 My name is Katie Lynch and I'm an associate professor of English at Rockland Community College where I also chair the honors program and Rockland is a two-year college in the State University of New York system. Right now I think in higher education we are still grappling with a model that is very top-down where students are learning from their professors and that's how they're expected to learn and that's how they expect to learn but I think students have so much to teach each other and also to teach their faculty and so the more that we can distribute that learning across different you know sets of texts and in different ways so that students are learning from each other the more we really see different perspectives and different voices which is so important to not be living in this bubble where or echo chamber where the same ideas are repeated over and over and the same ways of thinking are repeated and so the opportunity to do this kind of very big project seems like a way to just diversify the kinds of learning that we do and the kinds of people that we learn from. One of the aspects of equity that I'm most interested in is this idea of pedagogical partnerships where the teacher is not just teaching the students but is rather partnering with the students to ensure that learning happens for everyone and to engage the students as co-creators in the classroom and social annotation in particular has the ability to do that because students can for example annotate a syllabus with an instructor and even lead to making changes with that instructor or they can take ownership of part of a course and read texts together and learn from each other and and then teach that text to their peers in meaningful ways whether that's happening asynchronously or in a synchronous way and that to me promotes a great deal of of equity because you're you're not again privileging that top-down way of learning but instead you're allowing students to own the course themselves and own the content and put their own stamp on it. I think my first piece of advice would be just to start small for example you could start by using the tool hypothesis and using it yourself seeing how you enjoy it use it to annotate anything on the web which is really exciting and then you can bring it in for your students and have them experiment with it it's a it's not a very high stakes kind of you know way to start it's just to just to try it out and and I think the benefits will become apparent very quickly and then as you understand the benefits of that social way of learning I think there'll be a need or a desire to make that more broad and to and to really push it to the possible boundaries.