 Greetings, everybody. I'm Nate Angel from Hypothesis. You may have seen me around the event already. And I'm really, really happy to be here today with a couple of different folks. I'm just going to mute Cheryl for a second there. She just arrived and so just getting her audio sorted out. So really happy to be here. I just wanted to set the stage a little bit for what's happening here. This educator office hours are meant to be a really kind of informal casual session where we've invited a couple of educators who have some deeper experience with social annotation to just come have a casual conversation with other folks who might have questions or thoughts. Maybe talking about pedagogy a little bit. Every day we also have a separate Hypothesis 101 session where you can go for like kind of deeper technical questions. So maybe the idea here is to talk a little bit more about practices, educational practices and stuff. But hey, it's casual. So anything is all right. And I just wanted to say that I'm joined here and thank you so much for coming by Holly Benson, who's at Muskegon Community College and also Cheryl Swain from Temple University. I'm a big Philly fan, so really happy. And I don't want to disregard Muskegon at all, but I have a personal connection to Philly, so I had to say that. So welcome to both of you. I'm really glad that you could be here. And I thought we might just kick things off just so people can learn a little bit about you. If we could hear, you know, just a brief introduction about you, like where you work, what you do, and then maybe like how you got involved with social annotation and what you've been doing with it. And I thought if it's okay, Holly, we might start with you. Sure. Hello. Thank you for having me at this I annotate conference. I teach reading and college success seminar at Muskegon Community College. So I typically have the students who are the least prepared for college when they come. And before the pandemic, I started having students annotate everything they read for reading class, and I just found that it made a tremendous difference because, one, they actually had to read it because they had to show me something that they'd written down. But then also they were engaging with the text. So when the pandemic hit and we moved to remote in March of 2020, I tried to carry on with that and had students take pictures of their annotations and submit them or email them to me, which was really cumbersome. And then as I was reading about what other educators are doing around the country, I read about hypothesis and I was so excited. And then they had the where we could pilot it. So we piloted it for a semester and it went great. And then I convinced my college to subscribe to it. So I'm really excited that we're continuing with it. And for reading and college success seminar at the same time, we were considering going to an OER text. And so I thought, well, we're doing all kinds of change anyway with the pandemic. So let's just do the OER too. So plus we wanted to help students because it was tough financial times for everyone. So buying a book was just another issue for them. So it worked fantastic with the OER. We would take each chapter and I would save it as a PDF and put it in Blackboard and then students could annotate right on the text. And I use that to replace a lot of discussions. And I'm now teaching my classes. I think I'll continue to do hybrid because I love hypothesis for that interaction with the text. Whereas before I thought there's no way with DevEd that we can do online. And I really like doing the synchronous online about two thirds. And then asynchronous online using hypothesis to replace a lot of discussion boards for the other part of it. So I'm a big fan. Wow, that's really great. And I want to come back to that open OER for college success too because that's near and dear to my heart as well. Well, let's get an introduction from Cheryl then and hear a little bit about you and how you got involved with social annotation and what you're doing with it. Sure. So I'm an associate professor at Temple University. And I'm also the associate director of the intellectual heritage program at Temple. I teach in that program as well. And it's a humanities core text based course that has, you know, is really reading intensive to be frank. And some of the reading is quite challenging. In fact, I was just hopping from a professional development program that I'm working on with our faculty on marks and capital and the communist manifesto. And I also have been teaching online for several years prior to the pandemic asynchronously primarily and then during the pandemic synchronously. And I found my way to hypothesis through rap genius. So I'm a long time annotator who along with Jeremy and a bunch of other folks kind of hacked a rap genius where, you know, music lovers were annotating rap lyrics and used it to annotate things like the data chain or anything else that was in the public domain. So I was of course, you know, first really sad when when lit genius disappeared and then extremely happy that hypothesis came to be. So yes, full disclosure, I'm a big fan and a long time Stan. And, you know, like Holly, we are we did a very kind of mini micro pilot. I've had hypothesis last semester in the intellectual heritage program. And I met with great success and I am currently trying to talk to the powers that be at Temple, which is a very large research university to to adopt it university wide but if not then at least program wide in our courses there seminar style courses, you know, 20 to 28 students moving to an online space, either synchronously or asynchronously provided a tremendous amount of challenge and especially with all the zoom fatigue out there. I found that hypothesis was a really powerful social space for shared knowledge to occur and my students agreed. I have to say, never before have I had so many students confess to doing all the reading and enjoying it. As they have since adopting hypothesis and how we like you in the past I had. I've always been a believer in annotation and I used to have students. I would do like pop quizzes I would, you know, they'd come in and I'd say okay now just take a picture of these five pages of your text. Let me see your annotations and we're in fact in in our professional development program this week, going to be doing a whole session on hypothesis and social annotation so I think that's probably enough said. Well that's so great I'm so happy to have you both here. And thank you to Jeremy for rounding you up and convince strong army nearly you hopefully not too much to to join I really appreciate it. I'm just going to add a link. I think to what I believe is the program. You were talking about at Temple, Cheryl, and I also added one for Holly there so folks can see a little bit of your institutional backgrounds. So, I am going to just keep the conversation going until someone from the audience kind of chimes in with a question or comment or something that they'd like to steer the direction of the conversation toward. I noticed that Alex had was kind of responding to Holly talking about, you know, how the learners reacted to to the move to social annotation. And I guess I wanted to. I know you answered that a little bit in chat, Holly, but I kind of wanted to follow up on that because it I've always felt like student success is really not to indoctrinate people, but it's such a great time to put people in touch with practices that may help them out. As they're moving through their college, you know, experience overall, and, you know, as somebody who believes that social annotation can really help you in a variety of different environments. I've always felt like college success is the maybe the single most important place to get it going. And so I'm wondering, so you're a hero of mine, obviously. And so I'm wondering, did you find that that that when when your learners were coming into the environment, or are you finding that they had already had experience with any kind of annotation activity before or was it pretty much is a pretty much new to them. And if so, does it seem like it's something that I don't know, maybe it's too early to tell, but it's something that may be aiding their, their forward path in college success in general. So, sorry, my dogs are barking if you can hear them and they're done. Sorry, it's not. Okay. Many of them have been exposed to it actually it's, you know, I'm trained as an educator I taught K 12 before so I like I knew all these strategies and taught them to students but then you get to college and you kind of think like well students already know strategies so you don't want to treat them like kids and, you know, would try to teach them sort of different strategies. And my daughter, she's now just finished ninth grade but in her middle school they made her annotate everything and I thought oh my gosh why am I not making my students do this still it's such an excellent strategy how could I have sort of forgotten about it you know. So, I think they're doing it more in schools in Michigan at least now, but students may not have heard the term annotation. So, they always are intimidated by that and they like stumble over pronouncing it particularly in the reading class and our college success seminars required for students who test into two or more dev ed courses. So, they feel intimidated but once I, you know, point out well. And as add and note is note so you're just adding notes to the writing, and it's really a conversation and I model it for them. Then they're more accepting of it and we start right out with the syllabus and I add some annotations to it to begin with you know like, I have my name and I say please call me Holly, and you know, about contacting me I really am good about getting back to people setting that friendly tone for them to get them going. And then they, they're pretty receptive to it, and then they get nice conversations going too. So, that part, I think works really well and then I definitely find that by the end I have them do a reflection. They talk about how it really is a strategy they'll keep using. And I know in the beginning they just think I have to do annotations and I actually have to read it. They make me read it. And, but they really do by the end like it now of course I can't say that every single student just loves it by the end and they're, you know, great, great readers who like it, but they, they understand the importance of it by the end. Yeah, I think I have some learners in my house too that are seem to have been forced to do some annotation that's much more like it seems like busy work to them. And it doesn't have that well, welcoming kind of conversational aspect that you're talking about it doesn't. It's more like a, you know, the kind of annotated bibliography kind of move that seemed like a really onerous, you know, highly academic task as opposed to some sort of like shared conversation around the text. So that really resonates with with how I've seen it. And I think that that setting of the stage that you talk about much be such an important part of it. I wonder, Cheryl, if you did you want to riff on a little bit on what Holly was saying, I thought I could see you doing a lot. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like we, you know, we are kind of taking a, you know, same approach. I think that especially with the syllabus, you know, syllabus day, whether it's in person or online is maybe the most dreaded day of all. Professors because it's so flat and unengaging and I found asking my students to annotate the syllabus by putting questions in by I, you know, I always identify the learning goals for the course I asked them which one was most meaningful to them what they they hoped they would gain. What's missing from the course what's surprising about it and it really set an amazing tone from the beginning that was very different from how that first day can sometimes go especially in an online setting so you know, I've found across the board that the, the, and especially just the kind of beautiful light interface of hypothesis allows for kind of free flowing conversation. Almost like a back channel, which students are so comfortable using as learners and it's something that I don't think we fully tapped into as educators yet in a positive way you know they're always texting or in a group me or here even you know everyone's on the chat I see you out of the corner of my eye on the chat people. And that's a good thing right and so social annotation or hypothesis almost becomes a kind of. It had a back channel vibe at least this semester it was a place where students were being very real and authentic and their conversation with me and one another and even in their reflections. That seems like it could get really interesting, especially if the reading is you know does copy tall or something. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I found to in order to kind of Nate speak to that issue of annotation as busy work. I do think you're right that it really is important to be intentional in the ways in which you're asking students to annotate and sometimes and sometimes in leaving it very open so that they can kind of make their own connection and negotiation with both the tool and the text in each other. And for me, I kind of balanced the semester out where you know one want we have sort of a routine or ritual with annotation for the first round through a text and then usually I tried to do something kind of innovative or different. The second time that we engaged with the reading whether I was asking students to revisit old notes of their own or to find something that a classmate had noted that we wanted to pull into a new text to making contemporary connections and adding you know gifts and or chips I never know. It's both I think. I think it is both. Yeah. So, so, at any rate, the, the, the biggest takeaway I've had is that I feel like it really humanizes both the text and the educational space instead of being a kind of busy worker alienating task. I love that idea of it humanizing the text. I mean, obviously humanizing humanizing the classroom is awesome as well. But that, you know, books, they can come across as so dead sometimes. It's like written by a dead person. Well, and Hallie, I wonder if this was if you if you experienced this but you know I was working I work with a wide range of types of students at Temple from first generation college students to, you know, non traditional aged learners to honor students in what amounts to an honors college and again one of the things that I think can be so powerful about digital education that can sometimes get lost in the brick and mortar space is role modeling and also a kind of sense of building a sense of belonging and the thing that I noticed about my our use of hypothesis in the classes that it was very affirming for students. You know, if I if I said, you know, on this round of annotations just identify the things that are confusing. I don't want you to try to figure out why they're confusing or to try to help each other, even at this point just what's messing you up where are you getting stuck stuck and for for learners to see that they're not alone. Or the inverse for them to see that oh wait, I think I got that part maybe I'll be able to help this person. Again, it's really, it's powerful to be a little bit transparent on where you're stumbling, you know, because sometimes I think the biggest challenge with reading, especially with difficult reading is to not be able to identify, you know, what's causing the lack of comprehension. Yes, that's a good point Cheryl I have noticed that to and I do have a higher level reading class for students who have met the basic competency but are trying to get into our nursing program which has a higher level. And this semester it's been delightful that students feel comfortable asking questions when they don't understand something in the text and then I can go right in there and answer them at the basic concept or paragraph or sentence level which in the classroom. You wouldn't really get that because I think they would be too embarrassed face to face to say, I don't understand what they're really talking about with this term. But in there, they can do it and it's public and other students see it and they may answer it or I may answer it too so I do love that aspect of it. I did see a question in the chat from Michael about the balance of informal interaction with requirements and you did adjust address that a little bit Cheryl. I do the same where sometimes, you know, like the syllabus it's more getting to know you and I tell them it's to become familiar with what's expected because I never want to surprise them with anything that they didn't know they were supposed to do. But other times it is more that they need to identify specific things in the text. So I think setting the stage first for the safe space and a comfortable space is important and then you can get into more of that. But actually I'm going to pull one of one of the questions that came to Q&A right here on stage from Alex because I think it really pertains to what you were just talking about. You know, about the degree to which social annotation can make the process of reading and reading in a class more inclusive, not only across this divide of being in the classroom face to face versus not what you just mentioned, right? So there's a kind of inclusivity of space and time and mode that can happen, but also for different kinds of people. I wonder if, yeah, I don't know who to ask first, but do you guys have thoughts about that? Holly, you want to go first? No, you can go ahead. I have to think about it for a second. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that one of the things this pandemic has kind of laid bare for us are the ways in which we can always do more to design inclusively for a range of learners from thinking inclusively about the digital divide in terms of socioeconomics to cultural divide to learning differences. And I've just found that the more modalities that I can employ, the more inclusive the space. And what's nice about social annotation is that it does, you know, in terms of access, first of all, make things really wonderful for students. They thanked me across the board for keeping costs down and providing access to either appropriately, you know, legally portioned excerpts of text or full text where it was available, you know, in the common domain. But then also, I think that students and I think I mentioned this before, you know, Zoom is fatiguing and it can be a difficult space for students to participate in conversation with one another because of issues of social anxiety or something else. And so the hypothesis space allows for those types of inclusive moments in a way that discussion forums don't as well because discussion forums are difficult to set up where you feel like you're clustering around a moment or an idea. And, you know, the hypothesis allows for that space. Also, the fact that you can do, you know, some really clever searching using hashtags can allow students who need to organize information differently to do that. It can, you know, they can search for a particular term or concept. So I think that there are a lot of applications when we think about inclusive design that we can find a tool like hypothesis to be invaluable. I agree, Cheryl. And using the OER is like the first huge step forward in inclusivity because we always had students who did not have a book. And, you know, there were some who would come to me and they'd say, I just really can't afford it. Like my other, even though ours was inexpensive, they would have other ones that cost more. And they would say, well, I really have to buy my biology book first, which is $100 and or $150. So I'm waiting to buy this book and, you know, I would have an old version, but it just wasn't the same. Making sure they all have the text right there. I love to eliminate excuses. I'm, you know, very understanding flexible person but eliminating as many excuses as I can is something I love to do. So having that right there for all of them is great. I also so much prefer hypothesis to discussion boards. I really only use discussions when it's something very specific where they have to write more about their own experience or something else so they don't have to take something from the text and carry it over to the discussion board and then try to create a discussion about it and explain the context and all of that. Also, although we want students to write really well and be really literate, it also removes a lot of the judgment because it's more like texting where you can do just a short annotation and that's okay. And I always cringe for students who, you know, they're doing a discussion board and their writing is just terrible. And it's out there for everybody to see, but they can still have intelligent thoughts and engage with the text and share with other students. So I like that aspect of it too. Yeah, and I think in the chat, Alex is bringing up something that is kind of a pet project of mine, which is helping students really see themselves as a type of public intellectual. And I found that their writing and their thinking and their critical analysis as it becomes more authentic and as these activities are enacted for a real audience who matters rather than just for a grade or for a teacher behind some kind of wall, whether it's submitting it through an LMS or handing in a typed paper or whatever it is. You know, it matters more to them as well and that learning becomes significant and something that they then are able to take outside of the classroom space, which is so important. Yeah, I'm really, I'm loving this conversation too. I probably, Jeremy, designed this, but we really have the, you guys together are encountering the full range of at least college students, right? All the way from people just really starting out who maybe even aren't fully prepared for college level classes yet, all the way to folks grappling with, you know, some pretty heady advanced stuff. It sounds like it in your work, Cheryl. And I love this idea that I was hearing when Holly was talking a little bit about, you know, breaking down the act of reading and therefore of writing to into just little nuggets that could be that will be informal to start with maybe, which is how we think, right? Like, we don't, unless you're a British, maybe you don't think in perfectly formed paragraphs with proper punctuation and citations, at least I never have been able to. And so this idea of lowering the stakes so that, you know, your reading process and then therefore maybe your writing process to can be a bunch of little nuggets strung together, as opposed to some gigantic, you know, project that has yet to be done. And is that is that it sounds like that's what Holly, what you're finding in your practices is that that informality enables people to kind of climb up the scaffolding to something else. Does that make sense? Definitely. And I'm sure that I have some students who before would have been too intimidated if they had to read something and then write a discussion board post about it. And if they're really struggling, I can meet with them individually on zoom and we can go through it together and, you know, they can share screen or I can and we go through and we add some annotations together and they do a few and they're like, Oh, this is easy. I can do this where they, you know, first they're just being asked to interact and instead of like you said having to form some huge fully developed thought that they have to share with the world in finished form. Yeah, I just sorry, Cheryl. I just, I can't believe I never thought of this before this idea of sharing screens and being like, let's annotate together for a little while first. That's brilliant. I don't know why I never thought of that. No, that's okay. It is it is brilliant. I don't think that I don't think that we did that. I haven't done that. I've pulled the annotations into zoom. In other words, I'll share my screen and we'll use we'll say, All right, you know, here's where the interest was this week. And I might ask a student in zoom to students to talk about, you know, something that interested them and if you're met with silence, then you can pull up. I'll say, Well, let's just let's see what you all were talking about in hypothesis and and then we can go there and showcase and highlight some some of the ideas and discussions that are going on and pull them into the live classroom. And I do plan on continuing that in face to face class as well sharing sharing a hypothesis screen. You know, continuing the conversation pulling it into the brick and mortar space. I can also say for me as you know in teaching difficult tax that it's been wonderful to get a sense of where understanding breaks down before having to step into the classroom. You know, to kind of really tailor the conversation the supplemental context, you know, whatever it is students need. I'm really meeting them where they're at now, rather than where I perceive them to be. And I think that that is another kind of it wasn't really something that I was considering when adopting using hypothesis how as a tool it would really help me also get insight into my students thinking. But it has. So it's really made the classroom time very valuable almost like a flipped space in some ways. Just to circle back I during the first class session, I always pull up hypothesis in on share screen in zoom pull it up and have them get in and annotate at the same time then I can say oh I see that Cheryl added this good job Cheryl you got an annotation in there oh there's needs, you know, and Talking them through it and making sure they get them in there and showing them and then also I to have found that it really enriches the classroom discussion because I can look and I can say I noticed this is something you were talking about, or if no one's talking I could say, well Cheryl, could you say more about what you put in the annotation about this. Yeah, and that really you know then going to the inclusive design piece again, you know, then we really are leaning into the power of, you know, our introverts right the individuals who aren't necessarily going to be the first to raise their hand and just start talking about sharing an idea, like our extroverts will but the synthesizers, and the thinkers who are really kind of taking their time to come to an understanding or to share an insight and hypothesis allows for that. Whereas in a 50 minute class whether it's on zoom or face to face, you know that isn't possible for some students so. I mean we came up with this phrase really Jeremy and I in conversation about how social annotation makes reading active visible and social. And you'll see we see we use that a lot, because we really felt like it distilled down like three of the superpowers that one gains with social annotation. And you know that the way that reading stops becoming that kind of passive solitary act, and then how there becomes a trail of it right, and then, then how multiple people can kind of join on to that trail. And it's everything I'm hearing you guys say just kind of comes back to resonate with that. I'm really enjoying the discussion here there's a couple more questions that have popped up if you wouldn't mind switching gears a little bit but I don't want to interrupt if somebody had more to say on that thread. Okay, so another question that we have up here and this is really really shifting the gears a little bit is around. We've been talking a lot about what's been happening or you've been talking about your practices during this last pandemic year. So, here we go. Here we go into a new school you're possibly with differences. Are you thinking of using social annotation in your courses in the fall and I don't know maybe Cheryl you want to start with that just so that I pick someone. Yes, absolutely hands down so I absolutely will be using it I think that I'm also really nervous to do this but I'm trying very hard to embrace ungrading principles as much as possible. So, this coming semester, just after how my university was addressing some of the issues during the pandemic and I found that students really were exhibiting more of a growth mindset in an environment where there were no stakes, not just low and so I do plan on using it my my hope is that I'll have it set up so we'll again have maybe two or three passes through a text using a hypothesis per week or per per two week cycle depending on the reading. Whereas the first touch will probably be a little bit more traditional where I might begin by having a few prompts for students to look for sort of specific things in the text and share what they find to a second pass through where I might put them into groups and ask them to kind of function almost like a literature circle if people are familiar with those where one group might be focusing on difficult terminology and finding definitions or applications one group might focus on character and character development one group might focus on making connections to our world today finding articles in the news or in popular culture. And then a third more reflective type of annotation where where students will have the opportunity maybe once every two weeks to go back and look through their annotations to kind of map their growth or see what kind of interests are developing for themselves are they noticing that they they tend to kind of always focus on a particular type of annotation or a particular theme or topic so those are my off the top of my head my ideas in terms of annotation annotating rituals or rhythms for the semester. It might change but right now that's where I'm headed. Interesting what about you Holly. I'm definitely planning on using hypothesis again I'm the coordinator for our college success seminar course so I build like our basic shell and then people can customize. But we are planning on having them read and annotate every chapter of the OER text, which just as a side note related to reading. I had students at the end of fall when I asked them what did you think of the book. Several said to me we had a book. So, at first I thought oh my gosh that's bad they didn't know they had a book but actually I think it's probably kind of good because maybe they saw it as less of this huge insurmountable task to read a whole book and it's a massive textbook that we started out with it's the open stacks college success book which we're now on like editing the third version and customizing it more for our college. So I definitely plan to use that and then I've shifted to integrated reading and writing instead of just developmental reading separately. So, I love the flexibility of finding what's appropriate for the students to annotate so I don't have a, like a single text that I'm using for that when I'm pulling in appropriate things for the students which the flexibility is awesome. And really largely because of hypothesis I'm planning on, even when I'm back face to face, doing hybrid for all of my classes because I mean that's really quality learning time when they're in there socially annotating. And so when you say integrated reading and writing does that mean these are courses where students are kind of working on both of those skill sets together. That sounds great because I've heard so many people report that learning how to read in a different way than the very next thing that it does is empower your writing. And that jump from reading and writing is really the missing link in a lot of people's work because that sounds like where you're headed. Yes, and I'm this past year I did it as a an exploratory course to see and we're working out different things at our college with placement, because this is a complete aside from hypothesis but when you have your whole placement structure set up for reading and writing separately and then you add an integrated course that sort of throws a wrench in the works so working on all of that across departments to figure it out but I think students benefit a lot more when those skills are together. You can't really isolate them. Yeah, well are you guys ready for another swerve because I could take this in a whole new direction from an audience audience mark. So I'm going to bring this one up from Chris. And so I don't think we've exclusively been talking about annotation inside an LMS because I get the feeling that at least some of Cheryl's work is is outside the LMS. I'm just going to start off with a caveat that hypothesis knows that we've created a little bit of a monster here in the sense that the first thing that we brought into the world was this calling it a web application right where anybody can go create an account and start annotating in the web either publicly or in a private group. We sometimes say in the wild right and there's all sorts of things that can happen there, but there's also a lot of friction and getting that going and having it work and, you know, also navigating levels of privacy that you might want to have with a class and then maybe not have later or something like that. And then of course, as we all know many colleges and universities and K 12 schools as well, you know, use LMS and have very strong desires around using them in particular ways. And so it wasn't until we actually made an LMS integration that we started to see usage really explode even more widely than it was because it made it easier for colleges and universities to adopt and teachers and students to start to use it right. But there's things that are available out in the wild that aren't available inside the LMS, like the tagging and searching features that Cheryl was talking about aren't as aren't yet as readily available in the LMS but headed there. And then there's this issue to of sewing it together like maybe you've done some work in a classroom environment inside an LMS but then you want to expand that out and cross the boundary to another class or across the boundary even outside of your, your your learning experience into your quote unquote real life. And so where it is our vision to try to sew those experiences together so that people can actually have the inside the LMS experience when it's appropriate but then also take that outside when that works too. So that was a little preamble to this to give you guys a little time to think about it too. But I'm wondering Cheryl if you might this I'm thinking this might resonate with some of the work that you've done this question from Chris. And so maybe not but I'll let you I'll let you riff on it. Well, it did. I mean, prior to you all building it in the LMS, you know, like I said, from a long time ago, I was, I was using, you know, the genius platform. And then as soon as, as soon as lit genius went away, and I got a little note that there would be an extension that you could add to your browser, and you can create groups and put students in those groups and, and annotate the web that way. Yes, absolutely. We were doing that I was doing that more. More so in a course that I taught that asks students to identify students to identify social, you know, big social problems or messes that we're facing today as a society and and then kind of connecting the text to those masses. So it was almost an inverse annotation that we weren't annotating text but we're just like life, you know. And now that it's in the LMS, I, you know, because of privacy issues I do feel more confident and comfortable using it robustly in the classroom whereas before it was really kind of a light touch use because of my nervousness around digital fingerprints and student privacy. I don't know if that really answers your question. So, so next semester, no, I'm not, I'm not doing I am just sticking. Hopefully with hypothesis in the learning management system unless our university is doesn't adopt it and then I have to go some crazier space and we'll see what happens but for now I think I like that I for those of you that have been using hypothesis thinking about it in in the LMS. I know one thing that my students were frustrated about for a little while was that they did want to have, you know, easy access to their annotations and I sometimes wanted to aggregate them. And so there are ways to do that. I've learned that you can hit, I think Nate command P to kind of save annotations as a PDF on a particular text and I think hypothesis is working really hard from what I was told on making that kind of data and information more accessible for students to kind of hold and take with them. Yeah, there's definitely there's all sorts of things down in the weeds here but they're so important to. So the need to like when you have that text in front of you and all the beautiful annotations and the highlights and everything and the need to try to capture that in some way actually turns out to be one of the most complex problems that we're faced with. Especially, I mean to do a kind of screenshot type thing like you're talking about Cheryl is probably the only really feasible way to do it right now, because to bring the text and the annotations which are really separate entities living in separate worlds that are just kind of on top of each other, temporarily together into some sort of permanent thing or possibly printable thing is actually pretty hard except to the degree that it could be captured as an image. So that's that's a real problem and I can't promise any magic there, but on the other thing that you were talking about, which is, you know, outside in the wild, every hypothesis user has their user profile page right where all their annotations are collected together, and you can search and navigate not only your own annotations but other annotations that you might have access to that are either public or in groups that you belong to or whatever. And there's tagging and there's all sorts of features there. We are just kind of experimenting with and putting the finishing touches now on the start of that experience for inside the LMS. So the only thing there is that once again inside the LMS the experience is kind of, you know, within the class in the classroom so it's a narrower in that sense it's not the whole universe of annotation. It's the universe of annotations within that class. So that's that's at least a start. But Chris is right. I mean, my students are kind of addicted to it now. So they'll, you know, email me and be like, Sal and I want to annotate stuff. I'm reading the summer. You know, what do I do? How do I? And that's the other thing I was talking about right where it's like maybe they have an independent account, but that their independent account and their temple account could see each other. That was the annotation. Yeah. So that is a future thing that we also want to enable, but that's a little bit further away. So that was that was a long I'm making a lot of like hypothesis specific comments here. But but Holly, so are you are you primarily working inside the LMS or is it outside? Inside and that when I first learned about hypothesis and I learned that we could do it in the wild as you call it. I considered it, but I quickly rejected it and went for the pilot and then convinced the school to subscribe to it because when I used outside websites for students for things before I spent so much more energy than I wanted to working out issues with the thing outside of Blackboard. And so having it in there was controlled and there wasn't a separate login and and I can troubleshoot is just so much better. So and also particularly for developmental students or those who are just getting used to college, I think having things out there for the world would would not really be a good thing for them. Yeah, I've seen it in I don't know if you folks know the work of Amanda La Castro, who's another kind of educator who annotates a lot and talks about it. She's now at Penn. So nearby to you show you guys should hang out. She used to be Stevenson, I think, but anyway, she in her practices, she has often scaffolded things the way you're kind of thinking about Holly, maybe where your first set of annotation experiences might be in a very private closed structured environment. Even if it's that one to one Zoom call you were talking about, right, to kind of get used to it to get your feet wet and to start to understand what it looks like. And then as people kind of advance through their practice, then she takes them out into the world and they get empowered with their own personal hypothesis account that they can take with them when they leave. But the two worlds are still kind of separate, but she treats it as a kind of as a kind of scaffolding in her work. I don't know if that kind of fits with. And obviously, if you're just dealing with the developmental stage, you might only do the first part of that. But then hopefully by the time they're getting to a class that Cheryl might be working with, they would be ready for, you know, the more advanced stuff. Well, and even in my class, I do the one of the first things I do is show students that they have the ability to have private and public annotations within the LMS space. And I encourage them to take as many private, to make as many private annotations as they want and let them know that they aren't going to waste because at any moment they're able to shift those to become a public facing annotation to the rest of the class. And we talk a little bit about the kinds of private annotations that they might want to be taking as they're moving through the text versus the more directed public annotations. So I think that that's an important point that you want to help them feel safe and have a sense of mastery to a certain extent. Although I still think it's important in the community of the classroom to showcase a little bit of vulnerability in their annotating from one another. If you have a comment about the private annotations versus public. I actually have not encouraged them to use the private ones very much and they often confuse it and probably part of it is just their whole outlook on education and not wanting other people to see their thoughts or feeling like they're not worthy. It took me a while to figure out that some students were annotating but they were making them private because they thought I could see private ones and you know not the class and they don't want other people to see that. And then finally I figured it out and there were some who you know they kept saying I know I did it. It's there I can see it on my screen and then I couldn't see it on mine and so that's just something to be aware of if you start using it to be really clear students about what private and public means. Yeah, absolutely. I just found myself talking to someone on Twitter about this too, because you'd think that private would be a separate thing from being in a group. But as Cheryl was sort of describing, it's like inside of every group there's the possibility to have private annotations that you can then toggle to be visible to that group. That doesn't mean it toggles them to full visibility if the group you happen to be working in is the in the wild public layer then yes they would be fully public. But anytime you're in a private group, you would just be toggling them to visibility within that group like in the LMS or outside of it. Yeah, that's I think that's I've seen both cases right where people it's like I entered a bunch of annotations and nobody ever saw them and I'm confused like you're mentioning Holly. But at the same time Cheryl it's like people can use it as a way to draft some first thinking and then maybe later expose it when it makes sense. Yeah, or, you know, one of the one of my goals for students is to really feel like these, these, these books are theirs and that they, they can have a special private relationship with the text that isn't necessarily connected to a performance of any kind. And, and so I want to make sure that they have that option where if they want to kind of practice or rehearse or or make comments that really are just for them. You know, that that space is there as well. And I see is it over making a comment in the text about wanting the students to see themselves as experts of their own thinking and meaning making and really to own the book to right in a way not not necessarily in the physical sense but in the intellectual sense right so they feel like their relationship to the book is something of their own making as opposed to something that the teacher handed them or whatever or Isaac Newton handed them. Well, you know that actually makes me think that I want to make two little plugs here for a couple of other things that are happening here at I annotate. One is this I see going through the chat this kind of conversation around like you know what counts as an annotation right and getting people engaged in the idea of annotating doesn't always have to be a piece of formal text on another piece of formal text or something. And as I'm sure you've seen on Thursday oops I have to get it right in the camera. Rami and Ontario will be having a conversation on at noon on Thursday noon Eastern on Thursday around their book annotation. And this book does a really good job of I think starting to unpack the idea of annotation and how it can be many different kinds of things. And they've also been holding a really great Twitter a hashtag kind of conversation on Twitter around this where people are hashtagging tweets that represent annotations of some kind. Maybe there are a picture of something or something else, you know something out in the real world like you were talking show kind of reverse annotation that ends up being an annotation itself or anything from a tattoo to skywriting to graffiti. You know there's just so many different ways that the world presents us with opportunities to add an extra layer of meaning on top of it. And I think this book does a great job of kind of helping unpack that and they're going to talk about it on Thursday at noon. So we should we should think about that there. And then the other thing I wanted to mention is I make a plug for tomorrow's keynote where a couple of really special people. Everybody here is special but near and dear to my heart Manuel Espinosa and and Frida whose name I'm blanking on right now and I feel really bad because Frida Silva will will be here from the right to dignity lab. And this is a project that folks might not have heard about that might resonate with some of your guys's work where Manuel is a teacher at the University of Colorado Denver and he works on a program called the right to dignity lab where he really brings together students in sort of cohorts and groups and their goal they have a goal and that goal is to amend the Colorado State Constitution to make education a human right. So the purpose of their class or classes is to do that. And they use annotation to do it in many ways and you'll hear a lot more about that in the keynote tomorrow. But it's just an incredibly inspiring practice of bridging that real world kind of work into the classroom using annotation as the bridge because they're addressing a real world issue. But then also using it to advance their own kind of intellectual pathways and take ownership over their own scholarship in a really eventually hopefully public way. And so a big plug for both of those. I hope you guys will be able to attend them are you going to are you folks going to be able to attend more of these sessions they are being recorded to though. I'll have to hit the recording because I probably will be at that moment helping my faculty with hypothesis and social annotation so sadly. That seems like a good priority to have though. Yeah. And I'll be teaching my students and discussing annotation. You guys are going to be hard at work. What's what happened to that whole thing where teachers supposedly have the summer off and doesn't exist right. My husband keeps asking me that. Yeah. Well you know we've been reacting to the audience here we've heard from you guys and I'm wondering Holly and Cheryl do you guys have. Do you guys have kind of questions or thoughts that you might have for some of the other people here about about anything that has been working under your skin or bees in your bonnet. Think about it for a second. You don't have to. Well I did respond to it in the chat some there was the side conversation about students annotating and whether we use models of you know famous geniuses and that sort of thing. I think one of the great things about annotation in general and making it social in particular and hypothesis as the tool for it. Is it really is not just telling students but showing them that their thoughts matter and their thoughts are important and they're worth sharing with other people. And for some of them that's a new experience. So I really like that. And I think I've only ever kind of shown them medieval manuscripts and marginalia and the doodles and commentary there to help students to reinforce the idea that that reading is a conversation and that annotating is a kind of way of bringing that conversation into a physical act. You know to that you're not talking out loud to the book like you maybe sometimes you do when you read I know I have or certainly to movies I've I've talked out loud and screamed like no don't go in there. And again if I imagine a kind of ideal reading practice. It's one that is engaged, you know in an embodied way and that allows there to be a conversation, not just to publish students ideas with one another to show that they matter but to show that they're they can have a conversation with the author that the author isn't necessarily an authority, but somebody kind of presenting ideas that they want their readers to challenge or be challenged by. And so if I show annotations by anyone famous it's it would only be to kind of exemplify this is a conversation. Not this is how they do it or this is how you should do it. Yeah I was amused I think it was yesterday and yesterday's office hours with the sundry. I think that's where I came up or talking about how it's kind of nice to read dead authors because you really feel like you can talk back to them. Because they're dead, even though the canonized authors may seem a little more intimidating. So you know if you're going to annotate Isaac Newton, who has come up in the chat, maybe that's intimidating. But maybe annotation can be a way to empower empower you as a student or a teacher right. Do you have you guys used annotation in your own kind of you know professional and scholarly practice outside of the teaching and learning part of things. Do you mean digital or do I like well either actually yeah I mean either way annotation annotation annotation. I'll give you a visual hold on all right. I mean, you know outside of hypothesis I have sticky note annotations right so I'm always annotating to I don't know if you can see it here you can. There's a lot of stuff stuck in there yeah a lot of stuff stuck in there so you know certainly for both for both teaching and scholarship. That practice is important, whether it's through a digital tool or analog. I'm sort of stuck on this Twitter thing I kind of can't get my mind around it I never occurred to me that Twitter is a type of social annotation but it totally is and I don't. My mind's like a little bit been a little bit blown for the last 20 minutes, wrapping my head around that. So, I guess that's another way professionally yes that we annotate. I don't annotate things that I read for pleasure but things that I read to learn I annotate a lot. Just last week as part of customizing our CSS text were including student stories and writing some of our own and so I wrote about how when I went to the University of Michigan after being a small high school. I didn't have good study strategies and no one taught me to annotate, but I naturally started doing it for my Spanish literature classes because I would write translations and questions and that's the thing. And I'd like to say that I just immediately went oh my gosh I should do this for all my classes, but I didn't it took me time to learn to do that as a really good strategy so I always tell my students. This is why I'm teaching you this now it is so helpful and so important, and I do show them my books and how I still do it today. It makes me want to plug our world languages panel that's going to be on one of these days I need to remember which one it is to where we're actually going to discuss annotation of texts in different languages and annotations in different languages as well. So I can certainly understand that also as a farmer Spanish literature major myself parts out to you. Well we've taken up a whole bunch of your time and I know that I mean sounds like you guys actually still have a lot of work to do. So I don't want to keep you too late. Any parting thoughts. I'm Holly before you go back to lovely Muskegon. Just thank you. Thank you so much how about you Cheryl. No but feel free anyone you know email me I can share my email here. To share assignments prompts help you think about a way to use hypothesis in your classroom. I'm, you know, a big big fan and I am always looking for new approaches so be in touch. Very generous of you. Thank you so much. And I would definitely Holly I'd love to hook you up with I don't know if you know the folks over at Monroe Community College in Rochester New York who also went down the pathway of customizing we are for college success. I think that if I don't know if you have other colleagues who are you've met who are working in that space but I'd love to connect to you and I can do that offline if you want. Okay, great. And if you want to I could put you in touch with Amanda LeCastro at Penn too if you would like a local buddy. Yeah, she's fantastic she now works in the libraries at Penn so. Yeah, she might know I have a colleague who does instructional design at Penn who she might know too. So I would love to network with her. She's just I think she's just moving physically houses now as the job is new but I'll put you in touch. Well thank you so much for for coming today this was fantastic. I really love the conversation I learned a lot. And I really appreciate you guys take time to have time to come today. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you everybody for the chat and your great questions.