 So, anyway, I got excited about this, not so much that I had an expensive textbook I wanted to replace, but the corruption of the whole thing was really irritating to me. When I started thinking at Plymouth, and I think across most of our campuses, we had many, many students who are struggling to pay their tuition, and their fees, and I don't know about the rest of your campuses, but we have students this past couple of years in particular who struggle to eat on our campus. We open a student food pantry. When we've got crises like this going on, we want to do what we can. So I thought, okay, on board, I just put it again. Oh, it worked. So the anthology I was using was called the Heath Anthology. It was a whole anthology of public domain literature from about 1400 to 1800. Public domain literature means it's basically old enough that it's come out of copyrights. So my students were paying $86 per book for the Heath Anthology for a whole bunch of public domain documents that are freely available to anybody who wants them. And I thought, this is horrible. The North Moon, the Heath, the Bedford St. Lawrence, the Heath that I was using was the cheapest. They started in 1986 and they went all the way up. I thought, this is ridiculous. The problem is public domain literature is a little tricky because some Thomas Jefferson, no Thomas State of Virginia, public domain. But if I go online and I take a version of that that has been edited in a certain way, that is now public domain. That's been edited, right? So it was a little tricky to go out and find the public domain literature. But I decided, you know what? I think I can do this. I think I can go and find those texts and somehow group them together in a way. So I found an organization called Press Books that basically has a very simple interface that allows you to pull content and dump it in and kind of magically builds a textbook. Remember, I am an early American as I am not a technologist. I don't know what I'm doing. I've watched a kid on YouTube explain to me how to do stuff and that's how I learned things, right? So I watched a few minute YouTube tutorial and I figured I could make this textbook. But I needed help because there was a lot of legwork to go and find this stuff and I thought, how am I going to do this? I don't have graduate assistants and I asked my department for research money but we don't have research money like that. So the answer was kind of, you know, on all fronts. So I put a call out on the Facebook page of the English department. So I'm going to help you build this textbook. I'll pay you like $10 for each public domain text that you find. So what happened was I just built this Google Doc and there was about eight alums who had just graduated from Plymouth and a couple of current students. And I paid them out of my own pocket which sounds incredibly generous until I tell you that the total pass to build this textbook was under $400 which, you know, is a lot but nothing for me compared to what my students were paying. This is not a sustainable way to find out who we are by the way. But this was the best idea I had. So I enlisted these students. I trained them about public domain. I trained them about open licensing. I paid them $1 for the training because I was really committed to the fact that this was academic labor and we should mark that in some way. This was actual work and it should be compensated even though I couldn't find a way to do it at that point, right? So these students, like for example, Alicia, she signed up for William Bradford. She went on. She found the stuff. She put the thing in. We dumped it in. I took the test. I put in press books. Over the course of one summer, we built a pretty good replacement for the Heath Amphology as a collective and it was actually, you know, a little bit fun. So we get to class and it's cool. We've got this sort of skeleton textbook but it doesn't have the stuff the students love, right? Which is the, please give me the answer about what's important about Thomas Jefferson Park, right? So all the better, I asked the current students in the class to build all of that apparatus that comes with the textbook. Things like sort of footnotes, introductions, answer their materials, discussion questions, all that kind of stuff. So you can see here Justin and Simon, they were charged with a criminal revolt. So they went out and they found openly licensed images on Flickr and they wrote introductions to kind of situate things and we would put those in the textbook in time for that chapter. So as a group, the current class worked on the skeleton that those alarms had put together and we started to build our book a little bit further. All of this started creating this amazing thing. I was just trying to stay on 86 bucks and they were super grateful right from the beginning. They were like, we love you for saving 86 bucks. So I already had them in my pocket. What I didn't realize was how excited they were going to be to work on this. Now, in all my years of teaching with the heap anthology, which was probably over, I don't know, 16, 17 years, nobody ever said, like, we love the heap anthology. I used to put those wafered in pages, tiny type and nobody loves it. They really started to feel connected to this book that we were building together and they started coming up with ideas. So for example, this kid, Jonathan, he's a great writer. I was a drama writer, but making videos is really a mistake. I don't know how to really make a good video. He's super into, as you can see, the green screen videos. So he started making videos. This one on the Easter Revolution. He made these amazing videos. We can pop those right into the textbook, right into the introduction. And when Jonathan started doing that, other students started realizing, well, I got a skill. I got a skill. So whatever their skills were, they could start building around that stuff and we could put that stuff right into the textbook. So it became multimedia in a way, of course, with a lot of print textbooks. It can't be. And that's when I really started getting excited. I was like, what can we do with this amazing thing that we're building? So I grabbed an app called Hypothesis, which allows you to annotate an online text. So of course, this textbook lives online. It's just a URL. Anyone can go look at it. I'd love to read out the link to it after this session. So as long as something has a URL, you can load in Hypothesis on top of it and it allows you to take a piece of the textbook. I saw an arrow that had entered the final date on to the depth of the span and you can highlight it and come over here and write about it. So I wish they could just communicate. Both sides are obviously on the defensive. Sometimes the comments are really sort of amusing. So the students would be annotating this textbook really more or less in another layer of the textbook. What was amazing about this is, again, I don't think anybody ever really enjoyed annotating their piece of the book. It was just something you had to do so that you could keep track of your thoughts. But now they're annotating the work and it's social. They're getting notified when other people are replying to their annotations. And the annotations just took off. Hypothesis did a study of my students in this class and found that they made over 10,000 annotations in our textbook over the course of one semester. That was like sort of phenomenal, right? They were absolutely excited. What ended up happening is as this textbook gained some notoriety, other classes started using the textbook. So other students that we didn't know started annotating and talking back and forth with that. That's going to go on for years, right, as other people sort of come in and respond to annotations that are there before. So that piece of sort of being open and public really added a whole depth to the class that was not anticipated.