 Welcome to liquid margins. Very proud to say this is our 26 liquid margins. Then we're gonna, I know 25th. Sorry. I'm already thinking of the next one. But we're going strong with this. It's a great show. And this particular one I'm very excited about. It's empowering student writing with social annotation. Today's guests are Noelle Houlton Brathwaite. And she's assistant professor of English at Farmingdale State College. Mary Tracer. And I'm really sorry, but I forgot to ask how to pronounce your name. So I'm hopefully not bungling them. Mary Tracer is thank you assistant professor teaching of writing at the University of Southern California. And Chris Corvina, she is associate professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. And our moderator today is Jeremy Dean and he's a VP of education at Hypothesis. Thanks for any. I am super excited to be here this morning. I have been working with Mary and Chris for several years now, Mary. I believe we met at the University of California Irvine for a workshop I did. You may be helped organize that workshop and Chris and I presented together at I annotate several years back in Washington, D.C. and Noelle, it's great to connect with you. And I know that you're a long time user of Hypothesis. So I'm super excited to be here with this group of folks. I'm super excited because I'm a former writing teacher, an English professor. And so it's great to be with my kindred spirits. And there's one subtext to this conversation. I just want to draw people's attention to which is there's a fantastic article that Noelle, Mary and Chris wrote about social annotation from the journal Pedagogy. A lot of my questions are going to come out from reading that article and their teaching and the research they did. So I provided a link. Actually, I just didn't do it for any set. I just did it to the hosts and panelists. Let me post it in there for everybody. So I'm excited to be here. I wanted to start off by allowing each of you guys to tell us a little bit more about your specific educational context. What type of schools you teach at, what type of courses you use Hypothesis in, if there's any particular demographic specificity to your students. So let's start there and maybe we can begin with you, Noelle. Yes, good morning or good afternoon to some of us. I teach at Farmingdale State College, which is a part of the SUNY Pantheon of schools, State University of New York. We are located in Long Island, right in the middle of Long Island, actually. And I use Hypothesis. Oh, thus far I've used Hypothesis solely with my first year composition students. This semester I'm actually going to use it again with my first year students, but I'm also going to use it in a journalism feature writing class that I'm teaching. And I'm very excited about that. Yes. Chris, you want to go next? Sure. I'm Chris Kermina. I teach at Northern Virginia Community College, which is one of the largest community colleges in the United States. We have six campuses. I was kind of have to count on my fingers to remember how many we have. I teach at Manassas, which is the smallest of our kind of main campuses. Our medical education campus is actually smaller, but they're a lot more specialized. I have used Hypothesis with my second semester composition courses. I haven't taught that course in a little while. It has been, I do need more, more, more figures to count the campuses. It has been a couple of years since I've used Hypothesis with those students, because I haven't taught it since, since the pandemic started. And I'm looking forward to using it again. I understand our community college system is getting ready to do a pilot. And I have put my hand up for pilot integration with canvas, which is our learning management system. And once that integration starts, I'm definitely going to be using that with all of my classes, because I do teach the first and second year, our second semester composition, as well as an occasional literature class that's, that I think will be fantastic to use Hypothesis with. Just a quick note. I think you did more than just raise your hand. I think you helped shove Hypothesis into the conversation there. Thank you for that. We're looking forward to getting the pilot off the ground. Mary. Hi everyone. Yes, I teach at the University of Southern California, which is in Los Angeles. It's a private four year institution. I generally teach with Hypothesis in my first year composition courses, but I also teach an advanced second semester composition course, which is typically for our juniors and seniors. And so those are the two contexts that I've tried the school out in. I think in terms of demographics, USC is often ranked very high up there as far as a large international population. So yeah, I think those are the, those are the constraints I'm working with. Thanks so much. I think one of the really neat things about the three of you and an article that you wrote in the research you did, even though you're all teaching similar courses, you are in very different contexts with like a four year private for your public in a two year public. So I think that's really interesting to see that diversity. The article that you wrote for pedagogy sort of frames the problem for your students as the kind of in the echo chamber, you know, of reading on the internet and not getting out of a bubble of information that may be misinformation. I'm wondering what other challenges you and your students face or face that led you to adopt the tool like hypothesis. What were you feeling? What were you seeing? What were you feeling over the pain points you guys were experiencing that said I need something that's going to help us read better and read together. Maybe we can reverse this time and start with you, Mary. I'm such a good question. Yeah, I think for my student population, what I was finding when I first joined the faculty here was that my students would arrive at the university believing that they were already expert readers. And I think what I was finding as I was evaluating their writing was that they were tending to use more basic strategies of interpretation. So I'd see a lot of information dumping and a lot of quoting from other authors as they would reinforce my students own points where what we really want to do on our course is to stress critical reasoning and critical thinking and taking an original viewpoint and adding something to the discussion. So hypothesis, I think, what it would help me to do was really develop a pedagogy that would be organized around recentering reading in the classroom and thinking of it as a kind of sequential process that they could, you know, practice different skills varying from simpler to more complex. But really trying to help them think about what are other strategies available to you other than quoting and directly summarizing and paraphrasing. And so I think I think that's where I kind of started with it and how I implemented it. Chris, you want to pick up there. Yeah. And I think that I have used critical annotation in, in a number of, of contacts, even before hypothesis, I started out as a high school teacher and in those contexts, I started using a tool, a web tool called comment years and years ago, which was a web annotation tool. And I've also done it where I have printed out text, blown it up, put it on big paper. There's the high school teacher. And I'm the, the office supply queen, big paper and said, let's write on this together and think it through together. For, for me, it has been a situation where I think that students often feel like they're the only one who is having some issues with understanding what's going on. And they, you know, are a little afraid to question or to speculate, but once it becomes a more social activity, they seem to be more inclined to, to take a little bit more of a risk in their, in their reading and to, and to be a little bit more open. I love that so much. I really want to come back to, to your points there, Chris. No, I don't. What were some of the challenges that you were facing with students that led you to a hypothesis and social annotation? Well, interestingly enough, my own background was a huge motivating factor. When I learned about social annotation. Because I am a former journalist. And I noticed. In my own writing. That's when I, when I collected information, I interviewed sources. And I sat down to write. There was a huge difference. In the ease of writing and the quality of writing that I was able to produce. When I, I simply, I simply followed those steps without having conversations with other reporters, with editors, without engaging with, with copy editors, even. And I, I realized my, my writing was so much richer. When I was able to talk through. The, the information and sort of really develop a perspective about what it was I was writing about. And I realized that those conversations were key and crucial. So when I landed in the writing classroom. I would say things like writing is, is, you know, you know, I would say things like writing is a social activity. And it's a myth that the writer just operates in isolation. But there's a, there's a difference between being able to say that and being able to, to show it. And even though I would do group work in the writing classroom. I felt that social annotation was a tool to take it, take it back several steps. And allow students to realize that, that reading was key, but, but thinking and having conversations about what one is reading is, I think really what pushes one. Forward in the writing process. And specifically for my campus, we have a largely commuter campus. I would say probably 90% of our student body commutes to campus. And most of our students have jobs and lots of responsibilities outside of campus. And it's very, very difficult for them to make. Connections in, in often. Right when they're right there physically on campus. So annotation gives them another opportunity to engage and to see what their classmates are thinking. And to, to, to see asynchronously what's going on. And then I found that it really fueled our conversations in the classroom when, when they could look and see, oh, yes, I had the, I had that same thought or I had some of those similar questions as I was reading. That's great. Thanks. Your, your answers to that question really are encompassed in the subtitle to your article. Digital annotation is critical community to promote active reading. Right. I think Mary started talked about active reading and different form, you know, strategies for active reading. And then we sort of slowly move towards the social as we, as we heard you guys respond. And I want to dive deep. Into both of those. But I want to pull back the, I want to, I want to dive deep into both of those. But I want to pull back the curtain a bit because I believe it was in conversation with you, Mary, many years ago, probably at the genesis of this article, when you were talking to me about, and I think you're recording Robert Scholl's at the time or something like that, that the reading is invisible. And when we teach often, but we don't, there's no visibility around reading. And over the time, that idea actually creeped into our own marketing at hypothesis. It's one of the things that we say every time we are, you know, talking about hypothesis with instructors is that hypothesis makes reading visible. And I want, I was wondering if each of you could help me unpack that idea. How does social annotation make reading visible? And why is that important? And Mary, since I think you're the genesis of that marketing slogan, maybe you should start. What does it mean to make reading visible? Amazing. Yes, I remember, I think that, that article had such an enormous impact on us as instructors, just because I think in the context of that article, schools, schools was talking about, you know, we don't teach reading and we don't see reading. And if we could see how our students were reading, I think we would be horrified. I think is the word that he used. So I think, I think what hypothesis allows us to do is actually assign reading center it in the classroom. I think it allows us to see how students are reacting to the text. When they highlight a passage and make a comment on it, we can actually see what kind of operation they're doing in that moment. Are they summarizing? Are they remembering something else that they knew from another class or from their own experience? We can see if they're judging the material or evaluating it. We can see if they're doing some analysis or detecting bias. So I think, I think this idea that we can see reading is really about being able to understand a student's interaction with the text. And I think, I think the other piece is just giving that, that spatial awareness of where students are on the page. So there's something about that visibility of reading that's also coming through in the, the highlighting itself. So a student maybe marks up the page and it's becoming visible to them as well as to us. Yeah. I just want to pause there because one of my favorite things about the article is the way you guys talk about that physicality of reading at the beginning and then move from paper to digital and how in the paper world, the material world, we have more physical sense of our books and things like that, right? I can pull something off the shelf and somehow I have a sense like it's about three quarters of the way through Gatsby, the passage I'm looking for. But we really lose that physicality online. And you guys have some beautiful language and article where we're describing just that physicality. The page paves the way to one's personal reflection in the same way that a front path leads to one's home. And then you talk about how annotation is a way of kind of forging a more physical path in that sort of, you know, ethereal digital world, but back to the visibility piece. Chris, what are your thoughts on what it means to make reading visible and how social annotation can make reading visible. The way I've always kind of thought about social annotation is having conversations about a text on a text. So really grounding those discussions in textual moments as students respond to the text. And I always encourage them to respond to one another as well. That was something that I felt very strongly about so that they could make those connections with one another and make those connections with one another. And I think that's one of the most important things that I've seen in my experiences and on the text itself. I often find that when students will read something, they will make those connections, but not be aware of those connections. So those, those moments where they can trace that out. Are valuable to them. I think we all overestimate what we're going to remember about the text on the text. And I think that's one of the most important things that we are going to be able to do. Interrupting, in some ways, interrupting the reading to take those moments of reflection can be valuable as well. So I think that for me is, is the conversations about the text on the text is, is key. I love that. No, while anything to add on visibility and reading. So I think that what Chris said, I, I hadn't actually thought of it that way, but that I realized that's exactly what's happening. We're sort of leaving markers for ourselves, breadcrumbs for ourselves and for one another. So we can kind of go back and trace our thinking about the text. And I know that that is so valuable. To us in academic writing. We're going to be able to, we're going to be able to, we're going to be able to, we're going to be able to have professional. Communication, professional writing. And that's something that we're able to model for students early on in our, in our first year composition classes. And even in our upper level classes, really, it really gives them a concrete. Example of. Of the importance of, of doing that. So I think, if you remember your think you're going to, you think you're going to have that same insight again, but as we all know, that may or may not happen. So yes. So sticking with you Noel. Can you tell us how you introduce this tool and prompt your students, you could anything from giving us an example of assignment or explain why you're making them do this additional thing. How do you present this to the students, what do you, when you, when you first introduced it in the course. That's a great question. Well, like Chris, I have a long history of encouraging. Annotation. In print. In previous. In previous courses that I've taught before I adopted. Digital annotation. And I always introduce annotation in, in general, as something that is going to be able to. In. Enhance students. Understanding of texts, but also their ability to write about texts. There's so much anxiety among students about. Writing, and they, they tend to. As Mary was saying, see reading is almost the invisible link. They don't, they don't really make the connection and all the anxiety is, is about this, this product. That's going to get judged and critiqued. And so I, I, I've always stress how important annotation is in terms of. That that end goal that they're so concerned about. That without really digging apart and learning how to, to, to, to dig texts apart and understand one's own thinking about. The text that they're engaging with that, that, that writing, all forms of writing, but particular academic writing gets to be that much more difficult. So I try to introduce it as something, a tool that's going to be very helpful to them. And that will lower their anxiety levels. Once it's something that becomes a part of their discipline, a part of their writing routine. So in terms of introducing hypothesis, and in terms of introducing digital annotation. The, our students are digital natives at this stage in history. And, and they, they take very quickly to the tool, such an easy tool to use. But I, I, I spend more time upfront. Sort of giving them examples of annotation that I've done. I usually model my own annotation and talk through the process with them and how it started with looking at various texts and how it ended up with my ability to be able to make connections between texts. That's, that's something that they, they can concretely see, oh, okay, this is exactly how this is going to help me when I have a writing assignment. Yes. Great. I was going to say, I, I also also have brought in examples of annotation and annotation failures. Honestly, I have a book from grad school that I took a picture of and have commented and throw up a slide to talk about the death of the pink highlighter, because I highlighted everything. And so what's important, I have no idea. I'm going to go back to some of the texts where I started to write notes, started to write comments. I can still trace some of my thinking, you know, a couple of decades later, at least at that point in time. And I, and I mentioned to them that, and I will show them some of my textbooks, where if I've taught something more than once, I'll see different colors of annotation because I grabbed what I was looking for. And then I put my other pen was handy and added notes to my own notes. So I do that to show them that even now my annotation and note-taking strategies are evolving. And there's will too. I introduce it with some specific tasks for them to follow and mention that those aren't the only possibilities with the connections to what we're studying at the time. What are some of those specific tasks, Chris, that you're suggesting might be part of what an annotation is? For the assignments that I used for the study, we were looking at appeals. We were looking at, you know, the classic ethos, pathos logos to see if they could find those things. Some of them were, some of those assignments were, what's difficult, what's hard, right? So making a note of what it is they think is going on. I even will encourage them to define words if they don't know a word, but I also encourage them not to make that their sole way of interacting with a text. But I, because I do find that sometimes students will hit a word they don't know. Maybe get a context clue that they think they know what it is, but there's a missing link there for them. And I think for students who want the right answer, that definition and social annotation, if they could be the first one to define, that gives them a foothold in the text that they might have not taken if it was not offered to them. Thanks. Samara, I'm going to tack on to the end of the question of, you know, how you introduce this to students. What are some of the specific things you want them to be doing or prompt them to do in those annotations? Such a good question. And I think, yeah, well, no, well, and Chris, you were talking, I was just thinking about, you know, the way that my practice has evolved over time and the way that I implemented the tool in my classroom has changed. I think in the, the original moment I was thinking, you know, about these challenges that we confront with the decline in critical reasoning with manipulation by fake news, with, you know, we see this lack of critical summary in the papers that our students are writing. And I think one of the biggest realizations that came out of studying student writing with this tool for me was just the fact that I was really focused on cognitive goals. Accordingly, I was really interested in helping students do more complex things with their thinking and moving away from those basic understanding and, you know, initial kind of moves of reading and really getting into analysis, evaluation and comparison to other things they may have read before. But I think what I found when I started doing, when I was doing modeling and when I was asking students to produce certain kinds of annotations, I felt like what was showing up in the margins and in, you know, in their hypothesis comments was that they were writing to me as their instructor rather than to one another as a community. And to me that was disrupting that environment where they were testing out beliefs and ideas and bringing their own personality and reaction to the text into the, that initial encounter with new ideas. So I think what's changed for me about the way I teach and implement the tool is that I've really tried to pull back from giving any specific instructions about what to do with the annotations. And I do much more of that offline. So I'll assign, you know, fact idea list or evidence and commentary list where students are encouraged to practice some of the specific skills about, yeah, define this term or come up with a, you know, an assessment of whether this is a biased piece of information. But when I put them in the online environment and using hypothesis, I've asked, I've actually stopped giving any instructions just to kind of see if that produces that more free form and ability to add multiple voices into the discussion. So it's been an interesting evolution, but I think, you know, listening to the way you're talking about modeling and showing how you actually use them in the writing, I think I would like to bring that in more to my, to my practice as well. Super interesting. One of, I was rereading the article last night from pedagogy and I sort of had a revelation. I think when I talk about social annotation that I and the benefits of it, I'll often say it helps learn to read, right? It helps teach active reading and critical reading practices. And it's also good for social engagement. And those are actually different things, right? Like if you want your students to be reading more deeply and critically, it's a great tool. If you want your students to build community, it's a great tool. But those aren't necessarily one in the same. But when I was reading your article and it's in the title of the article, right, this idea of critical community, I started to think about how critical the social piece of social annotation is for the reading piece of, of, of social annotation. So I was wondering if you guys could riff on that idea of just like, what is important about the social piece of social reading? And how is it not just kind of like, oh, we're together, but that togetherness, those interactions actually help with fundamental academic and higher order academic skill development. Chris, you were leaning forward and I keep going back and forth in a linear one. So let's start with you this time. Yeah. I think for me in some respects, one of the benefits of being able to see the traces that other readers are leaving behind kind of normalizes that reading can be challenging. And sometimes to get through those challenges, recording them, asking questions, looking at how other people respond and go, oh, I, I didn't think about it that way. Do I agree with that? Is that a thing that, that I should take from this text? And in some respects, I find that when students can do that electronically, they are a little less hesitant to make those kind of question themselves or question each other. Moves than if they're face to face in a class. Don't get me wrong. I love face to face classrooms. I have had them, like I said, with the, with the large newsprint. Annotate together that way, but they at least in the, in the class where I was using this tool and I've actually found that with other online tools, they are kind of more likely to go, oh, I didn't think of that. Or I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation in a way that perhaps they would not. In more traditional classroom environments. So there's that social piece where they are, they're able to question the text and each other's interpretations of the text. No, well, I don't know if you're still there. But do you want to pick that up the idea of what, why the social is so important in social reading and how it actually invest the reading. Yes. Well, I, I think that the social is, is important in the learning overall. And I think about a negative example of when my husband actually was in grad school and unbeknownst to him, the entire class was meeting. In a very challenging course that he was taking. And all the grades were sort of determined. By what the consensus was, it was a very theoretical class that the students had come together. And he was the outlier. So, you know, not to, not to brag about my husband, but he's a very, very intelligent person, but it didn't matter how hard he tried to have many hours. He poured in how he just was banging his head up against this brick wall because he was this, this outlier who was not in on the conversation. He was not able to benefit from sort of the shared collective consciousness of his classmates. So I, I see that in a similar light with, with reading, my, my students, I always have, out of a class of about 24, 25, they're usually some very intense readers who, who come in with, with some strong skills. But the majority of students are, are unafraid and unabashed reading haters. That's what they tell me at the beginning. I hate reading. I hate reading. I'm a terrible writer. So I, I usually get met with a, with a serious brick wall. And again, I know that my students aren't going to have a lot of time to get together and, and, and discuss the texts or discuss their approaches to different assignments. But this is a way for them to, as Chris said, see what, almost the, the kid, first of all, see that yes, we're all engaged in something that, that may not be something that we find immediate joy in, or something that's very challenging for us. And there's, I think there's an esprit de corps that, that is developed in that sense, but also to see that there, there are, there are different ways to view things. And then, then sometimes their classmates will have very similar takes on things. And a consensus is, is developed around certain ideas and, and certain, certain difficulties that students have with, with analysis, they'll, they'll start to say, I'm not, I'm not alone. I am getting this, I am on, on the right track with this, or other people are having similar challenges. So I just think in terms of, of learning, and opening one's mind to, to, to something new, the, the social aspect, the, the ability to break out of that, that, that sort of bubble of isolation is, is really, really valuable. Let me reframe for you a little bit, Mary, because I feel like from reading the article, I got the sense that you were the most focused on like the Bloom's taxonomy stuff, right? And like the different things that students should be doing to be good, you know, better readers to improve, to become more expert readers. I think you said, does the social interact with that? I mean, so one thing we often get is like, I want to have a way for my student to read the essay, and only I can see their annotations, right? And that will allow me to help drill in those different kind of Bloom's taxonomy type things, right? But is the social important in kind of that development of those, you know, spectrum of reading skills and strategies? Such a good question. Yeah, I think, I think the thing that I've learned by using digital annotation is that I was very focused on, yeah, those cognitive skills. So how can we build reasoning to do better work and to produce better insights and more knowledge? And I think what I really did learn by watching how my students communicated, you know, was just remembering that reading has always been about relationship. So I think that initial question is so interesting too. Like, do we, do we separate reading from community and I was just thinking, you know, we've always read to be in dialogue with someone who's different from ourselves or we've always read to escape maybe from relationships with people who are close to us to find something new and to connect. So I think what using the tool actually taught me was that, you know, there is on the one hand, specific interventions we can make and specific skills that I can make, you know, approachable and accessible to a wide range of readers so that they can find themselves to be expert readers. And I think that's on the one hand, but then on the other hand, I think there is this question of, you know, how do relationships change over time and how is the way we relate, we relate political. So is there something about the multi-logic that we have now, this ability to hear many different voices rather than just having a dialogue between two people that could give us more of what we need now to confront the realities of our time? Do we need more voices and more perspectives to confront the rise of bias and the rise of echo chambers? Do we need more ways to hear new ideas? So I think, I think that kind of piece, which is, you know, on the one hand about community, but it's also about feeling and engagement and emotion, the affective. So that idea of really making a connection with the text as well as with one another. I do think that that's indissociable from expert reading. And I think it manifests in many ways. Like I think, Noelle and Chris, you're talking to you about that, that connection they make as sharing responsibility to understand a text and not looking at it as a kind of individual struggling to master something, but working as a team. So I think all of those pieces have to be together. And I think the tool has kind of helped establish that multi-logism as a pedagogical approach. Amazing. And also I was going to try to shoehorn a question in, but we're running out of time that you covered it because I wanted to ask about affective reading. And I think it's there. I said on Twitter this morning that I'm furious with my colleagues for only giving us 45 minutes because I could go on all day with you guys talking about this stuff. And so maybe we need to have a sequel, but we are creeping up on time. I do think the affective reading piece of the article is one of the most interesting interventions that you guys make. And I would love to have a whole session on why is it important that the emotional responses and experiential responses to readings are one and this are connected to the cognitive and other pieces of how we read, but I will shut up and just say thank you so much for this conversation. I hope we can continue it at some other time and I'll hand it back to friend. Thank you again for coming to liquid margins and we will see you next time. Take care, everyone.