know, another reason, no, I don't know, I think that could be related that other professors don't use these kind of tools. It's not only, okay, probably the age or no, I don't know, but it's because of the kind of text that they are using in their silos. Because there are a lot of professors, at least here in Latin America, that they still use books in, I don't know, paper, but not, or photocopies, as I told you, no. Old photocopies, then photocopies are, I don't know, scanned, you know, and it's really difficult to make the annotations of that, in that kind of a text. Well, that's a real problem. Yeah, and maybe we could circle back to this idea of making hypothesis itself or social annotation in general more available in different languages because it's a thorny one and I apologize because hypothesis hasn't done everything that we can do, certainly not as much as Rosario, it's time for Spanish, so single-handedly, she's done great work there. I wanna throw that back, unless Federico, you had something else you wanted to follow up and I was gonna do it the other way and see if Rosario had a question for you. Yes, please go ahead. I don't know if you did, Rosario, about something about Federico's work. No, I'm really impressed with this, I don't know, cultural change because I don't know Italian, it's almost similar, no, at least when you speak in Italian, I almost understand something, but in Korean or I don't know which is the language that they are talking there. In which way you can, I don't know, solve the problem of the alphabet that they use for annotations, for example, if they are annotations in Korean or I don't know. Yeah, it's supported by hypothesis, no problem. Oh, I didn't know, okay, I never tried, of course there. Okay, oh, hmm. No, the big difference that I faced and all the research that I'm doing because I'm also studying and researching annotations occurring in a more natural context, let's say. So on apps like Wattpad and other fan fiction website where people are writing comments on stories because they liked with them and they don't have teachers telling them that, oh, read this and annotate it. The main difference that I found is that in the tone and in the attitude that people have, like on apps like Wattpad, for instance, they are more casual. Of course the age is also matters because Wattpad users are much younger. I think the average was a, I did, yeah, it was just above 20 years old of age but the majority of them is also teenagers. So it's really, they have more casual attitude. It's more like a really, we are on a social medium. We share our thoughts more freely. We even, we use the emojis a lot. We write direct emotional responses to something happening in the text. Whereas once you start using these tools inside a class, everything changes. It's the attitude of the students that changes and it's more like, I have to show the teacher that I know something. I have to show my peers that I learned something and I know something about this text and I have to look smart when I write in my comments. Yes. That's a big difference that I've seen. Oh, but in that case, it's similar to Mexican students because they say in the different videos that I can share with you. If you want, I can link, I can share the link here. But they say that with these kind of tools or with the social annotation, they needed to read carefully and they needed to, I don't know, take their time in order to make an annotation because they know that all the classmates are going to read it, no? Yes. Yes, yes. Which might be an excellent way, I think. I mean, the social aspect of digital reading might be the key, I think, for the promotion of reading and especially what's sometimes called a deep reading, reflective reading, critical reading. Yes. Which is in decline because of media, different kind of digital media entertainment and also because of the medium itself. The technology of reading on screen has been found. It's detrimental for the retention of information or for the ability to understand deeply the text. I think the social aspect can bring this component of reflecting together into the game again. Tim, yes, I think in any case, I don't know the cultural context must be different, no? Because I don't know. I imagine that, as you said during your presentation, I don't know Korean society is a little bit more conservative. I don't know if and probably they don't share a lot that I don't know their thinking or no, this is a challenge or because they are young. It's not a big challenge. They use a lot, they're very social. They're very conservative but also very social. They use social media in a lot of different ways to share and to talk to each other a lot about any kind of topic. But they have a very different ecosystem, digital ecosystem. They have other tech companies, they don't use Google, they don't use Facebook much. They use a lot of Naver and Kakao, which are the two big tech giants there. But I think South Korea has become now a huge player in the worldwide context related to digital social reading and social annotation. Because I don't know how many of you know this but Wattpad, which is the largest platform for English language annotation, has been acquired a few months back by Naver, which is the Korean Google. And Naver also owns a platform which is the biggest platform for webtoons, which is a huge phenomenon in South Korea and also in Japan and China. And a few months later then Kakao, which is the second big tech company in Korea, acquired three other platforms. One is Radish and another one is Glows. So all platforms where you can read digitally and annotate the text. So now what we have that some of the biggest platforms in terms of social and digital reading are being owned by Korean companies. I think it's very interesting to see what the developments would be in the future. Well, that's really interesting context. I didn't know about all this mergers and acquisitions. Yeah, it's also interesting because Korean culture is very influential in all Asia, especially Southeast Asia, but a lot also in China and Japan related to K-pop. And of course now with the BTS, this is becoming very famous also in the west of world. And so we are all watching Korean drama now on Netflix. So that the rise of the popularity of Korean entertainment together with this merging of ownership of reading platforms, I think we're gonna see something very interesting. Great, well, we have actually a question from the audience. Finally, I was waiting for the audience to get involved. There's been some really interesting chat going back and forth, of course. And so I'm gonna put this one on stage and it could be that this is a little bit outside of your experience, I'm not sure, but we'll see because this is about basically using social annotation as a language teaching tool, to teach someone a language they don't know. And of course, I guess you both have experience in that because you're both working with students who are reading things that are not in their native language, but your goals haven't necessarily been to teach language, right? Yeah, it's not part of my research or my teaching, but I know there is very useful research out there. And you can find some articles listed in the Zotero bibliography that Remy Kahlir is curating and also in the one that I'm curating. And I will find the links, I'm posting here in the chat. Great, what about you Rosario, do you have thoughts on this? I'm the same, I'm an attempt, I don't know, I'm not related with the teaching of another language shows, native speakers, I'm a methodology professor, you know, then I really don't know, but I suppose that it could be useful, you know, useful just in order for sharing because you know, even I'm not a language or English professor here in Mexico, I can identify that the students even it's not my, I don't know, my discipline, they started to, I don't know, to improve their skills in speaking English when they are using these tools or they are reading texts in English. And sometimes they ask me some things related with, I don't know, with the use of language, for example. And I think it's related, but I don't know exactly because I'm just a methodology professor. Just a humble methodology professor. Yeah, and I think that's sort of in a way not the topic of this panel because that's like a whole other world, right, of teaching someone a new language. And I'll just point out that there was some really interesting presentations given at the last I annotate, which was in 2019. So we can find some links to past presentations on that, particularly people using social annotation and teaching French if I'm not mistaken. And one of the things that they were also doing was using annotation to embed non-linguistic cues and reactions to texts in other languages. So for instance, they were asking students to do things like as they were reading through poetry in French to give visual reactions to the text as opposed to textual reactions. So using images and videos as the annotation as opposed to text responses. So it then became, we can't really say non-linguistic because images are a language too, but it became not non-text linguistic, if that's work, something like that. You know, I was curious, I know people were interested in hearing a little bit more about your examples and I know Rosario, you posted a link to some stuff, but I thought you might maybe even wanna pick one or two and show them on screen. And if you wanna do that, while you're picking those out, I thought I might ask Federico, you had your students reading fiction. What fiction did they read? What were the stories? All right, in Italian, we had made a selection by Italo Calvino. So some of them were more short stories. Some of them related to his experience during the resistance to the fascist and some more science fiction kind of story. And in Korea, we use the selection of few mostly historical based short stories. During the Japanese occupation and also during the war with the North Korea. Were the stories by Korean authors or? Yes, all by Korean authors, which have been translated into English. My God, there's multiple layers of translation here. Interesting. It'd be interesting to go back and see how the annotations would anchor on the Korean version of the same text. Probably not at all. Well, actually some students did. Some students, of course, they are Korean-edited, so they prefer to read in Korean and do it faster for them. So then there were a few comments related to the translation, actually. Yeah, as a tool to navigate translation, it could also be really interesting. Some of it's just coming up in chat as well. So Rosario, do you have a couple of examples that you wanna show off on screen? Okay, Spanish, of course they are in Spanish, but if you want to, yes, I can share and you can imagine what they are saying. It's a very widely spoken language, so I'm sure there are many of us here who could probably speak some of it and understand. Okay, I'm gonna share with you the videos because they are so fun. And I don't know, I think you are just watching them. Oh, yeah. Yes, I shared this link. We'll see how the sand comes through. Uh-huh. My name is Amaira Nilo-Peslara. It's good. I'm gonna share my first class in line with you. Yes. She says that she was so nervous in using these tools because she has never used them. She's talking about that. She says that the hypothesis is so useful because she don't need it to go to make a photocopy of the book, no? And it's the PDF already there and she can read it. And she says that it's a very useful way to be in touch with other students. And let me show another one. No, please. And he's saying that he's gonna talk about the way in which they are facing the lockdown for continued classes. Okay. Every one of them are talking about the same. He says that it's not one more PDF that I need to read because I can make the annotation itself. Okay. Let me. Hola, ¿qué tal? Me nombre es Gustavo Sánchez-Mora. Les quiero contar que el día de hoy en la clase, en primer clase en línea por la maestra Rogel, pues vimos principalmente más aplicación de hipótesis que las que nos va a ayudar, no solamente a que los profesores nos den las lecturas, las imprimamos, subrayamos y transcribamos el texto como si lleva en otras materias o inclusive, pues con algo que se nos ha dado. And he's talking exactly about the same, that this is different, the way in which they are facing this. And can you see all of them share their experience? Some of them are so, I don't know, fun and others are joking or one of them take a, no, I don't know if in this one, no take a guitar and start to play the guitar and making like a song, no, they are so crazy. And in this part you can see, let me show now the, understand? Here and this is a block that we have for the class. And in this part, the students make some, I don't know, post about, about the hypothesis, no? And they are, he says that this tool help us to learn and how to face the COVID with this. And, no, if you are new, no, June, they are talking about the past, no? The me in the past is not going to use again the photocopies on there, no? And this is, Eslo de hoy, this is a, I don't know, slang that you say in Spanish or in Mexico. Eslo de hoy is something that you need to use now. And this, another one, they are explaining, no? If we are ready to use this kind of tools and in this part they are criticizing the professors that can, don't want to use this kind of resources and whatever, whatever, no? And I share this with you and I share, I don't know, there's a lot of tools, but I share the links there. Yeah, it's great. I'm so happy to see that actually because it's so rare that we actually get to hear actual student voices at gatherings like this. We try our best to bring students into the fold and it's really hard because of course what's in it for them, right? Yes. That's why I was so, I don't know if you managed to catch the keynote with Emmanuel and Frida, it was, that was yesterday, right? I mean, trouble remembering all the days. You don't know which days to date. Yeah, I've forgotten which day it is, but. No, I think Frida was the, okay, I don't know. Yeah, she was a former student of, of Manuel's and so, you know, she still had that. She still had the student perspective. It was really good to hear that. We've still got some, a little bit of time here and I know that there's one topic sort of looming in the background that we might wanna talk about because I know Rosario and I have talked about it quite a bit and Federico may have his thoughts as well and that's this sort of circling around something that Diego puts into the question and answers here around hypothesis translation. And by that, I think we mean translations for the user experience elements of hypothesis, right? Because obviously a text can be in any, in any language and an annotation can be in any language. So it's just only the user is the sort of Chrome around that is the part that might need translation. And then improving mobile support, which is in a way a whole nother topic, right? And I'll just preface it by saying because what I'd really like to do is hear your thoughts in this. I'll preface it by saying that first of all, a little bit of a caveat, we're an incredibly small team in hypothesis and so we're not always able to do everything that's a brilliant and great idea all at the same time. So that's a little by way of just admitting that I think there's a lot of work to do here and we haven't done it all yet. So for instance, just the way that the hypothesis application is constructed, it isn't built in a way that makes for easy internationalization or localization already, which is that's our bad, actually. It should have been designed that way from the ground up and it wasn't. And so we're gonna have to at some point really take that on and retool it. Then it can become a situation when that you see in other open source projects where it's very easy for other people to provide translations into almost any other language, right, by providing simple translation files, which almost I've even done it. I mean, you don't even have to be a technical person to provide those, right? Because you're just going in and kind of presenting alternatives for all the words that exist in user interface. So I'll just have to say that, you know, that's a ways off. There's some other fish that we need to fry before that to use an expression that's common in English, at least. I don't know, do you have a similar expression like that in Italian Federico? Do we have other fish to fry? I don't know if you know that one. Yeah, before, no, we talk about potatoes. Potatoes for my hands. And did Spanish Rosario, is there a, we have other fish to fry, if you know that same? No, in Spanish, but son papas fritas. Same thing, right? Well, we can thank the Americas for potatoes to begin with, right? Because they are indigenous to the American. Yes, but here in Mexico, we prefer the enchiladas. Yeah, always, always. Yeah. I'm always impressed when I think about all the fruits and vegetables that are native to the Americas and how intrinsic they are to a cuisine like Italy. And yet they didn't even get them until after there was a colonial experience. But anyway, that's a whole another topic. And so I just kind of, and I know Rosario, you've done so much great work in helping to provide guidance in Spanish for hypothesis, which is outside the user experience, right? That's the question of what guidance could possibly be provided in other languages. And we've wrestled with that issue as well. And I know you and I have gone back and forth about it a little bit because we end up producing new guidance and then as soon as, if we're gonna go through a translation process, then that would create extra work as new guidance and revised guidance goes out the door. And you of course, generously offered folks that might be willing to help with that as well. You're solving problems more than you're creating them. That's for sure. Yeah, no, I was thinking none on me, but on some students that can help because they are really happy with the using of this platform. And I don't know, I do believe that if you can offer some resources or tutorials or the information in other languages like, no, Spanish, probably there were much more people involved or interesting, not specifically in hypothesis, but they're related with all the social annotation, I don't know, ecosystem, which is so rich. And Federica, did you, in working with your students, was there the issue of having the guidance all be in English or did you butt your heads against that? I mean, at the beginning of the Italian text, I made one brief half page of instructions about the basic functions of a hypothesis. But I think they didn't have any issue taking up how to use that. Some of them are even posted videos. I just put like three annotations as an example, one using tags, one using a video, so that I had an example of what they could do. So you used annotation itself as the kind of documentation? Yes, but really just three. No more than that, and that was enough. Yeah, but I think that the context of Europe is different in Latin America because in Europe there are, I don't know, most of the people, they speak English as a second language. But in Latin America, this is not the case. In Latin America, most of the people who speak Spanish or Portuguese in the case of Brazil, even we can communicate pretty well with that. Portugnoli, no, it's kind of similar. But here in Latin America, there are very few people who, in English, I don't know, with some flu, fluency, then it's really needed to the information in Spanish because there are few people who speak English. That's a shame. Yeah. Yeah, although I don't blame them for not speaking English because it's a problem. No, no, no, you can help, of course. I'm pretty sure that we can organize a, I don't know, a very nice and fun group interested in help just for clarity. I'm pretty sure of that. Yeah, one thing that I was, I did a brief experiment of just looking at some of the hypothesis help guidance pages using Google Translate would quote unquote, automatically translate the English into Spanish. And the Spanish translation actually seemed to be okay and had a few issues, but the real main issue was that, of course, we use images in some of our documentation and add English labels to the images. And so that, in addition to being kind of an accessibility issue that we address through alt text, but then it becomes a translation issue as well because then you've got to make new images with different tags and so forth or do it in a completely different way. So it is an issue. Well, I'm not even gonna really raise the question of the mobile interface too deeply, but I did want to bring it up because one thing that I'm interested in is in the context that you guys were working in. And I know Rosario mentioned this, that a lot of folks maybe only have mobile devices in which to encounter their teaching and learning experiences, right? And so I know that it's very challenging to use hypothesis on a mobile device is possible, but it's challenging. Did you run into that issue, Rosario, with your students? Yes, all of them ask about the mobile application because as I told you at the beginning, most of them only, I don't know, continue their classes through the mobile, I don't know the phone or probably tablet, because you know, there's a complex situation. Some of them, they have a lot of people at their house, then probably they only have one computer desktop. And then, I don't know, probably they are three or four brothers and sisters and they need to share the devices because of that they wondering if the mobile applications could be used. And I said, no, and they were so sad. Okay, then I, of course, I think it's a challenge. And if I may say, I think there's another big challenge and it's related with the job that is made by the editors, journal editors in Latin America, because you know, there are a lot of journals that are made probably with this electronic uses like open journal system or this kind of things. But for example, open journal systems has an application in order to allow the social annotations of hypothesis. But if the editor don't open or don't allow the annotation, it's not possible. Then there are a lot of journals in Latin America that could be annotated. But as the editor doesn't know, the editors didn't know that this exists, they don't, I don't know, active or put active. Activated, yeah. Activated this bottom. And because of that, it's not possible to annotate their journals. I think it's, I don't know, it's another, it's a challenge, but it's not the challenge between professors and between students but between editors in order that they allow the annotations in their platforms. Yeah. And that's actually, that's a really good point. And that's, I mean, we struggle with it all the time is trying to make annotation available in different contexts, right? Not forget about mobile desktop, just like different publications, right? To start with our different reading environments. And part of the reason why we're forming this social learning across content coalition that Dan spoke about in his Monday announcement and there will be a panel about it tomorrow is to try to bring the folks who kind of control all the publishing platforms together in order to get some sort of interoperability going so that annotation regardless of what system is being used for it is sort of available across more platforms. I'm sort of curious, Federico, maybe you have other things to riff on here too, but did your students get involved with the mobile versus desktop issue? Yes, I even included a question in my question to know about the device they were mostly using and majority of them were using the laptop or desktop computer all the time. Some of them reported to be using the mobile phone or tablet, but I mean, I've tried it myself and it's manageable. You can annotate it on the mobile phone, but it's, I think the most annoying thing is that it's covering the text completely once you want to annotate something. So not having the side-by-side text and annotation, it's maybe the major drawbacks of the system at the moment. Yeah, I mean, that's actually why we really believe that probably some sort of native mobile app is gonna be the only way to solve this because the user experience is gonna have to be fundamentally different because of the small screen real estate, like there's just no way that on this tiny screen that you can fit everything that you need to do to read and annotate and all together. And so it's gonna have to be a little bit different. And again, I'll throw this we're a small team excuse out there, but we haven't gotten there yet. I will say that it is possible, but boy is it challenging. And it depends too on the browser you're using on your mobile device and so forth and so on. Well, I know that we're getting pretty close to the time that we're supposed to stop here at the top of the hour, which is only a term that I only learned in English very recently myself. It's when the hands on the clock, both reached the top or when the big hand reaches the top, I guess. I want to congratulate you for the stamina and keep it going until now. I don't know for how many hours. It's a great, great work and you must be exhausted. You know, actually I'm enough of an extrovert that this kind of experience actually charges my battery. And so I may not be making any sense anymore, but I do, I feel really good. So I appreciate that. I've also turned myself into black and white as a way to sort of mask the bags under my eyes maybe. I also, I don't love the way that I end up because I'm the host I appear in between you like I'm separating you or something. And so I thought maybe it made me move it to the background a little bit more to be in black and white. Well, I don't know if it works or not. Well, I do, I really do, we don't have to leave right now, but we've just got a couple more minutes and I really wanted to try to end on a graceful note here. And I was thinking, I know a lot of different ideas and thoughts and so forth have passed back and forth. I really have appreciated both of you being here, speaking really carefully about your practice and then also giving some really clear examples about what's happened. And I'm wondering if as you leave us now, if anything new has come to you and you're thinking about social annotation as a result of participating in this panel. And so I'm throwing that out there, hoping that maybe something, something new arose for you in this experience. And I don't know, Federico, did anything new happen for you here? New thoughts, new ideas? Yes, absolutely. I knew about a few research about, I mean, done in Mexico and Spain, but it's so great to hear more from Rosario's research because actually I think there's a lot of work done in the research. I mean, I'm talking about what kind of research is done on social annotation and social reading. And I think there's a lot done in Spanish. I think there were a few nationally funded projects, also internationally funded between Spain, Argentina and Mexico. And, but of course, the problem is always the communication between the Anglophone word and the Spanish-speaking word. So even though there is research about English speaking app, let's say, there's so much work done about the Spanish communities that are annotated in text which is not known. So I'm trying to always quote work from Spanish-speaking community when in my work to make this known to other researchers. Yeah, it feels like an iceberg situation, right? Where, you know, there's this tip of the iceberg showing above the water of what's happening. And then there's this huge mass of activity going on that Rosario's obviously more plugged into than I am, that I'm only just hearing about. So I'm totally with you on that, Federica. How about you, Rosario? Are you taking away any new thoughts or ideas? No, well, first of all, thanks for the opportunity to be here and to share the experiences that I have had using the social annotation. And just saying that, I'm so self-confident. I'm very sure that it is kind of tools and the social annotation and all these open platforms can be very well-welcome in an environment like in Latin America. Because here in Latin America, we have been very, I don't know, active with the open access movement and with the open science movement because it's really useful for us, you know. It's so powerful the way in which we have been working in this environment and this ecosystem. And I think that in this way, all the social annotation tools can, I don't know, contribute to end the circle of production, consumption, and of course, communication in this case of scholarly communication in general. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I want to, I don't know, thanks. And I hope one day we can be together in a new face-to-face, you know? Not only through the screen of my computer. For sure. Well, I'm a big fan of both Mexico City and Milan. So I would jump at the chance. Of course. Jump at the chance to come either place. I'm going to organize the next day, I am, say, 20, I don't know, 23 probably after the pandemic ends. No, here in Mexico. That would be amazing. I would love that. Mexico City is one of my favorite cities on earth, to be sure. I haven't spent as much time in Milan, but I would love to. I would love to spend more time. You're officially invited. Of course. We will make it happen at some point. Well, my, actually, on a personal note, my younger daughter is planning to attend college in Spain. So I plan to be spending more time, both speaking Spanish and visiting Europe. So maybe both of those things will intersect and I'll be able to do everything. Great. Well, thank you so much. Let's go ahead and bring it to an end here. And again, thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate your joining.