 All right, so I think we'll get started. I'm your host, Franny French. And I would like to welcome you all to Liquid Margins today, to Northern Annotations, Social Learning, and Canadian Higher Education. And then today's wonderful guests. Unfortunately, one of our wonderful guests was not able to make it. That's Lillian Hogan-Dorn. She's the acting manager of Digital Access and OER at E-Campus Ontario. We love E-Campus Ontario. We're sorry, she wasn't able to be here today. We'll probably, most likely, definitely, I guess, have somebody from E-Campus Ontario on the show in the future. And we, but we do have here today Olga Andrievsky. She's associate professor of history at Trent University. And Fodor Golohagan, he's the associate professor of psychology at Trent University as well. And our moderator today is Nate Angel. And he's the director of marketing at Hypothesis. And with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Nate. And Nate, if you'd like to reintroduce our guests and ask them if they have anything they'd like to kick it off with. Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for getting us going, Franny. And it's really, I'm really excited to be here. And just as a caveat, like if you're not from Canada, it's OK. We have a lot of Canadians here, our guests are Canadian. And but if you're not from Canada, that's fine. In the audience, we will be talking about social annotation more broadly. And so I'm sure it will apply across the border as well. If you happen to be in the United States or in some other country, that would be great. So as Franny said, I'm Nate. And I joined here with my colleagues from Hypothesis, Franny. And then we've also got Aaron Barker is here and able to answer technical questions that might come up. So if you have those, feel free to put them in the chat. Because these shows, we tend to talk about the pedagogy and sort of the interesting human angles of social annotation more than the technical nitty gritty. And so if you have kind of more specific questions, feel free to put them in the chat. And someone like Aaron can answer. We also have a few other Hypothesis folks here. Like I saw that Lori's here who is actually in Canada herself. And even though she works for Hypothesis, because we're a completely distributed organization, Gina is also here. So there's a whole bunch of people ready to answer your questions in the chat if you have anything that we're not addressing in the conversation itself. But then without further ado, I'd like to kind of switch over to talk with our guests for a little while. And we'll have some time for questions and answers with the audience later. But to start off, I was wondering Olga, if you might say a couple of words about kind of your practice, like what it is that you do as an educator. And then I'd love to know how you came to learn about social annotation and Hypothesis and how you first brought it into your work. Yeah, I'm a historian at Trent University. And for those of you, I can see from the chat there are a whole bunch of people there from Trent. So I don't, and from Southern Ontario, who don't need an explanation of what Trent University is. But for those of you who don't know, it's a small liberal arts college or university with a history of emphasis on small group teaching, especially in the humanities. And so we, our department in general and the English department, we've been teaching for decades using the whole seminar system, which is fantastic. So there was always an emphasis right from the start on student interaction and participation and all of that. I stumbled into Hypothesis during one of the workshops that was being offered at the beginning of the pandemic when we were all trying to figure out how we were gonna teach in this new world of remote and online teaching. And in particular, it was a course being offered by Brent Bellamy from the English department who was part of the first pilot program and was using it in his course. And there was no discussion or emphasis on Hypothesis, but the minute I saw it, I was really, really, really interested because one of the things that I try to do in my teaching in general is to shift the emphasis to social learning. I teach Soviet history. I teach and in particular course on the history of the Soviet Union. And then a fourth year course I'm teaching this year on the Second World War and the Soviet Union. And that's a seminar course, so there are no lectures. And that's where I'm using Hypothesis because it's an intensive reading and discussion course. And it's a year-long course. So I've had the luxury of being able to use the program for an entire year. And I've made some small accommodations, but I told my students right away that this is an experiment and I've been watching it and sort of making a few adjustments, as I've said, along the way. And I haven't used it in my third year course. It's a semester-long course, but the fourth year course really lent itself well to this. And it's hard for me to say on the basis of one year how successful it is. I will say my students are fantastic. And I don't know if they were gonna be fantastic no matter what or the degree to which, Hypothesis has kind of drawn them in even further into the course. And I'll let Fergal speak. I don't want to monopolize all the time, but I will say the thing that surprised me is the way, and this was unanticipated, the way in which it keeps students engaged with each other outside of that weekly slot when we're together. So I have two groups, they're really nice students, but I get the sense that it's really help them engage as a community. And so the experience I've had so far, small, not a big sample, I don't wanna draw too many conclusions from it, but I see a lot of positives that would make me wanna continue using the program. Yeah, that's really interesting to hear and that idea of building community around reading, I think is really, that's something that we are sort of talk about a lot and are really interested in understanding how that happens in different contexts. So I'd love to talk about that more during the show, but yeah, let's, let me ask sort of the same question to Fergal in a sense, first, how did you come to learn about social annotation and start using it? But also if you wanted to expand on anything that Olga had introduced us to about Trent and kind of what your classes are like, especially during these pandemic times, that would be interesting to hear as well. Yeah, well, likewise, I stumbled upon it by chance kind of, I came on board as the acting director of TrentOnline last summer, and it was, I've been, you know, the idea of social learning is really interesting because my team has been teaching me so much about online learning. And like Olga, I went through the professional development training last summer, picked up a lot from that, but my introduction to hypothesis was actually when we were, Maureen Glenn, who's our senior e-learning designer, has been organizing our pilot and I was introduced to it at a meeting that where we were meeting with some of the faculty who were using it and they started talking about it and I thought, this is really neat. I know where I could use this. And so I incorporated it into my fourth year seminar course, which is a team-based structure like Olga, our courses in psych sort of lower years tend to be larger than the humanities, but by fourth year where our seminar courses are 20 to 25 sort of thing. So a way in mind is structured on a team, has a team structure to it. So students work in teams of five and the task that they have to go about is basically doing like sort of layered group work that eventually builds, the course is called models of self-control. So it's about building explanatory models for why people behave as they do and applying those models to the development of programs. And so the students start reading papers and extracting behavioral outcomes but determinants of behavior. So the things that sort of influence our behavior in terms of our internal experiences and things in the environment. And I thought hypothesis would be a perfect tool for them to start to get access to those things through their readings and to start to build conversations. And so that's how I came to it and that's sort of where I saw it fitting into my course and it's been, I would say like I've taught that course in a different format a number of times previously and hypothesis has been a really nice feature that I will definitely continue with when we go back to face-to-face teaching with that course. Like it's a must have now, I think for me, yeah. Wow, that's a strong testimonial. And I'm curious about, just to follow up a little bit on what you said there about this idea of continuing social annotation in a face-to-face environment because I think a lot of people like y'all did sort of end up learning about and starting to use hypothesis during the pandemic when things moved to remote. And yet, can you say more about how you would think about using it and when teaching is fully face-to-face? We're all good? Yeah, I mean, I want to hear from Olga too but I thought just because you had just said that, Vergo you might have a follow up. Either way. So the course, yeah, so I've also used, I'm using Microsoft Teams to organize the teamwork which is another thing I'm going to continue with or something like that. And I had prior to hypothesis, I had been using discussion boards which I've found to be like, there are ways of using them, I guess, that are helpful but it was in previous iterations of the course it was kind of getting to like post once, reply twice kind of thing and getting very, I don't know, like just wrote and uninteresting for students. And so with hypothesis, what I find I can do is not turn the students loose into the course but it's like, okay, so listen gang, this is what you need to be looking for in these papers because this is what you're gonna need for your models. Go find it, all right? Take a couple of days on your own reading through them and then flip it to group public view and then start talking about it between yourselves, right? As to what you can use. And I've found that they're like the depth of reading in the papers has generally been better, much better where, I mean, they have that direction as to where they need to be going with it but they'll be in their initial reads you can see where they're annotating, oh, okay so this is something we need to look at, determine it they'll be defining things, outcome expectancy, what does that mean, right? And then I mean, as they get more familiar and sophisticated with it the sophistication of their annotations increases as well and so it's just a better way. It is just a better way of doing it versus the previous method I was using in the course so Olga. Yeah, and I'll give you a chance here to go right in that same direction but this idea of how the discussion forum untethered to the text can be a sort of like less useful way to have that kind of discussion but when you anchor the discussion inside the text that allows for new kinds of possibilities. So Olga, do you also think of using social annotation after remote teaching is a past? Oh yeah, no, it's absolutely. I mean, my goal in the course is to get students to read text as interpretation and it's what I did before the pandemic it's what I'll do after the pandemic and actually having them go through the text together looking for an argument, looking for an interpretation is really, really important. And the best students will always, their students will get that immediately but there are other students for whom it takes a really long time and this is a way of speeding up the process because they see the other students engaging in that kind of discussion. I mean, the other thing I'd say is that in my fourth year course on the Soviet Union and the Second World War, I have a mix of students who've had some Soviet history before and students who have had no Soviet history before and some students who are real military buffs so they know all sorts of things that I don't even know. And what's fabulous is that the students who've had haven't had Soviet history can say, what's that? And then without having me to come in as the authority another student who's had some familiarity can jump in and say, well, that's what it is or somebody could just even look it up from Wikipedia and put in a definition. And so that's a whole different dimension of what they get to do that would be lost in the face-to-face of a classroom. So by the time we get to discuss this as a whole group together in a seminar they've already done quite a bit of learning. Yeah, and that's a pattern that we've heard before where it's when you do come together for synchronous discussion whether that's on Zoom or maybe live face-to-face when we can do that, having the socially annotated reading power and inform that then later group discussion can really change the game quite a bit. I see folks in the chat getting frustrated as they often do in these shows because we're talking about kind of highfalutin' ideas here and they're still like, but wait, how does it work? So I can understand that and we have other ways for them to learn how the nitty-gritty of how it works. But I'm wondering, Olga, you had talked before about maybe being more specific about how you actually orchestrate the use of it in your course. And you've mentioned a couple of things already about how you use it. So exactly what kinds of readings are you assigning? Are they PDFs or web articles? And then what is, are there certain assignments? How do you ask the students to get involved in the annotation specifically? Yeah, I saw that somebody asked a question Becky Rudd asked if hypothesis is used for all course readings. I made a decision before the course started that I would use it every single week because I didn't want them sort of thinking, oh, is this the week we have to do it? Oh, great, we don't have to do it. I wanted them to get into a rhythm and a routine. Every once in a while I will just say you don't have to annotate this one, but annotate this one and give them a little bit of a break that way. But it's been pretty much routine. I use PDFs, I put them on Google Drive and then use the web tool link so that they can't do the course readings without going to hypothesis. So it's pretty straightforward for them in that regard. Sorry, go ahead. Did I miss a question? No, I think that was good, similar to Fergal. So what kinds of readings, how do you get them in front of students? And you already did mention a little bit about how you make the assignment that compared to say a discussion forum assignment like you were talking about, how is it that you get students to like see the annotation as an active part of the course? Well, I assign a participation grade. So it's really, well, and this is kind of standard for seminar courses in our university, 25% of their final grade is seminar discussion and participation. And one of the attractions for me initially of hypothesis was this was yet another way to allow students who maybe don't like to speak up in a discussion in a room full of people who might feel a lot more comfortable just being able to engage in a different way. And over a period of time too because they can walk away from it and come back. We use Blackboard at Trent. So that's the gateway to posting all of this stuff. Yeah, and Fergal, do you wanna go down that same road? I saw you unmute for a second there. Yeah, so I mean, I can share what it looks like, Nate. That would be great. Yeah, if you wanna try sharing your screen and get people a little tour, that would be great. And then they'll have a little bit of visual cues about how it works. So I've got a couple of, I'm just gonna share this. So that's our campus. Ah, looks icy. This is last week, so it's getting better. Okay. That's spring in Canada. That is, yeah. So the team's site is set up so that the way the course is structured, there are groups assigned to different behavioral intervention targets. So this year, there's a group assigned to reducing single-use plastics. One assigned to stress reduction among clients at a community health center related to COVID. And so there's five of these groups and they're set up on teams to be able to work back and forth. So a lot of their work starts there and then where are we here? Where is my... You're nimbly moving around though. I'm impressed by your screen sharing already. I just wanted to find my screen share for my, it's not it, that's my email. Looks like you got some email to answer. I do. It's a continual battle. I'm just trying to find my browser. Yeah, sorry. While you're looking for that, I'll take the pressure off too. And so one thing that I think both of you might address is if how you, this is coming from the audience, Francesco asked this question about if you actually seed readings with your own annotations or maybe you participate in the discussion after the students have gotten going. So I do see the readings and their annotations. And so what I've been doing is like all guys. So I post the readings go into a Google Drive and then a link is set up to our learning management system site on Blackboard. The students access the readings through Blackboard. So when I click on them, when they click on them, it's a direct link to the reading and they get into their annotation. And then I'm able to follow in behind them and comment on the papers. I see it there now. Comment on the papers. And so what I typically do, if you can see that is I'll make a page note on the paper. So this is for our single use plastics group. And here the researchers were looking at, figuring out determinants of behavior for plastic use. And my comment here is, this looks like a nice three step study and looking at ecological product marketing. And then I make orienting comments for them. And then as you can see, and I'm not gonna reveal here because it's my students, you can see there's 25 annotations in this paper. The annotations are ranging from seven up to like nine, there were 95 in one paper. And they'll be of sort of a variety of levels of engagement with the students. Some of them will be going in and defining a term. Some of them will be, you know, identifying a particular intervention method as something that they might consider for their intervention program. And then you start to see the conversation build on that where the other members will go in and they'll add thoughts. And as I said, like one thing that I'm noticing over the course of the term is the depth of annotations, not in all groups, I wouldn't say that, but the depth of thought that's going into the annotations is increasing. And then like with the annotations, I assign, there's a 10% of the grade is for the annotations, which is, you know, there are other things that go into the grade, but in terms of the direct participation, I look at the social annotation as a proxy for that. But it's not, when I talk to the students about their annotations, it's not like, oh, how many, did I do enough? Or how many do, well, it started, they started, of course, how many do you want, right? And then of course, I give them some obscure answer that doesn't really answer that, but sort of nudges them along to find their way. And then, but now it's like they need, they want the annotations, they find the annotations so helpful because the next step in the process is writing article summaries for an annotated bibliography. And they, you know, they're telling me that, oh, well, I just go to my annotations and I just build my article summary based on that. And so that's how it looks in the course. And on, you know, I've just got it set up so that there's links in Blackboard that take you, take them to their papers. Papers are in these folders. Folders have the links. And then that takes the links, take them in, yeah. So that's- That makes total sense. And thank you, you addressed a couple of things that folks in the chat were asking about, about grading and so forth. And I'm interested in this idea of keeping the number of required annotations sort of ambiguous. I've heard Gardner Campbell, if you know him, a professor of English, Olga might know him down in Virginia, has long made the case that being less specific about what you want students to give back can kind of force them to find their own way, like you were saying, Furgl. And I just, as a clarification note for folks, you saw Furgl show off a page note that he had made. So the difference between annotations and page notes is that the page note is sort of like a note on the document as a whole, whereas the annotations are anchored in specific highlights in the text itself. And so Furgl's obviously using the page notes there as the sort of general introductory annotation on the document as a whole, that makes sense. And so Olga, back to you. Do you also have a practice where you precede the readings with your own annotations to kind of spark the students off? No, I don't. What I do is I've told them all along that there's a way to read history. So what's crucial is identifying the main argument, talking about, or identifying sources and evidence, talking about approach and all of that. I want them to sort of train themselves to think of certain questions whenever they read. So I don't go in, I actually don't participate in their discussions on hypothesis. One of the things, I mean, this is something for me to think about for the future. If a class meets at four o'clock, they're often working on hypothesis at three o'clock. So in the future, what I would do is have a cutoff period, say two o'clock or something, so that I could actually go and look at the comments before the class. But I have two groups, so the hypothesis groups can't be too large. And because then otherwise students find that they have nothing to say, especially if they're late to the whole thing. But I do make them both groups available and I keep them up, because one of the things we keep doing is going back and talking about readings we've done earlier in the year and making comparisons and all of that. And the notes are there for them all year long to look at. And I think that's really useful for them as a kind of memory prompt. Yeah, that makes sense. And so you're actually finding that students are coming back to the same reading and maybe annotating for a second round sometimes. I don't think they're annotating the second time around, but they're going back and looking at it. And I know that the students in one group are really curious about the students in the other groups. So they are reading each other's comments. So there's learning going on in that way. I mean, the other thing is that, beyond the questions that I pose for them that they should be asking every time, students are also commenting on things they find really interesting. And for me, that's been a wonderful experience because they will sometimes take the whole discussion in a direction in which I hadn't anticipated. And we end up talking about something that's important, something that they see that maybe I didn't see in the same way. So there's a lot of learning going on, a lot of social learning going on. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's awesome to hear. And Fergal, I think I interrupted you. You unmuted there. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I do go in and I do have a presence in their annotations. So if I'm working through the annotations and more so, I'd say at the start of the term or earlier in the term, but I will comment on, and I don't really comment. I ask questions of them to orient them towards certain things I think, maybe they're not picking up on or things that they need to follow up with. In this course, each of the groups are assigned a professional advisor who works in the field. And so I'll suggest to them that they follow up with a professional advisor to see how relevant this is to the context that they're developing their programs in. Yeah. And both of you are hitting on something that I think is really crucial. I mean, obviously you're talking about relatively advanced courses here. These don't sound like introductory courses, right? And they're relatively small, I'm guessing. Fergal, how big is your class in terms of students? So I have 23. Okay. That's a pretty small site course, that trend. Yeah. And Olga, how large is your class? I have 25 students, but I've broken them up into two seminar groups. Okay, right. So kind of split them in half, right? So this, but one of the things I wanted to draw out was, I see in both of your practices here that part of what the reading and the annotated reading is doing is helping set up students for writing. And I think that there's a really interesting connection, right, between how we read and how we can empower that so that it informs our writing. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you as if you've seen a change or in the practices around writing. I mean, Fergal, you already mentioned how they're using their annotations in their summaries. Yeah. And what like, sorry, I'll jump in Olga because I tell them right at the start, there is no wasted work in this course. If you want to write, if you want to develop a solid program and document it, this is the process through which you would go. And so their annotations build their article summaries, their article summaries build their annotated bibliographies which build their visualized models and all of the work products that they need to go into a great final paper. And so the social annotation really outs the cognitive and social process that goes on in developing their writing as thinking over time. It just, it makes it explicit for them. I'm not sure how many of them kind of cop onto that but I'm sure they do, but they do recognize that the value of it. Yeah. Yeah, in this course and in my fourth year course they write historiographical essays. So they are always in every essay they're comparing interpretations. So the more they're discussing interpretation as interpretation in hypothesis, the more they can conceptualize writing an essay that compares in interpretations. So yeah, again, it would be curious for me to see over a couple of years whether there's a noticeable, where there's a noticeable sort of advance in their writing and thinking. I've been telling myself I just have a really exceptional group this year. Sometimes it might be the special class, right? Who knows what the special ingredients are or maybe the pandemic has made everyone a better student. I don't know. That'd be hard to believe in these circumstances. Another thing that I'm really noticing we've been sort of answering a lot of the questions that have come up in the chat along the way. So if there are other questions folks please feel free to put them in the chat if you feel like we haven't addressed them yet. But the other thing I'm really noticing in both your work, especially in yours Virgil but also in Olga's is that you're having these students read, I'll call it real works, right? You're not having them read some textbook that summarizes something. These are real journal articles and real primary and secondary sources that they would use in their scholarly or professional lives moving forward. And so in a way, they're practicing the kinds of skills that they would need to advance either academically or professionally to go to that next level. And I'm kind of, I'm inspired to see how maybe this practice of annotation can lead us away from having folks spend a lot of time with, I don't wanna say dumb down texts but texts that don't come from the real world and touch on the real professional and scholarly futures, if you will. And so I'm wondering Olga, if you found that in your work it does seem like you have folks focused on what I'm calling these real texts. Oh yeah, and by the end of the year, one of our goals is to have them understand what the state of research is. That is they've read the major works and what's really fun is they get to read historians who violently disagree with each other and it really prepares them well for a graduate school. It's a good sort of bridging class. And so yeah, that's the way I've always taught it and this just kind of adds another dimension. Yeah, and Fergo, yours, I mean, it almost seems like your class is like specifically preparing them for professional activity, right? Yeah, so the way I've set it up in contrast to prior offerings, which were more, I say sort of more theoretically oriented. This was putting theory into action, like purposing it. And so I set the course up as a consultancy and the students are consultants in training. And they start with scenarios relating to behavior change. You know, as I mentioned, a couple of them there, reducing single use plastics. So that group is connected to their professional advisor is the executive director of Peterborough Greenup, which is the community organization that is associated with everything environmental in town. And so they meet with their community advisor. They, their task then is to go back into the literature, look to see what's known about the behavior in question and it's determinants and then bring that into a model. First of all, that identifies, you know, why this problem is happening. And then secondly, a model of change, which identifies what targets there, what things we might target to change that behavior. And then in the final phase, sorry, I think my notifications are going off here. It's final phase. Then they write up a program based on that. And it's applied in that way, but this would be like, I would like to see if I had a student coming in, a graduate student to supervise who was coming in with this kind of a background, they would have a foot up. So I think both, you know, practice, professional practice as well as advanced studies, this kind of having this kind of background would be beneficial for them. And, you know, having used the social annotation through the process, let's them see what good process is. That makes total sense. I'm really impressed by how it seems to be working out for you and I'll just mention here and I'll ask Franny to put a link in the chat to kind of get at this idea that Olga brought up of, it would be interesting to see how this affects student writing over time. There's a really vibrant research project going on that just got kicked off this year at Indiana University. It's in kind of introductory composition in English classes, but it's specifically investigating this question of the degree to which social annotation can have an effect on kind of reading and writing practices over time. It's a multi-year study actually, so we can put a link into the chat for folks. So there'll be new data coming out about that soon. So I know Virgil at least has something that he needs to get to coming up. There was one last question that I saw come through in the chat that I thought we might address just as a sort of farewell. So if you wanna add on anything else that you wanna say as we're leaving too, as you answer this question that I'll pose to you, that would be great and then we can close it up so everyone can get on to their next meeting. So annotations themselves can kind of serve as scholarly objects, right? And we talked about students using them in their writing and Francisco has asked if you have or have seen the students actually refer back to and link to annotations they've made in their writing, in their writing, other writing in the course, like do they serve, do the annotations themselves serve as sort of primary scholarly objects for them in their further writing? You wanna try that one all go? Yeah, I haven't. Students do talk about each other's comments in discussion. So in that respect, it does enter into the seminar itself. I'm trying to imagine how I might do that. It's still a new world for me. So I'm just feeling it out. I see it in, so in their article summaries, the first bit of it is a summary of the research. And then the wrap up is a critical evaluation of the study and I see the annotations coming through in that part of their article summaries where you can see how things that they've talked about in annotating the papers then are expressed in the article summary. Great, well, this has been such a great conversation. So much to unpack from everything that you've shared. And this has been recorded and we'll be sharing it out. It'll probably be up on the site by Monday. So if anyone wants to review it, we'll be sharing that out. And if you've registered, you'll get a notification that it's up. I really wanna thank Fergal and Olga for being here today. Really appreciate your spending the time with us to share your practice. It's super interesting for me and I'm sure it was for the audience too. Thank you Olga. Thank you. It was so great to have you here and thank you Fergal. Thanks, Nate and Franio. Yeah, thank you so much. I'd just like to say thank you to both of you. So again, thank you for coming to Liquid Margins today and we will see you next time.