 Social Annotations, Collaborative Online Reading, a presentation for the K-12 Online Conference 2015. Thank you for spending the next 20 minutes with me to consider some of the possibilities of using online annotation with students and with each other. I'm Paul Allison and I teach sixth and seventh graders at New Direction Secondary School in the Bronx. I'm also the tech liaison for the New York City Writing Project and since 2003, I've been working with other teachers to build YouthVoices.net. In addition, since 2006, I've been one of the co-hosts of a weekly webcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers, from which much of the video in this presentation originated. For a few years, teachers in the New York City Writing Project and teachers whose students post and comment on Youth Voices have been using online annotation to move students toward critical, careful reading. And we have learned how public online annotation can add collaborative reading to the mix. Recently, we've been taking a closer look at three text commenting tools, hypothesis, now comment, and litgenius and beta genius. We invite you to join us in this inquiry. We are proposing that we ask about the affordances of each of these tools and work with other teachers, with our students, and with different types of texts. Over three Wednesdays in September, we gathered on Teachers Teaching Teachers to talk with Jeremy Dean, the director of education at Hypothesis, Dan Dorenberg, founder of fairness.com and publisher of Now Comment, and Stephen Pringle, who works with the genius beta community. We were also joined by teachers from all grade levels who use each of these tools for online annotation with their students. But let's begin here in this presentation by having each of these men introduce themselves and the tools they are working to build. First, here's Jeremy Dean. My name is Jeremy Dean. I'm a former English teacher of a PhD in English literature, so also taught at the college level and the high school level. On the former, educations are of a rap genius genius. So I spent two and a half years founding and heading their education outreach arm so I can speak to their service and to the politics of that platform as well. And now I'm at Hypothesis, which a lot of you guys know, but I'll just state real quickly as a nonprofit open source web annotation application foremost as a browser extension, but there's some other ways to access online documents and PDFs and HTML and PDF format. And so now I'm doing the same thing I did at Genius trying to get educators and support educators using this annotation technology. And it's pretty great gig, honestly. I really enjoy these conversations and I enjoy the work, so. Next, we have Dan Dorenberg. Dan Dorenberg, one of the things I love about them, now comment is you. One, I could say that. Seriously. I'm turning red. I'm good. No, but it makes a big difference that there's somebody, there's a person there who answers questions, who says, you wanna embed that on Youth Voices and you don't like or embed the code, let me work with my designer and we'll figure that out, which is something you do. So just to say, by way of introduction. I think of it as almost like marginalia, but it's not marginalia exactly, but you're seeing the document, you've got all the context and you're making comments in like another pane but where the document is visible. And it's just a whole different process from a traditional message board where say you read something somewhere, whether it's a paper document or a screen and then you go somewhere else to make your comments and then you have to say, I'm talking about paragraph three or whatever. Just that integration of the document with the comment in one visual space is really, that's what's dramatically different from a traditional discussion board. And finally, we have Steven Pringle. I'm Steven Pringle, I work with Genius. Originally my calling with Genius was to work on the lit side of things, which when I crossed over quite a lot into the educational arena, I work quite a lot on Shakespeare on other like important public domain literature, which is read widely in English, speaking countries and around the world. Right now, my focus and my kind of, my target is Genius Beta and getting people using the off-site products. With these three introductions in mind and the communities of developers, advocates, organizers, readers and annotators, teachers and students that each of them represents, let's take a look at an example from each tool. The best way for you to get a sense of how hypothesis, now comment and lit Genius work is to pause the video and go to the example that I'm showing you to add your own annotations. These documents are all open available for your collaboration. Let's go in the same order as the introductions starting with hypothesis. In September, a group of educators annotated on the Hishi Coates Atlantic Monthly Article letter to my son. You can join these conversations at this shortened address, G-O-O dot G-L, forward slash capital F, small N, small M, capital L, capital E, capital J. The first thing to notice are the three boxes in the upper right-hand corner of the page. I'm already logged in, ready to annotate the text or reply to one of our colleagues. In the bottom right corner, you can see there are 70 comments as of this recording. Maybe you will be 71. Notice how when I click on a comment, the text that is being referenced gets highlighted in blue. Also notice that comments can include links and images. As we've been looking at these tools, we've been interested in how accessible the conversations are and whether or not the conversations grow around comments. In this article, you can see several places where replies were added, suggesting possible places for further discussion. There's so much more that we could look at together here. Allow this to be your invitation to join us in annotating this article as your introduction to the possibilities of a hypothesis in your classroom. Next, let's take a look at the conversations that a group of educators are having around a now comment version of an article by James A. Bean, Curriculum Integration and the Disciplines of Knowledge. You can find this document at httpsnowcomment.com slash documents slash three, five, seven, four, four. But you can also find this public open document by logging into Now Comment and searching for Curriculum Integration. Once there, you'll see that a lot of information is visually and easily available to you. If you are in the two pane mode, the text is in the left pane, divided up into paragraphs. On the right side are threaded comments and replies. Again, by clicking on the comment on the right, you will be taking to the place in the text that is being referenced. One special feature of Now Comment is the way comments are invited with two boxes. According to Dan Dornberg, they didn't have double entry or dialectical notes in mind when they developed this, but I use it that way with my students. When they are commenting on a text or replying to another student's comment, I ask them to first paraphrase what the writer or the other reader said before writing a more expanded response themselves. If your students are familiar with dialectical note-taking, this feature will fit their purpose well. And I suspect that this and other more technical features on Now Comment are why this tool seems to invite the most extended threaded conversations around specific parts of a text. Again, so much to look at here and so little time. Please join us in this conversation as well as a way to see what is possible with Now Comment. For now, while we're here, take a look at the way a reader can use the sorted tab to see everything that a particular reader had to say about this text. I hope it's becoming clearer through these examples, how the reading experience can become a more collaborative social experience with tools like Now Comment. There are so many possibilities and affordances that I am only able to suggest here. And it gets even worse with genius, lit genius and genius beta. Just a reminder mostly to myself, my purpose here is to invite you into this ongoing inquiry. With that in mind, allow me to introduce lit genius with a story that many of us are familiar with. This spring, I put Langston Hughes, thank you ma'am, up on Genius and immediately sent a message to Stephen Pringle to ask him to open this page to individual student comments. I'm cutting through a lot of conversation and possibilities here, but I prefer my students to be working on publicly available pages on Genius, but I also want to give them the option of making individual comments, which by the way can include video comments, or the more traditional Wikipedia-like community edited comments. You can find the page I'm describing here by searching for thank you ma'am on Genius. I got to put that little apostrophe after the MA. Thank you ma'am on Genius. And you can also find it embedded on Youth Voices Mission, on a Youth Voices Mission at youthvoices.net slash thank you, all one word. As my students this spring were reading this story and adding their own annotations, the night after they started their work, another reader, a contributor, an editor on the site added the most insightful and helpful comments to the story. How delighted I was the next day to show the students that they could learn about the text from this writer and what a message it sent to them about the value of their own comments on this story. There are so many more examples, but let's allow Stephen Pringle to pick up this conversation. This was the transcript of the GOP debate, which was, we had a lot of fun with it, but there were also some serious political points to be made. And the Washington Post as part of their coverage, they transcribed everything. And I'm just scrolling down now. And so I can see the first annotation there is the Ronald Reagan Library. So I click on that. And it's, because it's like a feature that annotation is visible by default. If I wanna kind of change that, I go up to this menu here where it says, so right now it says filter by feature annotations. I can click with drop down. And then I can see everyone who's annotated the page. So this is an example of a very crowded- And how many and, yeah, yeah. Okay, guys, yeah. As we were talking about, so if I want all annotations, it's gonna get quite yellow quite quickly. It's still kind of manageable because it's a long document, but you can imagine if there's like a short poem or something like that, it would get over the top. So yeah, right now I can see every annotation. This person is a community member, so is this person. I can scroll through them all just by scrolling. If I wanna go back up, and then, yeah, I can just click an individual account and only their annotations will show. Right now I haven't seen an educational use of this filter, but like Greg was just saying, I think there's great potential there. But on my mind, the buzz, that's a perfect tool. That's exactly what a teacher would need. Circling back to now comment, listen to these amazing ideas for using this tool in these teachers' classrooms. But I think, you know, I wanna do, my next move is gonna be a silent seminar. And just give them an article. The stuff that they really love is technology and how it's taking over their lives and affect them emotionally. And a lot of them believe it, a lot of them do not at all, and it really divides the class. And I might just throw up that article. If you wanna read it, it's called 2045, The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It's by Lev Grossman. It was published a couple years ago, but it basically says that man will become immortal by the year 2045 and the kids absolutely love it. And so I'll just have them read that and I'll just get out of the way. I won't say a thing. I'll just put the document on there and say you have to make, you have to ask a couple questions and you have to respond to something, something very basic. And, you know, I think that might help them get to what they wanna talk about, rather than me forcing my brilliant questions upon you. And finally, coming back to a hypothesis, Alakras loaned me to point to Larry Hanley's American Literature English 528 course at San Francisco State University. Check out his site, teaching.lfhanley, h-a-n-l-e-y-l-f-hanley.net slash e-n-g-528-f-15. And I think we can all learn a lot about how hypothesis is working to challenge the students to read in deeper, more collaborative, more interesting ways. Thank you. Larry, do you make conscious connections back to the social annotations? And, because, I mean, to me, it seems like your students are really prolific. It's fantastic. So what I'll do is before class, I'll sit down and go through the, you know, the text and the annotations and then kind of group them. You know, like, well, the students really seem to be having trouble with this idea of double consciousness in Du Bois. Or, you know, the students really seem to be grooving on this frost idea of, you know, whatever, you know, this line from frost. And some, or there'll be a lot of difficulty. You know, I'll go into class and say, hey, Ariana, you said something about X. Can you explain that to us? You know what I mean? And then, you know, Ariana will explain it. And I'll say, and Jesse, you mentioned that. You know what I mean? It's a great way to seed the class. Larry, I teach sixth and seventh graders and some of them are just struggling to learn to read. Right? And so, as you were talking about provocation and so forth, I was thinking, yeah. But I think there's something useful about that, too. You know what? So I guess what I'm asking is that, in some sense, your students are still learning to read, too, right? I mean, can you, yeah. I think, you know, from my perspective, all students are still learning to read, to be honest with you. I mean, it's different, it's different kinds of, you know, levels or something. But like, I've taught graduate classes and basically have felt in many of those graduate classes that the students still need to learn to read. So, you know, and I think the one consistent thing about learning to read for me, or there are a couple of consistent things, one is pay attention to the words. You know, I was, you know, I said this earlier, but like, not the deductive approach to a text, the inductive, work from the words. And I think the other thing about reading is that I try to practice is, you know, of course it's difficult. It wouldn't have any benefit if you were just reading your grocery list, you know what I mean? Or your, you know, traffic ticket or something. You know, fine, but we're not, we're reading things that are difficult at times because that's where you really get engaged with the text. So I try to, you know, kind of, it's really hard, it's difficult. No matter what the level of student is, in my experience, but to really not be afraid of difficulty and confusion and instead to see the difficult and confusing moments as very, very productive. I hope these examples have inspired you to join with us in understanding the power of annotating online. We are learning what it means to use tools that allow us and our students to engage both the author of an online text, image, video, or audio, and other readers, viewers, listeners of those texts at the same time and in the same space. If you can see what an important part of our work with young people it has been for many decades to invite them to respond to the voices in their heads as well as the author's voice and to generate a dialogue between these, imagine how excited it is now to be inviting students into these new interactions of discourse that are available to a reader who's able to join or choose not to join prior readers' comments and replies as well as to learn how to respond in ways that in turn invite possible future readers to engage with them. Not only that, readers can participate in these multi-dimensional dialogues multimodally. The tools that are turning annotations into conversations are also making it just as easy for a reader to respond with image, video, audio, and hyperlinks as it is to write comments. Grounded in the pedagogical history of annotation and dialectical note-taking and thrilled by these new tools, we invite you to join us in this ongoing inquiry into reading with others online using hypothesis, now comment, and let genius. Thanks for your time.