 Welcome to Liquid Margins, Opening Books, Social Annotation, and OER. And I am your host, Franny French. Today's guests, and we were saying earlier, a pre-show that we have been looking forward to holding a show like this for probably about a year. So we're really excited today to have this wonderful panel. Monica Brown, she's the Assistant Program Manager at Revis. Hi, Monica. And we have Addie Clark, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Oregon Institute of Technology. Emily Reagan, she's Associate Professor of Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at MSU Denver. And then our guest moderator today, Robin DeRosa, she is the Director of Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University, which sorry, Robin, I thought that was in Plymouth, Mass. It's in New Hampshire. So I got there. Okay, and thank you. And with that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to turn it over to Robin to take over. Thank you very much for being here everyone. Hey everyone. I am so happy to be here. Usually I'm not a moderator. I'm usually a panelist on these things. So the idea that somehow I am in charge of making the train run on the track seems like a poor choice by a hypothesis, but I'm going to do the best I can. Wherever we go, I'm sure it will be interesting. I am the Director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State in New Hampshire. So I mostly work in faculty development now but in the past I was an English professor here for about 15 years and then five years as a professor of interdisciplinary studies. And I also do a lot of work in open education, particularly with open pedagogy so I'm really excited to be here to talk about this. And I'm going to ask our panelists today to introduce themselves so I will start with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Reagan. I'm at Metropolitan State University in Denver. I'm in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and I've been using hypothesis in my biochemistry to class which is senior level class and that's been a lot of fun. Yes, me and the chemist sits a natural choice. Addie why don't you go next. Hi, I'm Addie Clark, I am an associate professor of chemistry at Oregon Tech or the Oregon Institute of Technology, and I've been using hypothesis in both my upper division chemistry courses and my lower general chemistry courses for about two years now. And Monica. Hi everyone, I am Monica Brown, she her pronouns and I am the assistant program manager at Rebus community, where I work with faculty on creating sustainable open publishing pathways. I've been using kind of social annotation via the route of being a composition instructor before this role, and gotten the chance to work with some faculty and instructional design capacity on hypothesis. Awesome. Um, so I am going to kick us off by talking about how why I think perhaps I was invited here today. And then we'll hear from some of our folks who are engaged in current practice. So when I, the first OER I ever made or used was an OER that I created with students called the open anthology of early American literature. I was really lucky to be in a field where almost everything was public domain texts. So we made this anthology. It was digital. And it was kind of okay, you know it didn't have a lot of things that the paid version had in terms of like footnotes and notes and so students weren't actually loving it. And that kind of changed when I layered in hypothesis to this open textbook that we had made. I put in the chat, the sort of origin stories of this of this project and you can, you can take a look at it a little, but hypothesis was new when I was doing this. And somehow, you know they were so new and so small that they would like talk to me every day about like how's it going over in your class, and they would watch. I would watch my class like do a kind of beta thing. So it was this really cool thing because I was not a techie so I really felt like they were watching actual students to develop the tool which was cool. And then my students love the idea of like being in on the ground floor or something but the textbook itself really took off when I put hypothesis in there. And you can see from the little write up I shared that I think hypothesis was the reason that this we are became a living organic place, rather than a replacement for a textbook it was replacing the heat anthology. It was kind of a game changer for me so in some ways I think hypothesis is what pulled me into open pedagogy. This idea that using open resources, allowed for my students to have a different relationship to learning materials than they had before. So, that was like pretty transformative for me and again at the time I was new and open I was new and everything. So it's just, I felt really lucky to be hooked in with a community of people that was discovering the potential of using an open license, making no we are using social annotation, all this kind of one posse and I think it's hard for me to separate out from now the we are from the social annotations so all the stuff I've done since, mostly through rebus has had hypothesis, you know, plugged into it and I think it's been, it's been pretty cool. So I thought I might ask the same question. First of Emily and then of Addy about how you started using hypothesis and how it's shifted your teaching or your pedagogy, or your relationship to open resources. And then I know Monica will have some really interesting things to say about what publishing looks like in this open world where we can talk in the margins. So Emily, tell us a little bit about your origin story. Well, the first two places I heard of hypothesis were one from a colleague that's at an institution that shares our campus see you Denver shares a similar physical campus as MSU Denver and Rami Khalir was using hypothesis and introduced me to the idea of annotating today and really fun things that you could do with hypothesis early on, and then also Libre text had integrated hypothesis into their resources and so I ran across it there as well. But it really wasn't until it must have been spring of 2020 so this was the semester that the pandemic unfolded that I had been thinking for over a year that I wanted to switch to using we are in my biochemistry to class I've been doing that in general for a long time. But the OER I found biochemistry free for all which is out of Oregon State huge PDF like 3,600 pages or more, and I really was having trouble wrapping my head around how to use this resource and I realized, I could chunk it up into short readings, and then assign them through hypothesis and give that a go so I feel very fortunate that I happen to start that practice before the pandemic because it was one of the things I think really held the class together after we had to move virtually, because the students could continue adding their voice and having those conversations in the margin. And so that that was my real for a hypothesis and I've been using it in that class every semester since even adding more assignments. So we have at least two hypothesis assignments a week, sometimes three. And I found it very satisfying because I get to see what the students are thinking about and then I can respond to that in my lecture so for me it's become a type of just in time teaching helps me see areas that maybe I didn't explain clearly enough in the previous lecture or things that students are especially enthusiastic about for the upcoming lecture. And it's really, really been a lot of fun. Can I just ask a follow up, which I guess is my job so good job, Robin. When you talk about hypothesis assignments. Are you just telling students, hey, you know make some annotations or do you frame or scaffold that a little bit more. It's very open ended so we're using the canvas integration so I really can set it up in canvas and so to the students that looks like an assignment there's a due date for them to help motivate taking action. And I really just have said minimally I want you to either make three just three comments whether it's an initial comment or a response to a classmate I've generally kept it very open ended because I wanted them to have the freedom to kind of explore and that's worked well for this particular class and this particular application. The other thing that's really transformative is my students didn't use to do the reading and one barrier was that I knew only half my students had the textbook so I was using the textbook very lightly because I knew it wasn't a resource everyone had access to but that was a loss for my students so. And at the beginning of the semester one of my students was asking like do we really have to do these readings. I'm like hey it's going to make your experience richer there's connections that are going to come up in the readings that are things I'm not going to mention in lecture, and you're actually going to find it very satisfying so it's really helped me take my class, I think to a deeper level and students are able to make more connections as a result but it is very open ended just what I'm asking them to do with the so called assignment piece of it. Thank you addy do you want to jump in. Sure, so I also started using hypothesis in what I lovingly refer to as the spring that time forgot. And I started using it because we're on the quarter system here. And so my spring was the entire spring quarter, we basically went on spring break and never came back. And I was teaching a 400 level class in the fate and transport of pollutants that was supposed to have a lab. And in general chemistry there were a lot of good simulations and videos and whatnot that I could, I could send students to to sort of simulate the lab experience but for an upper division class there is there was no appropriate institution. So I sort of shifted the definition of lab, and we read peer reviewed studies in the fate and transport of pollutants for lab instead and what I used hypothesis for was posting those peer reviewed studies on canvas. And having students make notes before they came to our discussion about parts of the study that they weren't clear about parts of the study that they wanted me to provide some more explanation for again sort of that just in time teaching that Emily was talking about. And it really just sort of saved my bacon spring of 2020 because otherwise there really wouldn't have been a good substitution for that lab. Now, I have shifted to using it so I have been using OER in my classes since the fall of 2019 we, we shifted our general chemistry to a version of open stacks that I had curated and was hosting on Weber texts. And so, we already had that and what I've been trying to do since about that same time is get OER's in my upper level classes I teach to upper level classes and environmental chemistry the fate and transport of pollutants that I already mentioned and an environmental chemistry, sort of analytical chemistry toxicology type deal. And there aren't but there aren't good open resources for specialized upper division classes, because they're just so specific to those topics. And so what I started using hypothesis for last year. In that respect, I went to the open ed conference the open ed 2020 conference and I saw a really good presentation about having students tag their readings with these very specific keywords that we have definitions for. And that's what I've been having them do when I assigned them so basically I've been assigning them parts of other OER's and having them go through and tell me what they think is important to then build the OER from using these tags, or what they think could be made more clear like what this explanation is muddy and it would be better if you rewrote it sort of thing. So I've been doing that in my environmental chemistry course this year I'm teaching a new and different general chemistry course I'm building the OER again, and I'm having the students when they do their reading assignments instead of it being a reading course their assignment is to go through and tag the open stacks chemistry sections that we're covering to help me build the next general chemistry OER for the course. And that I'm sorry but that is such a cool project and I know people who use hypothesis, you know, Nate, being one of them but like in these cool ways that are so much beyond what I've done where students are just chatting with with each other because it's a bill, you know, I feel like I'm selling something by the way, I do not collect a commission from hypothesis, but the ability to use that, that tagging and curation piece, especially as a way to potentially over the over time, build OER's for areas that don't have, you know, curated organized resources yet is so and to do that with students, I think is really super cool. I'll ask Monica to chime in now from Rebus but I also noticed that big long thing from David in the chat which I can't, you know, process so quickly so maybe you guys can tell me also at some point if you can empower him to speak, I trust him and vouch for him so if he's able to be liked to talk I'd love to hear a little bit about his comment after Monica so yeah go ahead Monica. So, I think we're seeing both Maddie and Emily here at like the power of social annotation to kind of change how we think about publishing. For so long, we kind of give students these curated texts, and they might note on them right they might write on them in the margins but they're not able to make that public. And so the public component, the collaborative component it's just really cool to see students be able to kind of highlight what they value, call into question texts, and then of course make these really cool connections that we haven't seen before and so something that we try to do at Rebus is really encourage everyone to be a part of the publishing process so that it's not this like one way street, your student come in the class get the information and leave. It's more collaborative in both ways. And I think social annotation is just one really cool tool on our in our toolkit to do those kinds of things. Yeah, I mean I'm also always interested. I don't know if anyone wants to chime in but like to me it was really important when I started working with hypothesis that they had this. It was a nonprofit commitment and the commitment to open in general right like there's nothing. I mean you can use hypothesis in ways that I think you know we would not call open, but the company itself sort of has this ethos and I'm always interested in, you know, where the future is going in terms of using hypothesis through communities like rebus or using hypothesis through the LMS like canvas and what the pros and cons are. I guess sometimes I asked the question of like, what's your vision for the future digital environments that we have available to us for teaching and learning and how does hypothesis fit in with that. And it's like, especially with Emily and Addy if you guys are just thinking like, okay here's a tool that works or if you're thinking bigger about like why this tool for my vision, Addy I see you on muted do you have a comment. I have two actually and one of them Emily just posted in the chat so I one of the things I am up against is cost to the institution of integrating it into canvas, because right now I'm the only user on my campus. So they they really, they're not going to justify the cost for much longer just to give me this teaching tool. I think the benefit of the LMS and the integration personally is just one less thing that students have to keep track of it's one less account like Emily sort of mentioned. It looks like a normal canvas assignment they open it up it's just right there it gives them a grade in canvas they never have to leave the LMS to remember to do something. I think is really big and a lot of the other things that I use like that canvas integration is really important to students because they just can't keep track of all the different little tools that I want them to use. But if they're all in one place and it just looks like the same assignment, they are ready and willing to do it, even though it would be the same thing as if I sent them to hypothesis to do it on the hypothesis website. One step that one barrier taking it away makes it so much easier for them. Yeah, I mean we've heard such interesting things during coven to about. I mean, there's a million things we could talk about here in terms of like access and, you know, digital access and the ways digital tools make things both more and less accessible in various ways. But certainly, we heard a lot about tech fatigue and the challenge of a lack of consistency in the tech environments. But we also know the challenge of like centralized tech environments, and how those can also disempower learners who become less fluent in critically examining technologies right so it's a real challenge for faculty these days I mean, especially when you're at a residential campus a place where people didn't expect to be taking so many online courses and suddenly your students are in five online courses, full time online courses at once or something so it. I found that without the single sign on. It was a lot to ask of students for sure. So did you guys promote David. I don't know what he did to earn his way on this panel but he did. David I think if you try to unmute. I don't see him in my. I don't see him either. Sorry. It's okay we can we can come. Oh, there he is. Hey David. Hi, I'm sorry I did not mean to. I did not mean to be on this. This discussion I apologize. And you know what this could happen to any. Things in the chat so be careful. It was not a smart thing Robin it was just me blur, you know, gliding away. Oh, so I was just saying that, and I love what the panelists have said and I appreciate you being here and. For me, the annotation was not. It was not something that informed my pedagogy didn't inform what I was doing it actually was more of an openness to the students sharing their organic thinking with each other. And so I was just saying in my, my little note there that in their labor reflections I do a lot of reflections, and I asked them what's working for your learning in this course and I'm telling you invariably they always mentioned the annotation. One, they've never been invited to annotate in an academic setting before I think they do it a lot in their own social media platforms, but in an in an organized fashion, and it opened. I, my point was the openness for me is the openness of the organic thinking, because that organic thinking contributes to the writing practice practice which also contributes to their, the course community so I would love to actually have them go out, find organic texts, annotate them bring them back to the community, and then we refashion that now I don't know if the hypothesis people here can do that in the canvas LTI, but I would love for that to do that as well. So what Addie was saying, it is a beautiful thing when they can, you know, single sign on and use hypothesis but I have taught where they actually had to go and create their own personal accounts and hypothesis which was very, you know, it was simple it wasn't it wasn't that that difficult I teach at a community college online first year composition. Robin, our world is like unicorns and rainbows we could do whatever the hell we want so but I love the idea of you guys curating your stuff in the STEM areas and all that my, my goal and I'll stop here, my goal is to actually use hypothesis to perhaps create a children's storybook about on grading, where we get on grading through maybe a press book into the hands of elementary school students to hopefully kind of bypass the trauma that traditional grading does to them. So anyway, that's my little side project with hypothesis but thank you Robin. That is awesome I gotta, I gotta go find a resources to get in the chat in a minute because we made such an awesome little on grading chat book, it's, I think it's not impressed books though it's almost. Yeah, I gotta figure that out because I have something you could, you could start with. Those are our super great comments one thing I'm really interested in David that you brought up. And this is one of the things I've been interested in is sort of the community aspects of social annotation. But the others like the confluence of that community building with what you mentioned which is writing, which, and the third thing which is close reading. And I think as somebody who has taught both literature courses and reading and writing courses before making reading visible and close reading visible. Like I spent so many years teaching close reading without ever really being able to crack that nut. I think I did a better job with poetry right because we would talk about scans and we would talk about diction. And it's really hard with pros to help students understand what close reading look like and I just think there's something pretty magical about the confluence of community reading and writing. And it's sort of writing across the curriculum way in any discipline like those three things are generally going to be really, really useful. I just want to jump in Monica Emily Addie and then I can look to see what else we've got going on the chat. Well I'll just say manual was trying to help think of ways we could get towards what David wanted which was students finding things and then those being able to be annotated. I certainly have tracked down references that my students have linked to and brought them into the classroom. It would just be one step further. It will work for me but I could upload those as another assignment and students could then be annotating a related piece that was found by another student. So that's, you know, maybe one way to kind of let that cascade out. So just, I wanted to kind of follow up on that idea of how to let it cascade from the student contributions to additional annotations. We had some good luck to with students across different courses at different institutions, intentionally annotating the same text over a week or two. And then the work from that, they would share some of their blog posts and other things they were doing so that you ended up kind of creating some networked learning opportunities through those social annotation. And I wouldn't run me call them like I'm, Rami called them and a Tata funds is that right. It was not what you guys are calling them, but but doing that with with classes is very cool too. Addie go ahead. And I have to say just that discussion just now I just had an idea about an assignment that I do. And in environmental chemistry I frequently have students bring current events into the class for us to discuss because there have been a lot of current environmental chemistry events that we need to talk about. And I usually have them submit them and then I put them online and they we talk about them in class and I'm just now thinking, what if I put them in hypothesis and then they can talk to each other that way. You know when a panelist goes home that you're really getting to some, some good content. I do there's probably a lot of stuff and I'll ask, you know, Aaron and Nate what I'm missing but I do see a question here from Manuel. I want to ask the panelists do they find in the chemistry classes. There's a lot more writing so do they find an appreciation for the communication of technical content. So the question is really, how do you do you also get the added benefit of talking about scientific writing and how that works when you're doing that kind of social annotation. Either I think that's for the chemists. Yeah, go ahead, Eddie. Well, I'm just gonna say you go explicitly focused on that is come up just a little bit tangentially but I like the idea of diving deeper. Okay, Eddie. Really, I haven't gotten into it. But again, the question is making me think about ways that I could marry these two things together, because I do make them do at least in my upper division classes I make them do science writing, and I'm making them read science writing so the marriage of those seems like a natural thing I should be doing. Wikipedia contribution project with my biochemistry to students this semester so for the first time instead of just writing a final paper for me to read their updating Wikipedia page about a protein so it's related to our course. And this is my first time running the this portion of the class and I'm really thinking about how I can use hypothesis to do some annotation earlier in the semester to help scaffold this Wikipedia assignment better so that's something I'm going to be chewing on. I'll put into the chat, the wiki edu link for those of you who are interested in some of the confluence with teaching with Wikipedia. You do not have to go that road alone these those folks are really great at supporting anything from a very small, you know, two day Wikipedia project to whole semesters research project and it really goes back to that open education philosophy of the non disposable assignment, where many students tend to do research that, you know, go in the old trash can now goes in the delete button. But with Wikipedia there's actually a place where some of that research can live and serve access needs. Any other comments that I've been missing the chat is going fast and I know I'm missing things or Monica is there anything else you want to jump in on before I choose another question. I don't teach chemistry, but I do. I did teach research writing for first year students and so I didn't have hypothesis back in that day and I wish I had because I think it could be really compelling way for students to conduct research across the web and be able to really close read as you mentioned earlier Robin, the text and understand how scholars write about these different things. Yeah, I look forward to teaching an English research course again in the future because I think there's a lot of potential there. Monica one way to is in the research is to have what Emily and Addie are talking about when they do their writing, asked them invite them encourage them to cite their peers and what they've said in the annotation so now we're kind of renewing the research within the learning community as well. The other thing is I saw a tweet about decolonizing the syllabus and the person who did the tweet said, you know, you got to get messy you can't just say you're going to have these new readings on your syllabus to decolonize it. In a good way is to actually invite the critical consciousness of the students on those texts, get them to annotate them and to deal and get their hands dirty on these types of topics so to two comments there. Yeah, and first of all, David welcome to the panel is a pleasure to have you. And also I will say we've done some great stuff with our in our interdisciplinary studies, quote unquote textbook which again I really think of as a community. It's got a lot of, you know, peer reviewed open source articles from various places, but it also has a bunch of student writing that current students in the program annotate and a lot of those students, you know, when they go on and graduate they are still there, but people are annotating their essays and we end up with this really wonderful thing where students are seeing their peers as people who can participate in a scholarly conversation and contribute scholarly contents. And it really keeps our alums like hooked into the community, because they get pinged on these various annotations as they're coming in so they're always excited about seeing that we're still teaching their work. You know, a couple years after they leave and graduate so I think. And I also used in sort of an ungrading kind of way. I use hypothesis when my students are publishing we use domain of one zone in our program. So our students have their own URLs where they're doing a lot of their own work. I wouldn't do migrating via hypothesis and before you furpo me in the chat I will say, you know, I didn't do anything it was all feedback right there's no grading, but I would comment on their stuff just the way I would comment on any academics blog posts. If I had a typo or a problem like that. Like if I was reading Emily's blog and she had a typo I wouldn't comment on her blog and say, Emily you have a typo, you know, I would, I would email Emily and be like hey you might want to fix that type of. So that's what I did with my students I would give them some private feedback but most of my stuff was public and hypothesis, and it really changed. I felt like that was just an automatic way of ungrading. It changed the model from grading the feedback, just by thinking about their stuff as public and sharing stuff publicly the way I would with any scholar that I engage with online so I just love the way the dialogue of scholarly conversation can can change a little bit your relationship with your students it can move them and I think into a community of scholars, rather than just a community of students. Great question from David in the chat, and I would love to hear this from Addie and Emily to is about the assessment of hypothesis. So, with hypothesis assessment in my course I would always do it by self assessment where I would show them how to gather data on how many, you know annotations they made they would write out their data they would look at their metrics, then we would have little rubrics where they would look at the kinds of engagements they were having and then they would assign themselves a grade for it and that's what I would use. I'm curious to know what other people are doing do you count annotations do you not grade it and how does that may be different than how you would count class participation with like verbal contributions. Either of you want to jump in. Yeah, so the types of assignments that I've been using hypothesis for have been very much participation type deals of a very black and white you did it or you didn't. With my general chemistry this fall what I've done is I have, I get I give them the tags and the definitions and then it's also always open that if they have a different kind of comment that they want to make on a section they are more than welcome to. And I just tell them they have to make at least 10, and they don't have to be unique from what their classmates have already done because since the purpose of this assignment is to sort of build the text. They're almost doing a, you know, majority rules sort of thing on various sections if all of them highlight the same thing that tells me that it's a pretty important thing. So, for my general chemistry students it's a 10 point assignment they have to make at least 10. A lot of them still make more than that because I was a little worried in that model that they would get to 10. And even if that meant they were only on page five of the reading they would stop. But a lot of them keep going and they make more than 10 but it is entirely 10 annotations 10 points done I do not grade the quality of what they have to say I don't that because that's honestly it's their opinion. So how do you grade an opinion, at least as a stem person, I have no way to, I have, I have no knowledge on qualitative grading as a chemist so Yes, and I do something very similar. You know, I'm expecting three annotations and you get three points. And it's not grading the substance of those annotations. However, if students aren't participating they're not getting the benefit of the assignment right they're not showing that they're doing the reading or having the incentive to at least crack open the reading and take a look at it and they're not engaging with the reading and their classmates. So I've been using it at the, you know, kind of a basic foundational level and even just that has been really fun and exciting to get the conversations going I really feel like this benefits some of the quiet people in the class where you always have some percentage of the class that will be happy to engage verbally and some people who hold back. But everyone is equally contributing and hypothesis and I find that very satisfying. Well, I think you guys are brilliant and kind of I'm not teaching this semester kind of bombs me out because I'm remembering just how creative. You can be with with this stuff and there's so many interesting ways to use it. I only have a couple of minutes left and I guess I just want to say, ask folks if there are any last questions that you want from Monica Emily or Addy. I'm trying to read the chat quickly or David David is here and ready. I'm just seeing all of the, all of the stuff come in and chat and I'm trying to keep up but I can't really are there any questions that I missed Aaron or Nate. It's weird when we're all just sitting here in silence reading the chat. But I guess it tells you something about the power of the margin conversations right. Actually, we moved our faculty meeting online because of coven we used to meet we have a we don't have a senate model we have full faculty town hall meetings and we all show up. But now since we've moved it online. It's so funny because the chat is amazing. I mean you can only imagine like the faculty back channel. At some point they're going to shut it off on us but for the most part I think it's absolutely fantastic so I want to thank you all for coming. I will suggest that all of us are, you know, here on the interwebs and you can find us if you need anything. Maybe folks can either drop an email or Twitter handle in the, in the chat if you're willing to field questions I know there's also potentially some chemistry we are questions that were coming up there. So, if you want to find these folks, they can put their info there and then the last thing I'll say is. The hypothesis team is aggressively kind. So I do find that when I tweet at them like my student Chuck can't remember his password you know like they immediately help out. If you have questions, please, please check them out and I just want to put in a final plug for Monica over at rebus if you are interested in making we are or just kind of learning how people engage together in the, in the searching of, of open resources maybe just pop over there Mount Monica can put the link in the chat. So you can see what rebus is all about because it's a it's a similar ethos I think to hypothesis so with that I will turn it over to for any. All right. Thank you so much. That was great. The time just flew by as it does. I'm always amazed when I look at the clock, like oh my gosh. I want to thank you all what a wonderful panel and and David thank you for for being brave and and showing your face and it was nice to hear your voice and your thoughts I usually just read you on Twitter. But anyway, so thank you to Robin to Monica to Emily and to Addie. And thank you as well, Nate and Aaron for holding down the chat. And we will see you next time on liquid margins.