 Students and scholars have been writing in books since at least the invention of the book. As course readings move online, we lose that fundamental ability to write in the margins. We lose a fundamental learning practice. And web annotation and the work that hypothesis do, especially in education, is really about bringing that back to the digital environment, making it work across platforms so that each publisher is not producing their own annotation tool, and also adding some exciting affordances from the digital age. But when we talk about web-based annotation, there's two new possibilities that we want to emphasize. For the first time, we have something like public social annotation. And the use cases for this is that everyone can read, who has access to these tools, and everyone can write. And I can also begin to think about designing social conversation or social experiences where readers talk to each other in the text. The second thing that matters, and this matters a lot for teaching and learning in a kind of credentialed setting, is we can create private annotation groups where learners or affinity groups or editors can work together and say, here's a walled garden, and we're going to have those same social conversations, but just with a little bit of barrier protection, either for privacy or to help people feel comfortable to learn and grow, or for any other reason why privacy might matter to them. The thing that we want to stress also is that not only are these two types of annotation possible for the first time, but that each one of these methods now is possible on the same text at the same time. Each one of these layers is simultaneous on a text and layered. So for example, we might have a layer of your private notes, and on top of that layer, you might have a private group, which is Jennifer's French 322 class in one particular semester. And on top of that layer, we might have a publisher layer that's used by the French department to publish their critical apparatus on that text. And on top of that layer, we might have a general public layer that anyone who visits that book can read and write to, all at the same time on the same text. And for us, that's dramatically exciting for teaching and learning purposes. Here's what it might look like all put together. So the professor is given an excerpt, they've given them a stop and think activity, and over in the right hand side, you see an annotation layer with some social annotation happening. This is all just living directly in this case, it's Canvas, the learning management system. The student thinks they just clicked an LMS activity, but what we're really serving them is the live version of a press book with the hypothesis annotation layer just built in. And so for them, the cognitive load is very low. They're just having this experience like they would any other LMS experience. They click next and they take a quiz. They click next and they do a discussion for them. They click next and there's another chapter with an activity that Jennifer's built. I was able to pick up this platform called Hypothesis and begin to use this idea of designation, a sign, a note, a character, something left to show that you were there with my students as they read. I've come to do this simply by saying on the syllabus, we will have six, let's say, hypothesis assignments this semester. But I don't say what they are. I don't even necessarily know what they're going to be. I use them like prescriptions. I take the health of the classroom and I say, oh, we need some adrenaline. Oh, we need some serotonin, maybe some dopamine. These are all legal in the Commonwealth of Virginia. I just want to point that out. And I administer these hypothesis assignments. And I try to make them part of a larger emphasis on what it is we are doing with our marks, our signs, our designations as we work on these texts together. And I tell them that I want their annotations to be substantive, interesting, and relevant. And I say, if you want to talk about what does that mean, that's fine. The minute you ask me how long does it have to be, I will change the subject. I will play the who. I will do something, because I am not going to answer that question. It's the wrong question. That's a question a ghost asks. How much ectoplasm should I leave on the wall? I don't want you to leave ectoplasm, I want you to haunt it, baby. So I try to set it up, right? And then I time it. If there's a particular impasse we've come to, this is that prescription thing I'm talking about. If there's a particular impasse we come to at a particular moment, I'll say, and this weekend, there'll be a hypothesis assignment. And then I'll put it up online and tell them four. And I describe zooming in, zooming out, and connecting. And I talk about everything we do in the classroom as an example of one or the other of these activities and often combinations of them. And for me, the work with annotation and I use hypothesis is the work of zooming in and connecting, which of course hypothesis is very well suited for. Now the educational yield on a student making that kind of connection, practicing it five times in a row to get it exactly right, and then sharing it with her classmates and her teacher and the world, the educational yield is enormous, exponential. The reason I really like hypothesis is because it mimics some of those things we saw in the 19th century annotations. If you look at my students' conversation here, you'll notice that they're picking up on really nuanced language choices in the article and that they're actually connecting the work of my class to other classes they've taken at the university, which is like a goldmine for us professors, right? The kinds of conversations that happen on hypothesis are more grounded in the text, sustained conversations about one particular point longer, and involve more voices often than the Blackboard discussion boards about the same topic. Absolutely. Oh, there's no question about it. I mean, it's informed my pedagogy and how I design courses, how I think about students collaborating the way in which I have students engage deeply with texts and the kind of social practices and discipline-specific practices that are integrated into annotation workflows. I use it in my own teaching for peer-to-peer feedback for some aspects of formative assessment, certainly for ways of engaging with text, new content, what do we make of it, what do we understand, what do we not understand. One of the learning outcomes for this course is that students need to read for nuance and meaning and detect literary devices operating in a text. So I decided to use hypothesis to give them a means by which to demonstrate their skill at this. So I use it embedded in an LMS in Blackboard in groups, in private groups. And what I have found is that students adapt to it very quickly. They do their best work in the course in these annotations. And then when I move away from the poetry unit and into fiction and drama, the level of reading drops off noticeably. So the one thing that I hear from students is that the part of the course they like best is the annotation part. And it's always followed by I didn't think I would like poetry that much. So I consider that a win. There is a more intimate social nature about the hypothesis annotation interface. I also use the Blackboard discussion forum, which I hate, and I'm going to start shifting away from that and doing more hypothesis annotation merely because of the look. But there's just a different feel in those annotations. And I don't know what else to ascribe it to. This is probably my favorite quote out of all the surveys and times that I've had feedback from students. I just want to say, like a student that gives at the very end of the term saying, I enjoyed reading the annotations alongside the text primarily because it helps me engage with the text at the sentence level. I'm the product of an educational system where annotation and critical reading was not encouraged and not taught. So the hypothesis tool really helps me understand how to read critically, as opposed to just absorbing information. And it can be hard to read and interpret, hard in a good way. And so students ask questions like the example you see here, am I crazy? Am I understanding this? And nobody wants these questions in their inbox. But students need to ask these. And this is important because we need students to feel comfortable asking these. And when we add a social element of crowdsource, class source element to note taking, students benefit from the notes. But they're also benefiting from the ability to ask questions in a different way than raising your hand in a classroom or emailing your professor. And it empowers students because it's building confidence that when you continue reading that you're understanding. And it's letting them move on to higher levels of thinking and analysis. I think it also really helps students with textual evidence, which we keep on asking for if you've taught reading and composition. And where is your textual evidence to support that? Well, here they've started with the textual evidence because they had to highlight it. I would phrase it as a spatial and temporal proximity to the act of reading. So students do it as they read. That reading and writing are becoming very connected. And it's not separate. It's not somewhere else. It doesn't live in a discussion forum. Open web annotation can be more than text on text. Almost all the examples we've seen so far have been people writing text about text. But that's not the only thing that's possible with web-based annotations. So here's an example of a poem by a Wisconsin poet. If you don't know Lerene Niedeker, become acquainted. She's lovely. My favorite. And here in this poem, we're using rich web-based media to help provide context. There's an example of an image, a historical place marker in Paw Paw. There's a video of someone preparing Paw Paw fruit. There's a link to Paw Paw recipes. And then there's audio element of Lerene Niedeker reading a poem. And that's all lives in the annotation layer, which we could never, ever do in print. We talk a lot about standards at IAnnotate. And Hypothesis played a major role along with the W3C in getting standards through for web annotation. The thing that excites me about standards as a former English professor, English teacher, is that that unit that I was always encouraging my students to master, the sort of grabbing of a piece of text and saying something smart about it, saying something significant about it, is now sort of a basic piece of the infrastructure of the web. So I think it's particularly exciting the web standard for those of us in education. We're having students create knowledge that they're going to continue to own. Anyone who's done scholarly work, we build on our own work. And when I started thinking about using this in a graduate seminar, that's where it really became real to me, because students are going to study for MA exams. I hope they're going to write dissertations. Some of them will go on to do scholarly work. Students have rich understandings in many cases of what they can do when they share with their friends on social media and so forth. But they don't have a lot of understanding about how they're going to contribute to civilization. I mean, they never have. Before the web, students would come in thinking, well, this is another container-filling kind of thing. And maybe I'll have an inspiring teacher. It'll be fun. But I tell them right away, no, no, no. You are now at the place where you are conspicuously able to build civilization. You have attained your majority. Let's get to work. And when they find that they can do that as well, using the World Wide Web, using annotation, using all of these communication affordances in this global light speed telecommunications network we've built, they'll find it exhilarating. And they want to do it. I mean, I can't tell you. I say, leave four annotations. That's my instruction. No prompts, nothing. Leave four annotations on this essay. And because of the work we're doing with zooming in and zooming out and connecting in class on the blogs constantly, they just get in there. And they start talking to each other. They start linking to things. They supply images because they're awake now and they know that they can add good stuff. And they know that I pay attention and that it matters.