 But I'll just start out with something that came out of the presentation that gave it I annotate and that was that You know, I think you were kind of drawing attention there to what seems to be like a perceived Crisis around reading and writing like people are like, oh my gosh students can't read or write anymore or annotate or whatever And I think you were challenging that in an interesting way And so I was curious if you do you think that there's a crisis right now in reading and writing among students or people in general and if so Or if not, how does annotation kind of play a role in whether there's a crisis or not? I Always like to point to a text that kind of changed my thinking about this question And that's Kathleen Yancey's writing in the 21st century. It's actually quite dated now I think he came out maybe to say But writing in the 21st century by Yancey basically states that students are actually writing more than ever before If you were to challenge a group of students, which I have to document how many text messages Snapchat's IG posts Facebook posts tweets Emails they send out in a day the sheer volume of writing is staggering Why we don't value that writing in Academia or in higher education is the question for me, right? The claims that students aren't writing are just categorically untrue The fact is that we don't count what they're doing is writing, right? So it's not a question of volume It's really or it's it's perceived as a question of volume, but in fact, it's actually a question of the value of Of the quality or something exactly exactly and multimodal writing so writing using images using videos using even voice Elements that has been studied now for decades, especially in disability and accessibility studies Jody Schipka has a beautiful text called composition made whole and That I mean it's probably 20 years old at this point And that was looking at multimodality in terms of like if I write a poem on my ballet slipper Does that count as writing? Or you know if I write like like Emily Dickinson's recipes that were poems, right? Does that does that count as writing? It's a recipe for you know, whatever bread, right? But it's also a poem does that count as writing? So these these questions aren't new. I think they're just it's just the technology through which we are communicating as new So in that way this crisis has actually been going on for like 20 years, right? or more Do you call it a crisis or I don't I don't think I don't think there's a crisis There's like a perceived crisis, right? There's a shift and I think that shift may be more rapid than other shifts That we have seen historically, you know, like for example, the first major shift you can point to on higher ed is You know when the veterans came back from war and we start open admissions and started, you know Increasing just the volume of people in higher education that shift was subtle and it took time and it you know slowly moved through different Groups of people right so first probably a different class then different genders then different races, right? Here we have a shift that's just happening like across all of those of those Categories at the same time right access to technology is The ubiquitous The Pew Pew research says 99 point nine percent of college students have access to a smart device. I mean, that's everyone Right at least in And in the United States Exactly So in terms of writing I think that it is not a crisis I think it is a shift and I think that we need to move with that shift and we need to embrace that shift And we need to meet students where they are just as we have with open admissions and with these other shifts that we've that we've encountered in higher education over time in terms of reading this I got a point to Kathy Davidson for in her series of books from now you see it to Her most recent book on education Titles just gave me right now. That's right. I can look at it. Yes Kathy Davidson's work. She talks a lot about multitasking and attention blindness and how Students in the 21st century are essentially multitasking all the time and we treat that as a crisis We say that's a bad thing because they can't focus on one topic. They can't stay Kind of tunnel visioned to one task, but actually Multitasking helps us see more and do more and experience Texts and tasks in different ways I'm definitely in her camp when it comes to this Although maybe we're not sitting down to read pride and prejudice in one fell swoop. I Don't think we ever were honestly, but Bush cereal even I guess not wasn't it wasn't dickens, right? No Yeah, that this is awesome. That's Austin's probably not but anyway, you know, there's There's no evidence that anyone was ever deeply reading for hours on end with no interruption, right? All we have is claims from like Plato saying that you know writing is gonna kill our ability to memorize and We have these these kinds of things But we don't we don't have any data to suggest that anyone was ever sitting down and knocking out a novel, right? in in a short period of time I I'm totally of the camp that our minds have always been wondering that we've always been distractible, right? that we've always been doodling on the sides of pages or thinking about our lunch or Stopping to converse with someone or just look at the trees, right? now we just have distraction that's more readily available and more Purposely attuned to distracting us right like pop-up ads notifications things that quite literally fly across your screen Right to distract you that is new But the fact that we have students who are built who have grown up with those and have trained themselves to deal with those in Such interesting ways is something that I think we should bring into the classroom and be talking about and thinking critically about right? So how can we use multitasking as the? Positive as a tool as a skill rather than oh these students are so you know, they're so distracted. They can't focus on anything Why treat it like as an ill as a a symptom rather than a benefit, right? it sounds like I'm really hearing from what you're saying that you have a Attendancy to try not to blame students for the condition that we find ourselves in but instead see what they're doing or going through as In a positive light and thinking about how we might harness that Yes, in fact, I call myself a techno optimist, right? I do think we need to be critical of tools. I do think we need to investigate tools and to think about the ethical You know ramifications and considerations of tools, but I also think that we need to learn how to use them to our benefit, right? This is true of any tool look at a hammer. Sure a hammer can be used to hit someone on the head with but hammer could also be used to build house, right? So Let's take all of our tools in that way, right? How can we use the tools that we currently have to support and benefit students not to? Condemn them or blame them or show what they're doing it? Is detrimental, right? Yeah, there's been so much, you know, like Jesse Stommel is often Kind of talking about this vein about how there's such a tendency to blame students or call out students or shame students For the educational situations we find ourselves in So that resonates with me to like have a different approach to dealing with that situation And there's also I think a lot of parent blaming too, right? Like oh these parents gave them iPads when they were six and they had unfettered use of Technology and screen time and blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, but you know what we like Of course, of course they did, right? I mean the state of parents in the 60s and 70s did the same thing with television, right? I mean, it's not I don't like to play the blame game. I don't think the blame game gets us anywhere What I do like to do is think about how to use these tools effectively and how to make students aware of how they use These technologies so my students have to do a digital diet in my classes where they track Which apps and sites they use over a 48 period 48 hour period of time? And then they have to choose three of those things to eliminate for 24 hours and then they have to reflect on that, right? So it's more about this awareness about this Identifying and tracking and being mindful of exactly what they're doing and then say, okay You know what? I did this and I did this for 24 hours And you know what? I'm gonna go right back to doing what I was doing so it works for me. Good. Great You learned that or it's like actually I check Facebook 700 times a day I need to eliminate that right I need to delete that app for my phone during school year or whatever, right? So that's that's what I'm really looking for here is not to tell them what they're doing is wrong or bad But making them aware of what they're doing and how they could perhaps improve those Those habits, right? That makes sense and is again really interesting to me I Have like surfacing and make helping people make aware of what they're doing as opposed to Trying to discount it with some sort of nostalgia So I'm curious to shift so we're you know, you've been kind of talking about how There's this perceived crisis and some of the strategies you use to change the conversation there So that it moves away from this idea of a crisis into something else So how is it that you see annotation as being like a significant tool in in that work that you're doing to kind of Argue against this crisis or surface other kinds of you know teaching and learning or awareness and experience For me that comes down to the fact that I teach Text-based courses. So whether your texts are physical print based or digital You need to know if students are reading and you need to know if they're comprehending with a reading Right, that's just kind of the foundations of a humanities Curriculum right read this text and comprehend this text, right? So in order to figure out if students are reading and if they're comprehending I Right in some ways needs some form of accountability But I do not think quizzes are necessarily effective and I've moved very far away from quizzes and In general things that are punitive, right? I want to use a carrot not a stick. I Think a quiz is a stick Right, like if you don't do the reading you're in a failless quiz Plus quizzes are very much about that kind of minutia of memorization Like you know name these four rivers that were mentioned in chapter three or you know What do character X do the character Y on page 42, right? I that's not actually why I'm having students read I'm having students read so that they can understand conceptual Information and apply that information to their lives or their profession, right? so I want to Get at those higher order skills not those lower level skills. So for me, you know Exams quizzes, that's not going to get at that. So I started thinking about ways of kind of Tracking student reading or tracking student engagement with texts in alternative ways Of course, you've got discussion posts and discussion questions and in class discussion, but no matter what I have yet in my Oh gosh, 12 13 years of teaching maybe even more. I guess I started teaching in 2006. Yeah I Have yet to encounter a class where a hundred percent participation happens in the face-to-face classroom You have students who are shy you have students who have social anxiety You have students who are just uncomfortable speaking in those spaces and the same happens in the digital realm, right? You have students who will give very long well thought-out responses and discussion boards and discussion posts and then you have students who you know Yeah, good idea right a very brief I Also have experimented with things like live tweeting readings So I've had students read a novel and live tweet as they would live tweet like the Super Bowl or the state of the Union address As they read they tweet out things that they find surprising or interesting or questions about or you know, they use hashtag spoiler alert Books But that's again, it's giving me kind of a window into their reading process That's what I that's what I'm looking for is being able to almost see them read Right And I'm not I don't I'm not gonna sit in their dorm room and look over the shoulder So how can I see them? That would be creepy, right? Yes, right? We call it the creepy tree house effect. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm familiar with the creepy tree house So I don't want to be in their tree house, but I do want to see you how they're interacting with the text, right? So that's where annotation came into play for me I've always asked students to physically annotate texts when they are print based and I Actually have like walked around the classroom and looked at their papers to see if there's marks on their papers and That for me is particularly about how they're making marks like they're using highlighters or post-it notes or pens or multiple colors, what are they doing? and When I began to realize that not only was I teaching mostly digital texts but they were encountering digital texts in every discipline in every class and Probably even more importantly in their personal lives, right? Like they were waking up and looking at digital publications They weren't waking up and looking at a newspaper They were encountering digital texts More than physical texts in a wide variety of outlets in their life So I wanted to think about how I could shift that annotation into the digital space to meet them To meet them where they were but also to give them the tools to interact with the kinds of texts that they were encountering So I think I started actually with annotation studio the MIT Annotation studio and and Google Docs, right because those at the time of what a Google campus So we had, you know, Google for education And then when I started teaching with a WordPress, I was thinking more about like how could we I annotate Born digital text that didn't in a way that wouldn't eliminate the multi modality So I started teaching digital publishing and this is where the real turn happened is thinking about if I take a New York Times article, for example, and I cut and paste it into a word doc. I lose the New York Times right I lose the Layout the design the font the images the videos. I lose all of the work that goes into the creation of that digital text Yes, I saw the words on the page, but aren't all those elements just as vital and in digital publishing. Of course, that's what we talk about right We talk about the visual rhetoric of the text Being equal to or if not more important sometimes than the content of the text Yeah, I used to think a lot about how the New York Times on you know Their choice for what picture to include with a story or what picture that would be on the home page without an associated story Was, you know, probably a more important editorial choice than the text itself. Yeah, and think about the font I mean the New York Times font is iconic, right? It's a Romanesque Classical font that any pretty much anyone in the world could probably identify Right as the New York Times text just as you could look at the text of Vogue the title of Vogue, right? I We have a whole unit in my class on fonts and typeface and there's Students are baffled by the fact that they can identify texts. They never They subcont only subconsciously noticed Like Wes Anderson, for example always uses the same font What's Anderson font uses the same font for all of his films and when you type in any title like the Royal Ten and Bomb So like oh, yeah, that's what's Anderson's font, right? Or the Star Wars font, right, right or the show Strangers Things uses the same typeface as Stephen King novels Right, you don't like say, oh, that's a Stephen King font But when when you put them together like, oh, yeah, that's why that looks that reminds me of like 80s horror novels, right? That's why I feel creeped out. Yeah So those I didn't I wanted to find a tool that allowed my students not only to comment on the actual text But also on those digital elements Right, can they talk comment on the typeface the color choices the size of the font the images the image placement Because I wanted them to think about designing their own digital texts, right? So they need to do be thoughtful about those elements. So I first started having to make videos like screen captures of Digital texts where they were like walking me through like here's the font choice. There's the Video here's the you know hyperlinks, whatever But I Found that it was not one-size-fits-all right like not all students wanted to talk me through their process some students really wanted to write especially my my English and writing majors, right who who Find them selves able to communicate and writing differently than they do verbally So that's when I started looking for like those multiple options and giving them like a series of tools they could do the assignment with and One of them was screen capture one of them was literally like taking a screenshot and I'm like putting bubbles Or like circling things and making arrows and typing and then I There was hypothesis and I was like, oh this does all of the things that I'm looking for it allows students to write about different elements of The text it still allows them to comment in a very traditional kind of annotation way But it also has this amazing added benefit of allowing them to add multimodal Elements to the annotations themselves. They can add a link. They can add an image. They can add a video right to these Conversations in Exactly the ways that I want them to be doing the work like I want them to look up the word and provide me with the definition I want them to look up a reference There's one article I have all my students read by Nicholas Carr and the opening paragraph references 2001 a space Odyssey and none of them have seen it No, I love them Inevitably half the people in the class link to the trailer or the IMDb page or Whatever and that's actually super helpful, right? And that's something that they couldn't do in in those other Using with other tools or using you know pen and paper So that's that was a huge added benefit for me is like not only were they doing a multimodal project But then they were able to use these multimodal elements and it was very like metacognitive and like why? multimodality matters and what we can do With multimodal writing that we can't do static writing Hey Yeah, that's really interesting. You know we um had hypothesis mostly thanks to Jeremy's work We have kind of settled on this really short Descriptor about some of the benefits that hypothesis sanitation can bring we talked about it Being able to make reading active I'm sorry Visible so that kind of gets at your first point about You know like the accountability What was reading even happening? Visible in the sense of like a record of your interaction with the text and then social as a third kind of element and it seems clear that you are very active in in the you know using annotation as a tool to help make reading Visible and active Can you talk a little bit about why if it's important for it to be social? And and why if so? Yes So I know I talked about this in my book chapter and I talked about this in my presentation but For me at the end of the day it all comes down to talking about these texts in class, right? But there's limited class time. There's limited class space and You know, I think almost all of us are being asked to teach hybrid or fully online classes as well, right? So Is there a way to take that face-to-face interaction that social interaction and bring it into the digital space in ways that students are Already accustomed to doing because they're already used to tweeting at each other snapping at each other Answering each other's comments Whether YouTube or Instagram, right? But we also see the hugely problematic nature of those spaces. I mean YouTube comments are the worst I mean for us in higher education like don't read the comments of a chronicle article unless you want to be depressed You know the week Or really anything I mean almost anything you look at like, you know, that's what I think is so dangerous about Twitter Especially if you're yeah, say a woman or a person of color is like you say anything and then responses can just be so toxic exactly and This is really a whole realm of scholarship on digital citizenship, but I always try to like teach my students good digital to be good digital citizens, right and if we really want like the Ecology of online spaces to change we have to practice that in our classrooms too So I was thinking about like how can I capitalize on these skills students already have like leaving comments having online conversations To an academic end, right? So in the live tweeting exercise. I told you I kind of started with that was obvious, right? I had students, you know Okay, you have to have 10 tweets for each after and then you have to reply to three other people's tweets for that chapter Right gauge with each other in the ways that they already do but just trying to show them how they could do it How they could code switch right don't just use this for social engagement, but also use this for these like practical purposes of Finding out more information about this text and and reading with your classmates I'm talking about it with your classmates in the same way. You might the Super Bowl, right or your favorite show Game of Thrones finale, right? Spoiler alert, right exactly Like how can you you're already doing this you're already using the internet to talk about cultural objects right You're already tweeting using hashtags about You know The game of Thrones finale or whatever it may be. So how can I use those same skills? But apply them to a different purpose and show students how to do it kind of thoughtfully and with intention You know hypothesis has that built in right it allows students to reply to each other's thoughts and to support each other's work in in Providing information for each other like crowdsourcing the hard work of reading right so they can crowdsource the references crowdsource the definitions But also ask questions and and respond to each other's questions or throw it up opinions to start debates. I I Really really love when I have students like ask kind of those big Rhetorical unanswerable questions and see a bunch of other students way in I think that's what the internet's kind of lovely for right is that strange cross-section of opinions that you Don't really get anywhere else And in my although my classrooms are very diverse. I do every year have Especially women and people of color right in their final reflection letters like I should have I should have talked more I should have spoken up more, but I was afraid to or I didn't feel comfortable But the online space gives them a different dynamic, right? It's not it's not their face It's not their body in the space So they do have a little bit more freedom to to express their opinions And I find that my shy students or my students who have social anxiety have the time to think out and Write out their responses and ways that they feel much more comfortable doing than having to be on the spot and like state an opinion Right, right. Yeah Comfortable doing that live face-to-face But many aren't right that the asynchronous the asynchronous nature of it gives them a little bit more time to think through What they're going to say? I really do I do think that that Particularly benefits students who have social Anxiety or discomfort in whatever way for whatever reason Some of it brought onto them rather than coming from them Yeah, and it I mean I try not to weigh in until after all the students are finished But it also does give me the space to answer questions that maybe we don't get to in class, right? We're never gonna answer every single question about a text in My classes are an hour and 15 minutes long I'm sorry. I was just gonna ask there. Have you ever Reshaped what you were gonna do in class based on the annotations or students. Yes My best example. This is EM forester's the machine stops so I Start one of my courses with EM forester's the machine stops Which is a very short short story by a brilliant and beautiful writer But it's dated Very dated. In fact, I think it's 1919 Was when it was written and the short story is about living in a world completely run by machines and Having absolutely no face-to-face interaction whatsoever. Everyone lives in basically pods or cells, right and communicates totally through like tele presence and There's That one of the kind of you know main characters kind of rebelling against this and is like how come I can't just see people And I talk to people and go into the outside world and like live amongst people and I have students annotate EM forester's the machine stops and I I swear I've done it maybe five or six or seven times and the same chunk of text is always left unannotated Every time same chunk interesting and that chunk of text is full of fake historical references So they're like made up Events they're not they didn't really happen in history, but they're part of the dystopian world that you enforce there's created but they sound like a real historical events They're like perfectly titled to mimic real events in a way that I think students genuinely don't know if they're real or fake and they get very apprehensive about Saying anything about them because they think you just don't know about them like they think they happens, but they don't They can't find a Wikipedia page for right, so they feel like right like Uneducated right and they feel like maybe I'm the only one who doesn't know this thing, right? right so I After seeing this this same chunk over and we're gonna right not answer this I immediately go there first now and I say okay, so this is one of the things that the enforcers playing with here the whole this whole world is based on like having fake information and regurgitating Incorrect information that's provided to you by a big brother type figure So he's doing that to you right like he's providing you with this fake information with these fake events and Expecting you to just go along with it as a burial in the exact same way. The characters in the story are Right, so you're falling into the trap that he is basically setting up is is Vulnerability of humanity Right guy, you know the hot. That's an amazing Example and they I'm a big Borges fan as you might be and it makes me think of his short story clone. Okay bar or best churches You know where there's the encyclopedia with the extra sort of fake information in it Are you familiar with that story? I'm not not very familiar with it, but I've seen a reference to any guys and I was just thinking that And maybe this is the wrong direction to take this but it would be an interesting exercise to have students Create Wikipedia pages for the fake events in the enforcers Calling attention to the fact that they're fake right not trying how long it takes the internet to notice Well, yeah, but I mean they it it does make sense that Wikipedia could have records on these right because people might go there to try to find If that was a true thing or not Yeah I mean, maybe that would take all the fun and surprise out of them being in the story and kind of Unlookable up a little bit. Yeah, but it is it does it just like shows it shows The mother in the story is like basically a professor of fake news like she just spouts Fake junk about fake junk, right? I thought a Fox News watcher and she her You know, I think actually students. This is Perhaps unfair the students without you know, having their own voices here in this conversation But I think students actually don't see the irony of the mother Immediately, I don't think they realize that that's what she's doing That she's not actually an expert in some very much my new area of research But that she's actually just like we're gergitating junk about about fake things, right? So that's a really important conversation to have especially in our current moment of of Even the term fake news being fake Get on a fake meaning right like information literacy being so essential to education at all levels so Yeah, that I mean seriously and it's so The act of social annotation led me to change my lesson about that text because they didn't they were they didn't get it They didn't get that aspect of the story And I didn't know that they didn't get it until I realized that they wouldn't touch that whole paragraph In the short story and every other paragraph was like heavily heavily heavily annotated It was like the only paragraph that has zero highlights, right? You're like why yeah That's really interesting Interesting anecdote and I mean often I think people think about like looking at the hot spots or annotations happening a lot without maybe thinking of the reverse case Right like why is no annotation happening? I've also You know brought students questions directly into the classroom, right? So hey look the student asked this question it has like 10 replies, but we still haven't really settled right on an answer So let's talk about that And I have also used it again to go back to the digital citizen Question as when students do like kind of won't like inappropriate things in the online space I I I call I'm a call-out culture person right like I call them out and I say like you We're talking to the student in a personal way and not about the text like that's not what this is for right? Let's talk about how there's like an implicit code of conduct here that you were breaching And it's uncomfortable, but also important Yeah to actually address those things in a way that's constructive rather than just like She better believe that that students also doing it in lots of other spaces. Yeah. Oh, I mean If they're willing to do it in this coded space exactly Exactly, they're willing to do it like on the course site the professor built for course interactions You best believe aspects of their life that may need this lesson to be learned as well Yeah, and other and other units so that Kind of leads me to wonder. Um, do you grade the student annotations as part of do you count them as part of the graded? Assignments in your course if I could live in a grade-free world I would if my classes could be past fail I'd be in heaven I because I don't I honestly think there is just a past fail for life, right? Like you're either doing the worker or not And if you're doing the work at an average level or you're doing the work at an above average level We'll play out in your, you know Future, but it doesn't really matter what group what like the grade that I give you, right? Um, I Instead use basically kind of like a Check plus check check minus type system I have different kinds of Engagement activities where they either do it or they don't do it, right? So like the live tweeting you either do it or you don't do it, right? The social annotation either do it or you don't do it Things like peer review You either show up with your paper and you write on someone else's paper Or you don't show up with your paper and you don't write on paper, right? There's a better way to be a peer reviewer and there's a worse way to be a peer reviewer But that's not the point of the class the class is to learn how to peer review It's to learn how to read a text. It's to learn how to engage with these texts in a social way I don't think you should be penalized for not doing it. Well your first time Right, you get you get pushed back from students around your attitude toward grading. I get questions like do we get a point for each? Annotation or whatever it's like No And the answer that to be fair to be honest, I don't actually Tell them exactly at first at first I just tell them, okay for the rest of this class period you're going to create five annotations on this article and I'm gonna make sure everyone knows how to do it Right and that's just an in-class activity And I think they are accustomed to in-class activities not being graded because that's just like classwork, right? So I have them start it in class and then for homework They have to like finish the task and then do a second article, right? So they're I Kind of slip it through the cracks at first and then I show them on the group page in Hypothesis how I can see their names and how many times they've annotated so in their mind just that tally mark is like a grade, right? It says A La Castro five right I need to show up there right And say it so with the live tweets I do a tags Explorer that Google spreadsheet which takes all of their information and it and it puts exactly like you know a La Castro 12 tweets, right? And I just show them how I collect the data, but I don't tell them necessarily what I do with the data I just show them that they did the data is being collected so that they are held accountable for that work But I don't tell them it's worth like five points, right? I'm just Showing them that they either did it or didn't do it And Did they but is there anxiety it sounds like there's a little bit of anxiety sometimes around exactly how that's all going to be Calculated in the end. Yes, and for those students who are really like push I talk about the essay work is then going to result in it, right? So after they read these three articles and annotate them and respond to each other's annotations there's then an essay on those three articles where they have to put those three articles in conversation with each other about an argument they're making and That is the high-stakes grade, right? And if you didn't spend the time to do the work to carefully read and annotate the text your essay is not going to be good Not gonna be as good recently Because you haven't thoroughly investigated the the text in a way that will enable you to write a thoughtful essay that puts them in conversation with each other, right? That's cool. Hey, so and I don't want to make us go over time at all So I just I'll try to ask a couple more questions And I also give you a chance to if you there was something that you really wanted to make sure that you got across Which we can also add later obviously, but So You have this Chapter on annotation coming out, right or is it already out that look use the book whoo wait hold on they have to switch back Nice, okay. I need to get a copy is that's Rutledge. Yeah, unfortunately I you know with edited collections you usually sign on try to chapter before they tell you the publisher So Rutledge is more expensive. I'm used to it being an open access, right? Yeah journals, but that's the chapter and it's The whole the whole text is you know digital reading and writing and composition studies But I think I'm one of the only ones in about annotation in there. So well, we have to make sure that Hypothesis at least buys a copy There is it is funny though because a lot of these are about that that crisis that you asked me about like, you know The very first chapter says the it says the reading problem, right? So you may be a bit of an outlier in the book. I might be I might be but I have to say it was like one of those it was like accepted with very little revision like So they must have they must have been on board with it. And so it I assume there's an overall editor or editors There's two editors Mary Lam and Jennifer Parrot. I'm both composition people It is like I said a little more pricey than I'm used to but I am allowed to distribute eight pre Pre-publication drafts which after my talk at I annotate six people asked me for That's good. Yeah Well, I want to make sure that we up your sales numbers, too. So I will have hypothesis by one How did and how did you how did it come about that you were you invited to some of the chapter or how did that come about? there was like a Targeted email blast to people who do this kind of work And I responded with like a general inquiry of like, you know, I did this I did a presentation on this work at my institution We have these the diverse perspective forums where Faculty like demonstrate something they're doing and kind of talk through the how they theorize what they're doing So I did I did I talked about exactly this like annotation social annotation how it's getting students to read and write about what they're reading and I Was looking for a home for it. Like I was like, I think this is more than just a talk I think that this is an article and I was kind of trying to figure out where it should live And this, you know, the same mail came through You're like, aha This is exactly what it is. It's digital reading and writing And to be I really was looking to front-load publications before I went on maternity leave So it's trying to get kind of like a bunch of work that I knew wasn't gonna come out for a couple of years But like finished earlier So I then wrote the the drafts and I presented it at the Society for Textual Studies To give it an outside audience like outside of students my university Stevenson and it was really well received at STS And I actually presented it with Andrew Stoffer of book traces So he talked about book traces and then I gave us talk about how I use book traces to talk about social annotation And it was like a really lovely pairing So that's after workshopping it at that conference, then it you know finished it up and sent it out and now lives in the world. It's great Awesome publication news is central to your practice And I always try to because everyone everyone everyone everyone asks about the kinds of like innovative teaching work that I do like how How do you use tools digital tools in the classroom to help students do all this stuff, right? And having book chapters out there is a nice thing to like here's my tutorial on that it's in this book chapter, right? Instead of having to give the same workshop over and over again the Premise of this really did come from this collaboration between between Andrew Stoffer and I with book traces you know Thinking about media history and book history and the history of reading right like studying the history of reading And talking to my students about that long tale of Social reading and how reading has not been an isolated personal practice for very long It was always social The fact that we read in isolation now is almost antithetical to the foundations of reading And communication so trying to think about how we now can can Rejoin and recapture and reclaim that social space of reading especially in the era of Goodreads and Amazon reviews and all these things that students are doing for fun on their own time right like how can we bring that into the classroom and and I Don't know Right teach kind of these reading social reading skills and make reading Part of their worlds again part of their everyday like lives again in ways that Are not just about saying this book sucks. I hated it That's like yelp reviewing books But thinking about like the intention and the purpose and the context and the genre and all of these Torical questions that will help inform them and make them better readers and better communicators and like better participants in the social space So, yeah, that's that was You know, that's what we were doing in Victorian times That's what we were doing in the 19th century and now we have this opportunity to do it again in a way that has even more impact I Often kind of joke that I think of my Like my goal as a teacher to get people to Want to read again, right? Like my students always said oh, I love reading as a kid my parents wrote to me my grandparents wrote to me I used to love reading and then after I went to high school We'd read all these books I hated and now I never I never read again, right? And I always think like okay So how can I make reading part of their worlds again in a way that's enjoyable and pleasurable and not just something some teacher Is making them do for a grade Yeah, it's interesting. I I have heard You know contemporary students, you know like K-12 students say That on the way annotation is used in some of their classes actually makes them hate not only annotation but also reading because there's a kind of like Like almost pro forma book report quality to the kind of annotation they're being asked to do. Yeah Because there's I try not to do that. I try to say like use emojis use hashtags use slang like do it your own way I Think the fact that you are also seem to be connecting it to like the digital practices that they already do value and do participate in willingly This key to that and so it's not some sort of separate rarefied activity. That's boring Or as boring me. I mean, I'm sure some of it's still boring to them, right? That's fine But at least they might gain a tool to make boring reading easier for them to manage That's that's good, too. Right like bring hypothesis to your social science or science class and use it to make Really boring reading more, you know more digestible cool that works, too, right? Hey, so just to switch gears a little bit What what has been your experience with or connection to research on annotation In teaching and learning You know are there is the research that you've seen happen that you find particularly interesting or noteworthy Or is there research that you think needs to be done that hasn't happened yet? It's kind of spraying that one on the other left field But in my book chapter, I actually cite a lot of research that I think is the kind of research that needs to be done and that's things like the city I pointed to that compared the Blackboard discussion posts to The hypothesis annotations and looked at kind of like the quality and quantity and engagement of those posts Because I I really don't Believe that one size fits all I do not believe that a Blackboard course is going to fit every type of Teacher and every type of course content. I don't think hypothesis is going to fit every type of course and every type of course content I think that we needed more studies that are comparing different tools and Providing like I always joke about about this, but it really is like I want like the Amazon Spreadsheet of like here's four vacuums Here's a checklist of you like this vacuum does these four things and this vacuum does these three things these fact It's a totally different three, right? And you as a consumer you can look at that and pick which one you want, right? Like I feel like we are missing that and kind of the educational technology realm that like Here here's a Swiss army knife, right of tools and here's how you can use these different things for different purposes And here's how you can it goes back to that small pieces loosely joined that Jeff Referenced at the conference, but that's you know, highly highly cited How can we put together a Swiss army knife a toolbox full of many different tools, but also have that Criticism have that research have that like breakdown of what these tools do well what they don't do well And how students are using them and like data on how students have used them and comparing the actual products students create out of these tools I Think a lot of us have anecdotal evidence of that But I think there could be a lot wider scale Kind of studies of that some of it which you I saw that I annotate conference, right? Some people were looking at like Some some quantified data Of people using these different tools, but that I think that would be really helpful, especially because we're always being asked kind of to make the case for the Practices we're doing in the classroom. So I have to like you know Say I'm doing this because here's the evidence that it works, right? Right, even though it seems like you've are convinced that it works in your Context very well, right, but you have to justify it on another dimension, right? Like even, you know, I'm very excited about the Blackboard plug-in for hypothesis But if I want like, you know my university to Adopt that plug-in like I will have to make a case for it, right? And those kinds of studies helped me make cases for it outside of like it works in my classroom with my 15 students, right? So yeah that also I Really, I really really wish that there was some more Attention paid to multimodal writing across the curriculum and how You know the paper that you print from Microsoft Word is not really translating into the way that we write in any other context maybe except for our government memo But like, you know Most workplaces are not producing like these white papers anymore And most of what we consume isn't that either, right? So if we're not consuming this content and we're not creating this content Then we also can't be interacting with like annotating with a pen and paper, right? So Thinking about okay if we're going to be moving to multimodal composition How do we engage with multimodal content, right? What kind of tools can we use to interact with Multimodal content one of the biggest questions in higher ed is grading, right? Like how do you grade? Multimodal content, right? I use screen capture software to grade multimodal content At JITP we actually use hypothesis to provide peer review For multimodal content as a journal the journal of interactive technology and pedagogy as a journal We have used hypothesis to provide feedback to authors on their multimodal articles that needed like line by line like line level um commendation but Was a website or something right that nature Hey, so I know we've reached the top of the hour. Um So I should let you go so you can get on with your time But if you did want to if you did at least want to suggest something that I should make sure to include Even if we talk about it asynchronously or something. Yes And this is something that I don't think comes across in the article or in my talk And this is that I use hypothesis in different classes for different purposes So it really is not a one size fits all and it's not like the same process for every class in my 100 level class from dealing with like, you know college freshman in a mandatory general education course For that I am doing very much, you know Make five annotations on this article in a private group And there's more parameters and there's more guidelines um There's more scaffolding Right And then especially since I have what I like to call repeat customers Right, like I end up getting those same students in my upper level classes, especially English majors because we're small school um I have a totally different process and they are in those classes They are annotating in public. I am I choose articles that already have public annotations on them so that they're responding to people outside of class And I have them do a completely private annotation on On a resource that is only for their research, right that they're not actually sharing with anyone Not even you Right so that they can Experience the tool for different purposes. I want them to experience. Okay. What's this tool like to like Just to read this article and understand it What's this tool like to engage in the social conversation? And then what's this tool like To use it for the purposes of research to use it for the end goal of making like a comprehensive literature review in your Upper level kind of high stakes project, right? Um, because I think that Using it in different ways for different ends Is the best way to have students really integrate it into their own Habits Right, if I'm only showing them kind of like one application in one way, then it becomes just a tool for my class It's just dr. Clash's weird thing. She has you do, right? But if I can show them different applications of it, then then one of them might resonate and transfer To a different context and that's the ultimate goal is to give them tools that will transfer Right that will lead them outside of my class that will allow them to Better understand texts they encounter across contexts across disciplines, but also In their lives right at large. So that's I feel like I never quite There's never the space or time to say this is what I do in this class. This is what I do in this class This is what I do in this class, but it is different. I don't I don't use it in the same way for every group I don't use it the same way for every subject And I think that's really important when that's an important for me assessment Of the tool itself, right? Look when I'm using a tool I don't want a unit asker. This is like all do you watch Alton Brown? Alton Brown is like a chef that has good eats and good eats is like a show about It's not just about like here make this recipe, but it's about like cooking and learning about The way cooking works. It's almost like Bill Nye for cooking, right? Got it Um, Alton Brown doesn't allow unit askers in this kitchen, right? So you can't get like a strawberry core like that little thing with just cores your strawberries That's like no you can't use that for anything else. Why would you have that? I don't want a unit asker I don't want tools in my classroom that will only do one thing right I want a tool that can Be applied to many different situations that can The student can take and use on their own which means that it has to be open It has to be affordable it has to work across platforms both um platforms meaning like mac versus pc But also like different browsers and also like mobile versus desktop, you know Um could be better there. Yes, it could but I mean the that's These things matter to me. I don't want to give students something that they're going to be priced out of That they're not going to be able to use outside of my classroom for any number of reasons and that Means for me personally investigating multiple ways of using it so that I can demonstrate to them its utility, right? Wow, really great stuff. I was completely Completely in love with this conversation Forever Thank you for talking to me Too long. Oh gosh. No, I just don't want to take up too much of your day. Um as we've already made you turn back flips to come to I annotate um And if you have one more second, um if you were gonna Invent the title of this blog post About yourself Do you have you do you have any ideas about like boom? What's the headline? You can also think on it if you want. Yeah, I always think of things like annotation for all, right? I always think of like things like that I'm always thinking about like how Tim to make things accessible. So like accessibility of annotation or making annotation accessible or like things about like breaking down the boundaries of the classroom breaking down the walls of the classroom. I'm like Making making bringing students lives into the classroom and bringing other things from the classroom into students lives Right, maybe like breaking boundaries of annotation stuff like stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah