 Welcome to this session on bringing the margins to the center, an introduction to social annotation. I'm here with a couple of folks that I've known for a very long time, and I'm very excited to be here with what I believe are two of the foremost experts on social annotation in the world. I don't think that's an exaggeration. I've known Amanda and Alan for a long time now. We connected early in my career on the tech side of social annotation because they were both early adopters of social annotation for teaching and learning. And so I'm looking forward to your presentations and to the discussion that follows. I'm going to introduce you each, and then I'm going to provide a little overview introduction, and then we'll hear from each of you and then move to maybe a Q&A and some discussion. So Dr. Mandela Castro is the emerging and digital literacy designer at the University of Pennsylvania and a junior fellow of the Society of Critical Bibliography. I wonder when the first time emerging digital literacy designer was used as a job title, but it's an awesome one and I'm glad that it exists. Amanda is also Pedagogical Director of the Book Traces Project, the chair of the Committee on Digital Humanities for the MLA, Modern Language Association, and serves as the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology in Pedagogy. Book Traces, which I hope she'll talk about a little today, is something, it's a large-scale project to find and record historical readers' interventions in the circulating collections of the University of Virginia Library, focusing on volumes published for 1923, so actual annotations in books. Her research explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities. Her collection, Composition and Big Data, co-edited with Ben Miller, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 21. And she is also the author of the chapter, The Past, Present, and Future of Social Annotation in the Collection in Digital Reading and Writing in Composition Studies. Like I said, foremost expert on social annotation in the world. Alan Reed is an associate professor of first-year writing and instructional technologies at Coastal Carolina University. Also a title, I mean the first part we've had first-year writing for a while, but the combo of first-year writing and instructional technologies probably also didn't exist a long time ago, I'm glad that it does. He teaches courses in composition, new media, digital culture, and design, and graduate writing and research. He has designed and taught a variety of graduate courses in the instructional design and technology doctoral programs at Johns Hopkins University, Old Dominion University, and North Central University. In addition, Reed is the evaluation analyst at the Center for Research and Reform in Education, an adjunct teaching fellow in the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University. He's written two books, The Smartphone Paradox and The Philosophy of Gun Violence. What amazing contemporary topics to have published on that examine intersectionality of humanity and technological artifacts. He has also edited the book, Marginalia in Modern Learning Context. Again, one of the foremost experts in the world on social annotation. And that collection is of innovative research on the methods and applications of interaction between readers and texts through digital means such as commenting or physical annotations such as writing the margins of books and how these strategies can be applied in educational settings. How exciting is this? All right, let me just share... Can one of the... That's the wrong way. Can somebody, just because I'm not be able to see you guys and my presentation I'm trying to share at the same time, can one of the speakers just unmute and say that you can see this next slide? I see a red slide saying getting on the same page. Perfect. Okay, we're good. No more technical snacks. I think I've mastered it now. It's a new platform for me too. So let's get on the same page here. So I'm trained as an English educator as are, I think my colleagues in conversation today. And well before I got interested in digital technologies to be applied in the classroom, I always told my students to annotate. I believed it was going to be critical for their success in my classes and I would actually hand out this poem by Billy Collins, which I believe Alan references in the preface to his book, to try to inspire them on day one to write in the margins. We've all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show, we did not just lays in an armchair turning pages, we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Now this was not a radical pedagogical innovation on my part. Annotation has been around for a very long time. Scholars and students since then, at least the invention of the book have used annotation. It helps with memory, facilitates comprehension and develops critical thinking skills. As I moved through graduate school in English, I did become interested in digital pedagogy and digital tools for the classroom. And I really, I still remember the day that I was in a computer lab at the University of Texas and I saw the social annotation tool Digo. And I guess basically I fell in love at that time. I just knew of all the things I'd been playing within the classroom, digital tools, of all the things I'd been introduced to, this one just made so much sense to me. Again, probably because it was so familiar from this history. And I got very excited and I got very obsessed. I kind of made it the one, the one tool that we used throughout the semester in my professional concourses at UT Austin. And the rest of the history, I moved into the tech space to try to develop this tool specifically for classroom application. And that's where hypothesis is today, providing social annotation technology to colleges and universities across the world. There was a 10 years ago, I guess, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I thought really captured the power of social annotation and social reading. And it's from Jennifer Howard. She writes, online a book can be a gathering place, a shared space where readers record their reactions and conversations. And that continues to be what excites me about social reading and social annotation. It is that connectivity as, as Devorah Lieberman was talking about in the keynote. That's what really drew me to education. That's what drew me to teaching. That's what drew me to grad school. I wasn't interested. Actually, it turned out to be in a sort of isolated research researcher in a library. I really enjoyed being in the classroom with other people when I couldn't be in the classroom. I wanted still to connect to them. And that's why social annotation really became such an important part of my pedagogy and now of my profession beyond teaching. So I'll just quickly share the sort of, for those that aren't familiar with social annotation as it exists, you know, in tools like hypothesis. This is our model for hypothesis that any website, article, ebook, document, piece of multimedia that might be being used in the classroom as an artifact for students to engage with, has multiple layers of annotation and really of conversation. There can be a private layer of marginalia, your notes, right, which is that kind of layer is always existed on top of, you know, analog books. But there can be these other social layers of different communities reading and thinking and building knowledge together. I can have a layer on the text that I'm teaching with my colleagues, or maybe it's a text in my field that we're all reading together, you know, as part of our research and scholarship. I can have a layer for my course, for each course that I teach, maybe the same text or different texts, I can have group discussion on top of the text with a tool like hypothesis. And finally, there is a public layer for hypothesis. And I think that's one of the things that really distinguishes it from, you know, an ed tech tool that's really just disposable and used in the classroom and not beyond, is that this is a tool that exists online and everyday users are using it to engage with content and with other people online. And there's a variety of professions that have started to make use of social annotation as a core technology to their profession. So with that introduction, I am going to pass it to Amanda. And then we'll hear from Alan. And then we'll have a discussion. Thank you so much, Jeremy, for that really humbling introduction and for having us here today. Can everyone, everyone want to give a thumbs up if you can see the slides and hear me, okay? Wonderful. Okay. So I am coming to you from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the traditional lands of the Lenape tribe where it is currently, I think, 94 degrees outside and later in the afternoon, about 1.30 in the afternoon here. So go ahead, next slide for me, Jeremy. So in both my role as a faculty member and I do teach for the English department and the digital humanities program, but also in my role as an instructional designer, I often hear a very common lament from faculty members that students aren't doing the reading. I think we can all relate to this, right? That how can I tell if my students are reading? How do I know if my students are doing the reading? How do I know if they're understanding the reading? And the traditional response to that kind of query is to give quizzes or other high stakes, high anxiety assignments. This quote that you see in front of you is one that just haunts me. It says here, right, that those who read with a pen in hand form a species nearly extinct, right? And that we no longer engage in that conversation that time and distance otherwise makes impossible. The reason why this haunts me is because of what I'm about to show you in contrast, which is on the next slide, Jeremy. This is a screen capture from my Kindle that shows that 9,940 people have annotated this text. And bonus points, extra credit for anyone who can name this text in the chat before I tell you what it is. So I can't imagine that all of these readers were required to use this particular Kindle edition for a class assignment, although perhaps a small percentage are students. And this is a rather popular book, but certainly capital L literature, right? The literature that we, the three of us here, got degrees in, right? And yes, Thomas and Douglas, you both get the extra credit. This is George Orwell's 1984. And yes, I do mean for this to be ironic, right? These readers are in Logan's words, right? Engaging in a conversation time and distance otherwise would make impossible. So I want to shift the conversation from assuming that students do not annotate or do not read, right? And instead explore how and why we want students to annotate. Why should they do the reading? Why should they be annotating? What does that look like for us as educators? Next slide, please. So this quote is from Jason Jones in our new note directions and annotations. And I love that title because everything new is old, right? Well, all of our new media stems from old media. And here, Jones is saying, the notion of better understanding a text through others' experience of it is arguably the foundational experience of most Louisville Arts classrooms. And this is what I mean about the why or the should students annotate. And I think for me, it's that perhaps many academics or educators privilege certain kinds of annotations over others. We imagine that solitary scholar in the archives making annotations to themselves and for their own learning. But what we really want, right? What we really think is worthy of attention is those conversations, those debates, that the exchange of information between people in the classroom, that's what we're trying to encourage and facilitate is not the person learning for their own sake, but for that collective community building, the knowledge building that happens in the classroom as we talk to each other. And yes, that could be asynchronously or synchronously as we've all discovered over the last two years. So what I want to say here is that I really, I really agree with Jones that it's the conversational function. It's the act of discovery and sharing that we align with our practice in the humanities. And in this view, marginalia is not a personal act, but a public act that can and should be archived and shared in order to teach our students how to engage in conversational marginalia and to provide them models. So next slide here. Of course, there are historical roots to my argument. And I'm going to start with what Jeremy proposed for me is the book traces project. So here we can see examples of marginalia, the example on your screen is of Walt Whitman, but this goes way back, such as the town mood, which we just heard about in the keynote, early modern book of ours. And the many famous authors whose annotations we fetishize, right? We think about how authors have annotated other famous authors books, right? We study these in the archives. We see them published in articles about these scholars and authors. We also see this kind of intention to archive and document marginalia and these conversations that were happening in the margins by thinkers like Vannevar Bush and Gervaart who predicted the need for a network of associated texts. These examples have all been explored in great depth elsewhere, but I want to talk about how I introduced this to students and how I use these as models for their own annotation. So over the past decade, I have been actively a member of the book traces project and I use this as a way to substantiate and demonstrate the long tail of social annotation practices. When I was teaching at NYU and now at the University of Pennsylvania, I actually invite my students to go into the stacks and we're talking about the circulating stacks, not rare books or special collections. And what we do is we go to the stacks, we identify a set of texts that they're going to look in and they actually take the books off the shelf, get their hands dirty, and look for marginalia in these books that are sitting on library shelves. Well, as you can imagine with a place like Butler Library or Van Pelt Library, we find a lot of original 19th century annotation. Why? In the 19th century, you see a rise in multiple copies of books being published, papers cheaper, there's more circulation of multiple copies of texts, but also because that is when a lot of our academic libraries started getting donations, large donations from private families, from local institutions that were donating in bulk their entire collections. So not only do you have that capital L literature, but you have a whole wide variety of things that were donated as part of those collections. So when you go into the stacks, you might find items that maybe have never been checked out before, right? Or a copy of a text that's never been checked out before. And you can find not only marginalia from these 19th century readers, but also locks of hair, flowers, scraps of fabric. We often find those early library cards that have the holes cut out of them, that carry the card catalog information, lots of interesting items. What this really says to me is that 19th century readers were not only annotating, they were annotating multimodally by putting in these drawings, these locks of hair, these scraps of fabric, these flowers, but also if we read and analyze the annotations which we have done as part of the book traces project, we find out that their annotations are not for themselves, but actually are in conversations with others. Many times that's family members, we found whole family genealogies, mothers talking to daughters, talking to grandmothers, and so on throughout the generations. But we also find annotations that are talking to other communities, religious communities, groups of women who are sharing one copy of a book, right, to try to teach each other and share that knowledge. So we have found elicit romances between members of the royal family. We have found battle schematics by famous generals, right, we have found all sorts of fantastic annotations that show that these margins were a way of communicating information across time and space. So by having my students get their hands dirty, actually get book dust right on their hands and find these annotations, they are really able to see that this is not a new phenomenon, it just happens on their kindle, but this has been happening across time. So, next slide, please. So this is actually a picture from our book choices event that just happened in April at the University of Pennsylvania. We pulled 250 books off the shelf and our hit rate, meaning there was a high level of annotations was over 60%. In fact, there was one group that found annotations in every single book they looked at, their hit rate was 100%. We found so many amazing discoveries here and what I wanted to really convey to you is that this project not only allows students to see the annotations but it also allows them to understand acquisition history, it familiarizes students with the legacy of print collections, it provides a sense of history and provenance for the offerings available to them and suddenly the role of the library expands from a convenient place to study to a resource that serves the greater purpose of maintaining collections of invaluable research materials. Searching for these annotations also leads to discussions about what counts as meaningful evidence in the marginalia they find and students discover many interesting artifacts that we, the book choices team and their librarians and professors are there to help them assess, decipher and digitize for use by you and anyone else around the world to data mine and study the findings across the dozens of universities we've done book traces events at. So then the discussion moves from what are these marginalia, what are we looking at here and the move to digitizing text and to opening the conversation to the future of the humanities at large. How can we make old forms of media accessible to a wider audience? Next slide please. As the Pedagogical Director of Book Traces, I help others integrate this work into their courses. During the pandemic, it became obvious that people needed a way to interact with this material not in their own libraries because they couldn't search the stacks. They didn't have access to their libraries during the large part of this time. So what we did was we made this open access resource full of assignments, prompts and grab and go materials for use by librarians, instructors or workshop leaders in any discipline and you can go to this URL, I put the link to these slides in the chat and you can explore all of these assignments and contact me anytime for help using them with your students. Next slide please. So at Stevenson University which is my previous position, we didn't actually have a research library at all. We did not have a library that would hold volumes of pre 1923 texts. So what we did instead was we used this site and Andrew came and gave a talk as a part of our distinguished speaking series and brought examples with him and even with this very limited engagement with just the website alone, you can see that the materials had a huge impact on my students. You can see here this is a quote from one of my students and it's really an expert reflection. He was able to recognize and articulate the social function of the annotations he found and he likens this and this passage right to email or social media the marginalia in 19th century text reminded him of social media because of that exchange between people. So my goal is to capture this knowledge and translate it into a student's own reading practices. So next slide please. To start this process students read about the differences between reading online versus reading in print from a variety of perspectives. I have students read born digital articles but also actual physical paper articles where I have them read for a given amount of time and make tally marks any time they're distracted. So yes they end up with 15, 20, sometimes even 30 tally marks when they got distracted in their reading practices. I then have them read the same exact article but while annotating right and they're distracted by far fewer tally marks right during that time when they were actively annotating them when they were just trying to read straight through. I often ask them if they were given a quiz on the content after the initial reading versus after the reading when they were annotating which they feel they would perform better on. The answer is obvious right when they were annotating they retained more of that information. So Kathy Davidson whose article you see here or whose books are you see here argues that the ability to productively multitask is a vital 21st century skill. Students are asked to identify their own attention blindness and then given tools that work with and not against their natural inclination to bounce from one task to another right. So instead of saying stop getting distracted stop multitasking think about productive ways of multitasking which I really think social annotation offers us a chance to do. Next slide. So I have tried many different online annotation platforms. I have tried many different types of annotation studio and google docs and perusal and you name it I have tried it. The reason why I personally like hypothesis is because it can both be used with an LMS. So canvas blackboard noodle or as a standalone product with your web browser. And most importantly for me you can use multimodal annotations. So you can see here in my very meta activity of having people annotate about right reading they are using videos and links and they're having conversations back and forth and this is a real spring round from a real class and real student assignments real student writing right. So you can see them having robust conversations and using all of the tools that hypothesis offers to share information it's peer to peer learning in action. Okay. Next slide. You can see from this exchange here that my students recognize the potential benefits but also the drawbacks of social annotations skills sorry tools armed with the readings I provide and previous discussions we had about digital reading class debates are often rich both online as you see here and off. Ruminations formulated in their annotations are hashed out in greater depth in person be it synchronous or asynchronous right be it online or in person in the classroom. And this allows for conversations that are big for the constraints of a comment section to take place to evolve. I'm often able to identify the areas where my students are struggling to understand a text by reading their comments or in some cases by identifying sections in which no one has commented this is very important okay. These omissions can signal a place where no one was brave enough to take on the difficult language or advanced concepts. This way students engage with a text online in ways that form the way I structure my synchronous lessons. I am better able to use our limited class time strategically when provided with access to their asynchronous comments. Next slide please. So this is how I sequence this assignment. So first I have students annotate the text online. I try to leave space for students to respond to each other before I interject. I obviously interject when needed, when there's a debate or question that has arisen that I can answer. But I try to let them have space to just talk to each other first. I then use student insights as slides in class. So I screenshot interesting insights or I screenshot interesting conversations and I put them in my slides and I use it as the catalyst for the lesson of the day. What does that look like? Well often there's a debate or a question of how a term is defined or used in a text. And then I provide in the following slides further research for those debates. So sometimes it's definitions from our professional standards, our professional sources. It's links to articles that have further information. I also provide quotes from course readings we've done previously and try to model that good information sharing that then I see them mimic in future annotations. So from those individual low-stakes annotations assignments, I then derive writing prompts. So this could be discussion board posts, journal entries, whatever works best for your class. And I will often do those in groups. So five people are going to do discussion board posts for this article. Five for the next, five for the next. Cuts down on your grading time. You're only grading five posts at a time. They're only in charge of leading the conversation for one text at a time. That then becomes the, you know, a student-led discussion. So those five people will lead a fish bowl, right? And those eventually lead to students leaning information from those conversations and links for their high-stakes multimodal essay. Next slide, please. So this is what that looks like. I have my students apply what they learned when creating their final multimodal projects inspired by an assignment shared by Kerry Krause. So in this assignment, they are engaging in design fiction by imagining the future of the book. So I actually collaborate with a faculty member in the School of Design for this, where students identify a problem in the way we currently consume, assess, access, and store information, and devise solutions for a specific audience. So here you're seeing this student create a smart bookmark where you can read a physical book, but put in this smart bookmark that will allow you to put annotations and definitions into a digital notebook while you read. Very smart, right? Next slide. And this student here was thinking about their aunt who has ALS and couldn't actually physically hold a book or turn pages of a physical book. So they were using eye-tracking software so that their aunt could use annotations with eye-tracking technology. Very, very smart, and again addressing a problem for a specific audience. So I know I'm about out of time here, but these are only two examples from dozens that I don't have time to showcase. I believe the evidence is clear. What you don't see here in these screenshots is their extensive research incorporated in many forms in these proposals, and you don't hear their passion and excitement that students convey in their oral presentations. But hopefully what you can see is that students went from the passive consumers of annotation technologies to active critical makers thinking about the future of annotation and what that might look like for their audiences. Next slide. So you can actually see my entire guide to using Hypothesis on my website. There's the link. There's videos for how to use it with the LMS or as a standalone with my assignment all laid out for you. And next slide. You can also read the full article in digital reading and writing in composition studies. Thank you so much. That was so great. Thanks, Amanda. Excellent. Well, we'll turn it over to Alan and then as I said, after we hear from Alan, we'll have a Q&A. I know there's questions coming in and we'll have a discussion. All yours, Alan. Thanks. Yeah, that was really comprehensive, thorough, Amanda. You are definitely one of the foremost experts. I will agree with Jeremy on that. I don't have any slides to share because I was going to just kind of reminisce about social annotation and what kind of landed me here. I was thinking like how did I get interested in social annotation? Why am I here? And why did I write so much about it? And I think it stems from right out of graduate school, I was kind of thrown into the classroom, right? I was thrown into a classroom of undergraduates, first year writing your standard English 101 type courses with very little guidance or anything like that. And this is the early 2000s when there was a real shift towards the digital texts. And I can remember being worried about that. I mean, I'm an English guy, I'm an English professor and so I love books, I love holding books, I love writing in books but I saw this real shift in students opting for the digital. And I think a lot price probably had a lot to do with that, convenience had a lot to do with that but I was also noticing that in the polling and in surveys we were seeing that students time and time again would reiterate that they actually prefer print materials yet they will often choose digital materials for those reasons, price affordability, convenience and things like that. The thing that worried me about that is that I also had a hunch that we read differently when we're reading something in print versus something digitally. And in fact there's a type in the chat here there's a great book by Naomi Barron from American University called Words on Screen if you've not seen that before but she outlines this whole argument in its entirety and it's really fascinating but it was really worrisome for me as well because I saw this happening in my students and so what I began to do was I began to shift all of my materials into things like Google Docs and have them comment in these documents as we would go and what I didn't realize was that I was having them annotate things socially within their assignments and I wasn't grading it, I wasn't requiring it I was merely providing it as an option and most of these students were taking me up on this and so I decided to conduct an actual experimental study on this it was a small case study but we looked at the differences between readers who were annotating synchronously so at the same time that someone in the same class was reading the same document you could see the comments popping up synchronously in real time another group was looking at annotations while they were reading the text so the annotations were already there much like picking up an old book from the library or something that has writing in the margins already and then the third group was a control group no annotations, no ability to annotate and what we saw was a significant difference between these three groups in terms of important things not just achievement such as comprehension on a post test but in terms of things like learner motivation mental effort required to read and understand the text preference satisfaction which I think are all very important contributors to a student's performance in a class and not just the score on the final post test and so that really got me thinking about how I could start to use social annotation more formally and more effectively in my courses and I think it was around that time that I kind of began collaborating with Jeremy and hypothesis and realizing like oh there's a whole world out here of people who have these same views and here's this technology here's this tool that I can use in my classes seamlessly and I remember being so excited about that because I wasn't really happy with all the other social bookmarking sites and things like that and Google Docs wasn't quite cutting it so once I came across hypothesis I was really thrilled and so I started implementing that formally in my courses I started doing that gosh I don't know almost 10 years ago I guess maybe and then I started thinking about things beyond just sort of informally annotating works as we go and started thinking about things like prompting in meta-cognitive strategies and things like that that I could actually embed into the documents and into the pages on the websites and different things that could actually prompt my learners to think about specific things as they were reading so I was sort of flipping the script and saying okay well we can use annotation for you to generate your own annotations on these materials but I can also use annotation to set you up to think about certain things or to prompt you in certain ways within the texts as opposed to using like supplemental questions or discussion boards or something like that and so that I think really started to get me thinking and that's a large part of what my doctoral work dissertation work involved was embedded meta-cognitive and cognitive strategy prompting within digital texts so not just asking learners adjunct questions within the text about what they were reading but asking them giving them meta-cognitive prompts to either maybe draw their attention back to the text or to ask them to rate their level of understanding as we go all sorts of different things that hypothesis afforded me to do within these texts I will say that there's a balance because what we did see with that is there's probably a saturation point where you can have too many annotations within a text and it starts to override the learner's cognitive load and anxiety levels and things like that where it starts to supersede what the actual content is conveying so I will say that there's probably a ceiling on this but what we saw were extremely positive results in terms of again not just achievement but motivation and satisfaction a reduction of mental effort while they were reading and we saw these changes particularly within groups of lower level readers so in other words the high achieving readers would contribute and would use annotations really well but their gains were not nearly as significant as lower level readers and so that learner population became the focus and we started to realize like okay this is a tool that we can start to target this specific population and we can tailor these specific prompts and comments and things towards this population to help them and that's exactly what it did and so we then took that model and we applied it to this program I'm going to try and share my screen I didn't try this beforehand, sorry oh this might work we had a digital badging initiative at Coastal Carolina University in 2014 where we essentially said for the first year writing courses in English 101 and English 102 the standard freshman year writing courses English courses we developed a set of badges about six or seven badges per course that identified specific skills so in other words we basically took the learning outcomes from each of those courses and said what do we want students to be able to do at the end of English 101 okay well they need to be able to shape a thesis or a quote paraphrase, synthesize all sorts of different things and we parsed these out into specific badges where the website which is still available it's still out here you can access it I'll post the link in the chat we keep it just as a writing resource for the public but we've since moved it internally students would access each of the badges where they would leave some type of instructional content so sometimes it could be a produced video that we had developed from faculty we give a text based explanation of what we're talking about this particular badge had to do with shifting styles and linguistic awareness but one of the first things that we decided to do was to include or embed hypothesis into this website which is actually just hosted on a WordPress platform and what that did effectively was we were able to say to students not just hey go to this website and read this content watch the video, read this content and then do the assignment at the end but as you're reading it we want you to also annotate and ask questions or piggyback on other people's comments and that's exactly what they did most people didn't require this as part of the assignment but what we found was that students were doing this voluntarily because they could see other students who had been there previously the types of questions they were asking or the types of links connections they were drawing to this into other works and so we thought this was a really effective thing for all of the incoming students into this first year writing program to be able to use and it was actually a really big success and so the reason I point that out is because when we were developing the program which is essentially just a bunch of web pages where we're asking students to read the instructional content and then develop the assignment and then submit the assignment we were trying to liven it up by saying how can we make this a much more dynamic active activity rather than just a passive reading of a page which I am sort of terrified of students doing and hypothesis was the first thing that came to our mind I'm going to stop sharing that okay so that's where we are and that's been my experience with social annotation it's something that is just now ingrained in all the things that we do I teach still some undergraduate courses but also doctoral courses in all sorts of areas for a number of institutions and one of the very first things that we do as an assignment is the syllabus annotation assignment which simply asks the students in that course to read closely the syllabus and to annotate it to make comments to ask questions to draw attention to different things in the syllabus and it's a way to immediately engage learners into the course but also to ensure that they're actually reading the syllabus in that they don't actually have any questions but I think it's a great introductory assignment for any level of course yeah so I think that's about it I think that's all I really wanted to talk about I think we should open it up to Q&A and see what kind of questions you have okay I'm not sure how and when we're allowed to be seen and heard but I'm back as is Amanda that was so wonderful thank you Alan thank you Amanda we have some great questions to get to and so let's get to them there's a one question in the chat from Karen at Binsens University how can you get students to open the book to do the reading in the first place so this is that problem that Amanda sort of hinted at I don't know if you were agreeing with the problem as it's normally stated Amanda they aren't doing the reading but could each of you guys just talk about ways that you sort of help encourage students to actually do the reading then we'll get into the annotation piece and maybe the annotation piece helps let's start with you Amanda okay I answered a little bit in the chat and also I see that Karen has put this also in the Q&A so in that in the Q&A Karen writes that they use reflection questions that require students to read and find answers but they find that students just Google them without actually reading the text so there is actually an amazing data driven article on this I believe it's by Admiral and Pole and it actually compares discussion board post engagement versus social annotation tool engagement and what it finds is that when you require students to annotate a text you have more line by line interaction so students are interacting with individual lines in the text in an in depth way which I would call close reading instead of skimming or surface level reading they're really going at a line by line level to think about what the author is saying specifically whereas discussion board posts you get more of that broad summary where students are just lightly engaging with the text in a superficial or shallow way they might quote one line if you require them to right but it's more of that broad statement and at least for me as someone who teaches composition courses I am always trying to say don't generalize don't make broad claims don't make those kinds of statements instead really go to the text and do the close reading and that's what I believe social annotation you know enhances their ability to do that so I did post in the chat my kind of strategy but what I like to do is I start with a very short reading at the very beginning in foresters the machine stops is a great short story to do this with I've also used readings about reading online which I showed in my presentation but very short reading and I have them do just five annotations and three replies just to learn the tool and just to understand what I mean by I can see you right reading by using this tool because I can really see the engagement of each individual student and I give them very clear prompts about what kinds of annotations they can engage with so I offer definitions links to further resources or research for example if they don't know what a certain phrase or concept is right they can link to the definition of that I also offer you know offering counter arguments or points of um disagreeing with the author points of agreeing with the author and also points where they disagree and agree with each other right again requiring them to reply to each other that way not only are they engaging with the text in their own original way but they also have to engage with their peers comments on the text which makes you think an even deeper level about what the text is saying and doing in a stuff through someone else's perspective yes this can directly to your grade book I often just grade this with a check mark though like they're just getting a yay or nay they just did it or didn't do it and I linked in my blog post on it how I use a pro group which is about how the post needs to be educational they need to be educating their fellow students to count so they can't just be like this was good I like this cool right but they actually have to be offering information that the other students learn from and then you can just you know make the stakes higher go along with longer articles increase it to 10 or 20 annotations and 10 replies so on and so forth Alan any thoughts on how to get the students to do the reading either using annotation or other means oh man you know that's I don't know if that's a question about annotation or I mean if we if we knew the answer to that like how to motivate students to do anything that we want them to do I think would be rich but you know annotation can make it at the very least active right so you will have students who just will flat out tell you that they hate reading I hate reading I don't like to read well this isn't just reading this is contributing this is responding this is interacting with the text and I think one of the questions on here was about sometimes it being hard to get students on boarded and to see it how it can be fun I one of the things that I used to do I haven't done this so much recently we would have an all media annotation session which some documents we would say okay I want you to annotate this and respond to these different texts or different sections in this text but I want you to do it solely through media whether that's memes gifs or gifs however you want to say it or photos right or there's been times we try to use emojis to try to express it that way but so making it a little bit more challenging for them and saying like what kind of meme would best express how you're feeling right now that's a pretty easy way to get them thinking about how to use it and then once they're familiar with how to use hypothesis which is pretty easy to use then I think they're more likely to go along with you on other assignments I love that idea Alan that it's maybe the idea of what reading is is maybe one reason why students don't do the reading because they're like expected or maybe they think that they're expected to be passive absorbers of the information but if you make it active you say this is a place for you to create for you to respond for you to engage with others you make it social it's something different it's a different experience and I think we could get into this in the next question I should say there are some that they're not that many international experts on social annotation in the classroom two are on the panel here for sure there are some in the audience as well and one of the questions is from another early adopter of hypothesis a long-time friend and collaborator of mine Robin DeRosep from the State University and you hinted at this question Alan but I want to go deeper into it and Amanda responded in the Q&A area but let's talk about it Robin says my students love hypothesis but sometimes it's hard to get on board to get them onboarded I suppose and help them see how fun it can be how do you introduce it to students and help them enjoy the process so let's talk about introducing students to social annotation how you kind of frame the assignment and the activity but also the pleasure that can come from social annotation and maybe we'll start with you this time Alan and go to Amanda I was just thinking and this always makes me sound like old man talking here but like we're living in a social media generation and the reality that most of these students are used to being producers and not just consumers information but that's exactly what they do they don't just consume social media or what they're seeing online they're actually producing they're actually contributing to that and so it doesn't quite make sense for us to then step into the classroom and say I'm only going to consume the stuff that I'm giving you well they want to produce that's what they're used to doing and hypothesis gives them a way to do that and I think that's really important is to kind of draw that parallel between this is a very I mean coming from a new media background like this is a very new media approach to a very traditional practice of reading and comprehending this is the new media approach to that is to be generative as you do that for practice like tiktok for your books there you go Amanda your thoughts thanks so much Robin for this question I did answer you in the Q&A comments with two links I start with genius.com so if you ask anyone in the class you know how many people have used genius.com before and you're going to get a couple of fans you know musically inclined folks in my composition classes in general courses I might start with Beyonce's lemonade and I show the debate about who Becky with the good hair is right and I show them that people all around the world are annotating lyrics on genius.com and we talk about why people are annotating them and why people care what a music lyric might mean in my immigrant literature class I always start with the song immigrants from the Hamilton mixtape because author themselves has actually annotated that on genius.com along with his audience so you see interaction between the author and the audience in that and we talk about that form of annotation and that kind of knowledge sharing and then we talk about the ways that they live tweet events or write live stream on tiktok or instagram how they use good reads right to share information about books all the time one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan English has a huge large scale data mining projects going on with good reads that show that there are good read users that read thousands of books a year thousands of books a year right and share their thoughts on those books on good read so we already know that students are doing this right they are doing this in all sorts of other platforms that we may or may not integrate into our class though it's pretty easy once you show that they're already doing it to just transfer that knowledge to transfer that into the classroom using this tool that's ready made for academic work but then also the beauty hypothesis is that they can keep using this outside of your classroom there's an open source tool that they can use for anything I'm in a reading group right now and we are using hypothesis to annotate the book design justice and there's just people from all over the world annotating design justice for fun right for our own engagement it's not part of any class it's not part of any grade right and there's lots of other examples of that you do I think though need to talk about like again the drawbacks of some of that engagement right how to be a good digital citizen how people are how authors are vulnerable online and how information that we post in online spaces stills humans behind them and to be you know thoughtful generous compassionate to those authors that have put their thoughts online but also to be compassionate to each other in the comments right and think about kind of the harassment trolling and vitriol that happens in comment spaces online and how what is appropriate inappropriate to put in those comment sections so I think really this this extends beyond like how do I get students to annotate and how do I get students to be good digital citizens who are already annotating right and all sorts of other spaces that were very well aware that they're doing that's great I love your point and this is why I was attracted to genius.com can you guys hear me I'm getting a funny sound okay why I was attracted to genius as a platform as well that you're already doing this work this work that I'm trying to kind of you know train you in or introduce you to or develop your skills in it's something that you're already doing right you leave a movie you have a conversation probably with the person that you went to the movie with right you're excited about a song you talk about some piece of it that really gets you so these are activities that you know everyday you know folks are engaged with that sort of are also part of the formal work of the humanities but let me ask a question of my humanities colleagues here in terms of broadening the scope here to make sure that we're including you know all the different disciplines in the academy is this just a English literature you know adjacent disciplines thing a humanities thing as it were or let's talk about social annotation as something broader in the academy in terms of the skills that students need in college and maybe specific disciplinary skills they need in other disciplines and I you're not as more vociferous Amanda so we'll start with you and then go to Alan so when as our wonderful keynote speaker it talks about when you know March 13 2020 hit and we all moved online my previous institution Stevenson University actually made everyone do like emergency blackboard training that included together as an entire faculty socially annotating an article together using hypothesis on blackboard like every single faculty member on the whole university was required to annotate the text together amazing yes you you might remember that before the pandemic they were hemming about integrating it but then the pandemic hit and I won the play I do remember that and we've got tremendous adoption at Stevenson and we just found out one reason why and now every single faculty member across the disciplines uses the LMS plugin for hypothesis in their classes I'm talking nursing biology fine arts you know we have a huge uptake in the business school right but seriously across all disciplines first of all all disciplines have texts right you're teaching articles in higher education you're teaching PDFs of someone talking about your subjects right every every single discipline does have a text so there's something to annotate but you also I think that increasingly especially in teaching focused institutions and teaching focused classrooms you do want to create an atmosphere where students are learning from each other that you're not just the sage on stage who's like providing all the information but that your students feel like empowered to also be experts in areas where they can offer insight so if you present that as an option if you empower them to learn from each other I think using social annotation is a really good precursor to other forms of group work right if they're already used to discussing things in the margins with each other without your introduction then when they get into that group work which we know students have mixed feelings about I'll be nice they they will already be so familiar with working with each other and to working out arguments and debates with each other in those spaces that when you actually get them into those peer learning groups they will be more successful there are tons of great articles like the one I put into the chat of people in the sciences using social annotation but I just wanted to offer two alternate ways that I've used it so I've actually used social annotation tools to have students peer review each other's work so if you have an essay assignment coming up and you want a student to read their essay draft and comment on it you can use social annotation for that and you can have their peers comment on their own writing using social annotation it's really a wonderful way to get that peer to peer feedback and also I've had students use social annotation to do rhetorical analysis so read this article and determine the purpose, the audience the context, the genre and do that kind of formal analysis work which is a form of annotation that they're doing for themselves but of course they also share that knowledge out so those are just two alternate assignment forms Alan? Yeah I mean I tend to get really tunnel vision when talking about annotation because we are in that English umbrella but I'll speak from experience, just writing this last book that I was writing this past year I had to dive into some constitutionality arguments and I'm not a legal scholar by any means so I really had to try and figure out a lot of the different arguments that are made particularly on issues of Second Amendment rights and prima facie rights and all these things that were new to me but I was really happy to see that when I went online to read more about this there are numerous tools online that actually offer annotated versions of the constitution I think one it's actually called constitution annotated maybe there's another one I was trying to look it up just now I think it's called interactive constitution which again is just an annotated version of the constitution and it shows you original drafts and changes that were made to it along with citing court cases and precedents and things like that to help explain the legal terminology and jargon that's contained in the original document so that's just one example but I mean there are thousands of examples in every field, every discipline where annotation occurs and happens and sometimes it's it might not be called that but that's what we're doing it's how we contribute or have a conversation with that text That's awesome, thank you both for those answers so let's tackle a tough topic there was a skeptic I believe in the audience around multitasking Amanda suggested reading Kathy Davidson's book now you see it, now you don't which I also recommend Kathy Davidson also an OG member of the rap genius community and a hypothesis annotator as well so let's talk about this question of multitasking and I'll just bring Alan into it a little bit because Alan you talked about the ceiling of sometimes there might be too many annotations on a text that might sort of become less useful and I will at risk of being recorded by an education at hypothesis say I still sometimes wonder especially going back to the question of like making the students read could annotations potentially sort of create a way for students to not read to skip over the text and just read the annotations is that a problem so multitasking reading versus skimming the noise of too many annotations go Alan I mean I fall into that camp of thinking that multitasking really is not I won't say it's not possible because it's clearly possible is it a good idea? No, probably not we know that a tradeoff occurs when we multitask particularly cognitively Nicholas Carr wrote a great book about this called the shallows that he really dives into all these different issues that he explains not just the neuroscience behind it but the different tradeoffs and benefits that we that we have when we read digitally and when we try to do multiple things at once particularly even like media multitasking I'm always on my kids about if they're on some kind of device in front of the television I'm like no this you can't we can't be doing this you can choose one but there's a rationale behind that and that rationale is that you know it does fragment our attention and I think there is a danger in over annotating something or perhaps seeing too many annotations when you're trying to just get the original text I think there probably is a balance a healthy balance there I don't know what it is I think it depends on whatever the text is the type of text, the type of reader what's being said in the annotations and what's considered distracting versus useful I try to encourage students to always make substantive annotations so like Amanda was mentioning earlier like don't just write great or yes or need to it has to be substantive, you have to be contributing to the conversation otherwise I don't know how valuable it is let me ask a question in the middle of the discussion here and that is is social annotation, is the use of hypothesis, is it multi-tasking or is it a way to reduce tasks and bring focus and closeness to one's reading practice I don't know where the question is at this point Amanda but I know you're probably in the Davidson versus the car camp so we'll just let you take what you want from that I make students read the car essay and they read essay by Lafarge and they also read some of Kathy Davidson's book and they annotate all of them and then we have an in-class debate about this so I have thought about this across a decade of teaching and hearing students' responses and first this is not directed at you Alan or the questioner but I do want to point out that we're being extremely ableist in this conversation so something like 40% of college students identify as not neurotypical and Kathy Davidson points out in her book that the very first chapter is about the gorilla experiment so you have a set of students passing a basketball back and forth and you're supposed to count how many times the students with the white shirts catch the basketball in the middle of this experiment a person in a gorilla costume walks through the students tossing the basketball and then you ask how many students saw the gorilla and very few of them raise their hands most of them don't see the gorilla, why? because they're focused on the basketball so they miss the gorilla and in Kathy Davidson's book she said that because she identifies as having ADHD and dyslexia she can actually she saw the gorilla because she wasn't hyper focused on the basketball she was looking at the whole picture so this is what Kathy calls attention blindness and this is the idea that when we're hyper focused on one thing we miss the big picture I don't know about you but if I've given students a reading task like find the number of times that they reference the color red in this novel they miss the big picture all they're looking for is the color red and they have missed the whole point of the novel so what I'm saying is that sometimes that hyper focused that we kind of have drilled students into believing as the point of education it gives them tunnel vision and they're unable to see kind of the larger point and what is the point of having us close read a text is it so that they memorize how many rivers are in chapter 5 or is it again for that discussion so that they're talking about the social issues that they can give them a reflection or a lens to understand our world and their world and their cultures better for me I don't really I don't care if they spell their character in chapter 7's name right I care that they're better understanding their peers, their world and our social issues right so yeah so is multitasking a problem you know I guess if you're trying to play a video game while you're reading Ulysses probably not going to work so well right but if you're listening to music while you're doing your statistics homework for a lot of people that's incredibly successful multitasking right that's actually the only way that they can do the work I do want to say that I often offer students several ways in to the annotation process so you can turn off annotations there's a lovely little eye icon at the top of hypothesis you turn the eyes shut all the annotations go away and you can read that clean text before you open the annotations and start reading your peers comments or offering your own so yes read the text unadulterated I also obviously provide print copies they can print their own copies when needed for folks who work better that way right not everyone is going to interact with the text in the same way but the ideas at some point they're going back to engage with those annotations and to engage with their peers to learn from each other where they enter that is based on their own again learning process and their own reading functions which is different I'm in a question for you then about the role social annotation might play in you know as you sort of said the spectrum of various neuro of neurodiversity right does it enable across a spectrum or is it pushing for a certain kind of focus because it seems to me like it could be used to mark every time the word red is mentioned to find the basketball I guess it were but it also does enable whatever your wormhole is to other observations because it's do you feel like it takes a stand or not a stand but does it direct in any way as a technology or is it pretty open in terms of allowing for different types of people to see and or is that really depending on how it's framed for the students by the teacher I do think it's how it's framed I also think in general we in academia we privilege the written text right we certainly privilege the alphabetic text so I also try to give my students other forms of reading so I always give audio book options for our full texts I don't have you know social annotation for me is often great for an article or a book chapter but when we're engaging in novel length works or longer texts I have students live tweet their reading of novels this fall you'll see my students live tweeting Orks and Craig by Margaret Atwood right I have also again I offer those audio book options and I play audio book chapters in class that we can annotate in other ways I think giving students text to speech software is extremely important and again I'm going to say like a broken record that the multimodality of hypothesis is key for why I like it because students can bring in videos and images which I really think helps certain students learn better right if you have a picture of what Canterbury Cathedral looks like when you're reading Canterbury Tales that's going to help readers understand what they're talking about actually once someone my students read that Nicholas Carr article about shallow reading the very first example he gives a baby that opens a magazine and tries to like pinch it because I think it's an iPad right and so someone found that video and links to it of the baby doing that and that's it's a helpful visual cue and you can do that through hypothesis you can offer those other forms of learning engagement I just want to offer a little personal anecdote and then hear from you Alan just in terms of your experience of social annotation allowing for diversity of viewpoints or forms of expression or different types of students to engage that's very resonant for me in my own personal teaching history which was when I was teaching with Genius at high school and I was I was supposed I was on the cusp of transitioning from a very traditional pedagogue of English and literature to one that was thinking about things new tools but also new pedagogical practices and I had a student that was not doing very well in my class she wasn't you know writing essays that met the standards and she wasn't passing reading quizzes and we were reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison which I believe I uploaded illegally to Genius.com so take that out of the recording but they were annotating The Bluest Eye and she went home and she was reading it and she was supposed to annotate it and she came back and she had annotated this one chapter she had gone onto the internet and she had researched and discovered all these old advertisements for skin whitening cream hair straightening cream targeted African-Americans in the 20th century that are the obviously the deep context of Toni Morrison's novel and she put them into the margin and connected them to texts and I was just like wow I guess somebody is paying attention I guess somebody has skills that I had not given her a chance to really express herself with until we had this platform to do it where it was the multimodal piece of it but it was also this idea of like maybe I don't know what she became maybe she became a historical archivist because she had this ability to go and find and really interesting stuff online and so you know I thought it was not just the multimodality but also the kind of skill that she was demonstrating ways of reading ways of thinking about culture that I had been pretty blinded in terms of what I was expecting so to you Alan just diversity of students different types of students diversity forms of expression have you seen social annotation as a way to for students to gain voice yeah of course voices to be heard I should say they have the voice voices to be heard of course yeah I mean it's it's really it's really powerful in that way and I mean I'm sure all of us have examples of like seeing these conversations take place in annotation form through threaded discussions alongside the text that might not have otherwise happened in person or in the classroom because you know sometimes students can feel a little repressed in the classroom if they don't feel strongly enough that they want to speak out against someone in person or a whole bunch of reasons and again it might even speak to again a sort of digital age where we might feel more comfortable typing something behind a screen and we do saying it eye to eye to someone but that doesn't mean it's not meaningful or important for you to be able to say that so I think that's what the text and the annotation tool gives them is that right and ability to say that and in doing so sort of democratizes the conversation and doesn't just defer to the loudest person in the front row or something like that that's great thank you I have some small questions that I want to have answered that came up in the chat and then there's a question that you guys have seen that I haven't picked up on because there's all these different channels I think I'm suffering from a little bit too much information and also very focused on what you guys are saying so please push me and say oh I'd like to bring this one to have as a conversation piece but a couple things came up in the courses of your presentation and they also came up in some comments in the chat and in the Q&A Amanda does a kind of completion check is that right for in terms of grading annotations Alan do you have you graded annotations is it a formal like rubric kind of thing or is it sort of complete and complete or just for good vibes how do you assess social annotation or what are your thoughts on that assessment I've used it differently for different courses graduate students are very different than freshmen I've done the thing where we're requiring a certain number of annotations and just like requiring replies in a discussion board I think you kind of get junk replies and you're just kind of checking the box and doing that to leave it a little bit more open-ended but I do give them a sense of like engagement score which again I'm not counting annotations on the text but I am looking at how often you're interacting with the text and what those interactions look like are they just affirming are they just saying I agree or are they substantive and if it's a consistent substantive annotation interaction with the text then I would give it a high engagement score and that's just one score that I use it's not for assignment it's really for the whole course just basically their engagement with the texts coming back to you Amanda you can say more about assessment but I also want to use what Alan was saying to point to draw something out from your presentation you also had a different way of saying like it has to be substantive it has to contribute to the learning of the community talk to me about assessment but also like that seems tough I mean they have a rubric for that to sort of say did people learn or do you have a talk to us about that yes and this full credit to my colleague at Stevenson Christina Garcia so this is called the pro rubric and you can use it for like traditional participation like in-class participation that thing that no one really knows what a grade because it's amorphous and strange right but you can also use it for online or asynchronous participation so what the pro rubric looks like and again it's linked in the chat right there what this is is essentially something that I create with my students so think about contract grading or other forms of collaborative grading models that lots and lots of experts have talked about this basically ask students to define what they think it should mean to have respectful open brave and educational contributions so what does it mean to exceed what does it mean to meet or what does it mean to fail to do that effectively and if you make this rubric with your students right if they're actively oh sorry I will relink it I promise if you're actively building this rubric together they are coming up with the barometer of success if they're actively contributing to the standard of success then they know whether they're meeting it or not right when they write their annotations and I also have them do a self-assessment twice a semester so at two midterms and midway to finals right they assess their own contributions right do they think that they were successful in meeting this standard in the probe rubric why or why not and sometimes those are brutally honest right like they say like no I have not been contributing because you know my dad had COVID and I was working three jobs and you know fine good I see you and I hear you and that's okay that's why it's just a check mark or not a check mark right but also sometimes they say you know you thought maybe that the student wasn't really doing their best and they articulate that really it was like their best ever but they were just confused or lost or felt intimidated by some of the other comments of their fellow students good information to know as well right to help them feel equal and seen and heard in the classroom space so I guess it's what I'm trying to say is democratize the grading process too right let the students be a part of assisting their own work and have them articulate what they think they're contributing to class in their own terms and learn from them what they think is valuable amazing Alan there was a question about do students have a sense it's from my friend read at Pima do students have a pretty clear sense of what will constitute a high engagement score Alan I give them student examples so from previous courses I'll do like an actual pdf of a version of a text with the annotations alongside of it just for them to be able to not just see the number but what kinds of quality I'm looking for in the responses and what kinds of things they can say and I mean asking questions counts you know I mean you can you can ask questions that's absolutely fair I just I give them a model so that they don't think that they have to go through every two lines and say yes I agree yes I agree or no I you know and I think maybe that's where it might get a little bit challenging with mental effort and things if that's what you're constantly focused on so yeah they just work off of a student model but it's a very very low grade first of all and really it's for engagement so I think another one of the perennial questions aside from to grade or not to grade annotations and I think there's a very complicated answer to that here which is great I love complicating things is to annotate or not to annotate as the teacher and Alan you talked about prompts and being part of the and annotating so I want you to talk a little bit more about that and how you pre-populated text with annotation and then Amanda I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether you pre-populate or whether you're also engaged you know with responding to students annotations because I've heard teachers some say like I'm there I'm modeling I'm prompting I'm sort of emceeing the reading to some extent and then I've heard others that just like step back I don't play a part I let this be a student space yeah I like that I like that phrase emceeing the text I think that's a good way of putting it I tend to lean more towards facilitator and drawing them towards things but as far as the like metacognitive prompting and things that's more or less asking them questions like are you understanding this or did you get that or this is a somewhat difficult idea to understand here's a supplemental resource or something like that I know when you get into like actually embedding questions and using inline questioning like what's called adjunct questioning the research is really really kind of furry on that as far as like whether or not that's actually doing any good as opposed to doing a delayed kind of questioning model so I tend not to actually embed questions that measure like comprehension within the text but I'll ask them questions along the lines of you know are you distracted right now or things like that but to very very minimally I don't I try not to overwhelm the text because what we saw in the dissertation research was that if you do that too often it actually turns students off in the text and it actually starts to negatively impact comprehension. Amanda? So I always start with those general guidelines which I'm just going to get one more time in this case so I give them examples of what would make a good annotation so a summary or paraphrase a definition references opinions questions or links to related material so they always have that prompt and that prompt you know is on Blackboard with every single assignment I post with with for annotation right so it's reiterated again and again so they kind of know what kind of edge what kind of annotations I think might be helpful um I always then for the very first assignment let them go I let them annotate I do not interject unless someone asks a specific question of me in the annotations sometimes it's like hey I don't understand what this means can you help professor right sometimes you will get called out like that in the annotations or sometimes I will see like an incorrect definition right like someone has linked to the incorrect definition of a word or an incorrect reference which of course I step in to correct because you don't want then everyone in the class thinking but it's right so I will step in in those ways I will also step in if there is inappropriate behavior happening so I did once have like one student hitting on another student in the comments like one student was like hey add me on snap and then the other person was like nah like you know that's not supposed to be happening in the annotations so I will step in if there's inappropriate behavior and I'll bring that into the classroom space um I will often also if there's like a really heated or heavy like a debate that seems to be verging on aggressive sometimes step in and say hey we'll talk about this more in class right just to kind of bring it to a close and then like I said I will screenshot those interesting insights I will screenshot the most vibrant debates and I bring them into my slides that I start the class with so I start every class with examples of their annotations and I then model that good behavior of saying I found this really interesting because here's links to further research here's further definitions here's other information that might help you continue that conversation in a respectful way so I do interject and I do engage with their comments but not actually in the annotation space but in the classroom space whatever that looks like and I've done this both fully online classes and fully in person classes it also kind of gets like the gold star of being student of the week that their annotations were shared on the board and the instructor was giving them that highlight I was like single boosting I was up voting their work through the slides by showing them and of course make sure I try to rotate whose comments are being highlighted and that's not hard to do because you have students who respond differently to different articles what I find is after that first time that I do it where I have the interesting insights and I'm providing several slides worth of further information and opening up the discussion that then in the next annotation assignment they start doing that as well they provide the links to further research they start mimicking kind of what I had done in the class in their own annotations so that's the way that I model the behavior but I never embed specific questions like plant kind of prompts throughout or anything like that I really let it be their space so that I know what they're thinking about without me leading them down a certain direction yeah I think there's different teaching context and so you know that one great thing about it is the flexibility of the tool and that's something I definitely love about it I'm going to address a question that's a couple questions come up a couple times I just loved Amanda how you were talking about you're using the language of there's some skepticism I think a few of the Q&As and chats around is hypothesis social media is social annotation social media it doesn't have this button or it doesn't have this kind of element of immediate gratification it's got it's missing some pieces of what say Twitter Facebook or whatever they use nowadays is using but I loved how you actually sort of took that in a direction of saying it doesn't have an upvote button right but there's other ways of an upvote button is the simplest way of being sort of like honored for your thinking or honored for your contributions and if you're pulling annotations into a slide and then talking about those annotations you're getting the same you know it may not be the immediate dopamine I think somebody used in the Q&A of a vote on a social media platform but it is also training us and making us think about those types of gratifications and over longer periods of time and in different formats you can address that if you want but I just wanted since with 3 minutes left I'll give each of you a final minute and 30 seconds I guess exactly each to just share anything from the chat that came up that hasn't gotten addressed or just your closing I didn't get to talk about this but this is one of my thoughts on this topic and let's start with you Alan any closing remarks or comments Oh man I mean this is such a fascinating topic and I love these conversations and these are really valid questions and great discussions to have and I just posted that I think Hypothesis is more of a tool for discourse much more so than social media which is based in immediate gratification and doing and saying things for likes rather than for a valid response to that statement I think and I think that's the big differentiator between the two and so I think Hypothesis can really foster that kind of conversation whereas social media is more of a sort of posturing or even signaling to others as opposed to an exchange of ideas Amanda your final thoughts or thoughts on social media and social annotation and so I just want to remind everyone that social annotation is just one of the tools in your toolkit right it's not the right tool for every assignment it's not the right tool for every kind of engagement it is one specific kind of tool that I think works really well for close reading but as I said before I actually do have students live tweet their readings of novels I do use social media in the classroom I have had students make you know Instagram influencer videos about Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale before I think you can use social media you can use Goodreads you can use all of these different tools in our toolkit for different kinds of responses from students what I like about Hypothesis is that the skills that they learn in this more safe more regulated more academic space can then transfer to those social media spaces where the context and audience is different but we hope that the skills that they've learned through the kinds of engagement we're promoting will maybe make the internet a better place for everyone to know I mean that's too optimistic I mean really isn't that part of what we want is we want to model good online behavior thoughtful educated responses to people's comments not just liking things but having more substantive conversations I agree I'm very happy to be that optimism that's going to happen every single time but like you know when I was in grad school and they're like you're teaching in this composition department it's like composition is what makes engaged citizens and thoughtful citizens and it was like the bottom of the you know the base of the pedagogy for you know these courses and I was like okay maybe but if you start to use these adjacent technologies and there's some slippage between them I think I think that it might be true because it's not writing a five page essay I don't think a five page essay is necessarily going to prove you know to make great engaged you know citizens but using tools that as Amanda's point out again and again hypothesis one of its great virtues is it's not disposable it is not another ed tech tool that gets thrown out at the end of a course or when somebody graduates or leaves a school you can use it beyond maybe more on that in other sessions I have not taken a sip of water checked my phone or drank a sip of my coffee or done anything but take notes and listen in this conversation I just want to thank you both so much it's been an absolute pleasure I could keep going maybe we'll have another opportunity to do this but Alan Amanda truly wonderful session I'm going to echo our keynote speaker that you can reach out anytime my info is on the slides that I provided I'm on Twitter obviously and lots of other places so reach out anytime so hi Alan thanks Alan thanks everybody go to the I think you can click back to the table of contents or the schedule and you can jump to the next session the next sessions will start in I think 15 minutes if I'm correct and that will be the final session final hour and a half session we have one sharing stories in the classroom CTL directors and staff sharing stories of instructors their stories from their schools and we have another session on sort of avant-garde of integrations with tools like hypothesis in terms of some publisher and library platforms that hypothesis is working with so if you're sort of interoperability tool geek go to that latter session and if you want more ideas about how to use this in the classroom go to the CTL session and look forward to seeing you there thanks everybody