 And joining me for the presentation today is Jennifer Gibson, who's an assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We were frequent co-conspirators there, I think, was what I was supposed to say. And today we're talking about how to use web-based annotation to enhance the teaching and study of literature. Some of the ideas will be ideas that you may have already heard in some of the previous sessions. So we'll try to kind of fast-forward through those and focus on what we have that may be slightly unique. But we're excited to share with you some of the work that we've been up to at Wisconsin. And I'll hand it over to Jennifer to talk about the past of annotation. So pretty much as long as people have privately owned and read books, we've had the possibility of people annotating books, underlining key passages, taking notes in the margins. Has it changed all that much in some of the slides you've seen before, some of the salient features of annotations existing in context with focused conversations, which back in the day used to mean passing on your ballot manuscript to the next generation. The next round of monks, yeah. The next round of monks, you know. Or even, say, purchasing a book online that's already had a lot of writing in it. From a private library, maybe, of someone that you admired or something like that. Yeah, you'd see their annotations. Are the students just randomly getting lucky in purchasing a book from somebody who did a really great job? Did the homework, did the homework wrote the answers the year before? Yeah, yeah. So focused conversations, kind of having a one-to-one ratio, though. Sure. And additive materials, so that's our glosses, vocab, things like that. And annotation has remained somewhat of a tradition beyond vellum manuscripts in teaching. Teachers ask students to take notes and assign text as part of the reading process. Oh, also to kind of improve they've done the work to improve comprehension, highlight big ideas and concepts that we're gonna discuss, maybe assess, and in some context develop into some application or creation of knowledge like a paper. But, more of us are putting our materials online. So something interesting happened. Digital texts are good for access and affordability. We forgot one of the key parts of this presentation, which was something soft and discreet to throw at me when I get off on a tangent. Oh, sure. So we're gonna have to just leave it at OCR, your PDFs, just do it. Um, and so provided you have OCRed your PDFs, this is good for access and affordability. You should also OCR your PDFs because if nothing else you can give them what they call hypothesis in the wild, then you just plug it into their Chrome browser. Doesn't work if you didn't OCR your PDF. OCR your PDFs, can't stop you. Okay. But on their own, these dismoved traditional texts, access and affordability is actually subtracted something from some really essential reading practices. Namely, as one of my students said, I can't really put the highlighter on my computer screen. I don't wanna buy the course pack. We don't have means to have you really easily printed anymore but you can't put the highlighter on your computer screen. So where does this leave us? Our promise is that bringing well-designed, well-designed social annotation experiences to web-based texts, it's not only gonna approximate or recuperate some of these older practices but allow us to explore new and exciting pedagogical possibilities and possibilities we wouldn't have imagined before without these functionalities. So instead of just trying to do some, replicate something, we look at what functionalities we have and what could suddenly be possible. Yeah, I think this is particularly true when we think about teaching or learning with web technologies or on the web. There are things that we always wanted to be able to do and we'd have students go have private reading experiences with print texts and then they would convene to talk about them or go into a discussion forum and talk about them usually at some distance in time and space from the texts that they had read privately. So we're talking about what annotation means on the web. As Jeremy and others pointed out, there is now a official web standard for annotation. It's part of the fabric of the web and what we imagine being possible with web standards. That's a really important and a good thing. And a number of the things that this makes possible help us think about ways that we can change some of our teaching practices and some of our reading and our annotation practices with web-based documents. This is kind of what we're imagining when we were talking about possibilities in the era of print annotation. There was a publisher layer of annotation that's always been possible. You could see this in things like a Midrash or in the Talmud or something like that where you've got the sacred text here at the center and then sometimes centuries of commentary have accreted around it. Or even a critical addition, just what we call a scholarly apparatus. There you go, we've got the primary text and then some pedants, 100 years of footnotes, right? So you've got that, right? We could always, we can do that with print, right? And we can also make curated supplements to print a text. Now the key thing about this is that while everyone who could acquire that print book could read them, only some people could write to them. People that the publisher had approved or had accessed to the publishing or the printmaking tools. The second type of usage was private annotations where you take a print book and you do what you want with that copy of the print book. And sometimes it was marginally social in that you might be lucky and check out a library book that had something like this in it and you're like, oh wow, some reader got here before me and I'm having something like a voyeuristic reading experience with something they said. But it wasn't truly social in that unless you knew whose book it was you couldn't write something to them and pass it back. And so this was what happened and what was possible for us in print. And it was powerful and we loved it. But when we talk about web-based annotation there's two new possibilities that we wanna emphasize. For the first time we have something like public social annotation. And the use cases for this is that everyone can read who has access to these tools and everyone can write both for good and for ill. But there are use cases here for open learning. If I'm talking about making something truly open on the web to all learners, this can happen there in a way that it couldn't happen with print. And I can also begin to think about designing social conversation or social experiences where readers talk to each other in the text. The second thing that matters and this matters a lot for teaching and learning in a kind of credentialed setting is we can create private annotation groups where learners or affinity groups or editors can work together and say, here's a walled garden and we're gonna have those same social conversations but just with a little bit of barrier protection either for privacy or to help people feel comfortable to learn and grow or for any other reason why privacy might matter to them. The thing that we wanna stress also is that not only are these two types of annotation possible for the first time but that each one of these methods now is possible on the same text at the same time. Some of you had those professors where they were like the wizards of the, what are they called? I forgot the word, it's such old technology. Projectors, not the projectors, but the transparencies. Thank you, it was like bingo or something. Transparencies, right? So you've got the transparency and they're like, here's the human skeleton and then they lay the muscular thing on top of it and you're like, they just let it a layer, right? I have a picture of all of the overhead projectors being thrown out from a few months ago. In the hallway? Yes, yes. Because my mother taught them for so many years, I took a picture for her. But this is the idea, right? And you'd prepare like layers of transparencies and you teach with layer upon layer upon layer and it took a lot of time and only a few people were really good at it but the idea now is that each one of these layers is simultaneous on a text and layered. So for example, we might have a layer of your private notes and on top of that layer, you might have a private group which is Jennifer's French 322 class in one particular semester. And on top of that layer, we might have a publisher layer that's used by the French department to publish their critical apparatus on that text. And on top of that layer, we might have a general public layer that anyone who visits that book can read and write to all at the same time on the same text. And for us, that's dramatically exciting for teaching and learning purposes. The second thing that Jeremy said I would say this, so here I am saying it, open web annotation can be more than text on text. Almost all the examples we've seen so far have been people writing text about text. But that's not the only thing that's possible with web-based annotations. So here's an example of a poem by a Wisconsin poet, if you don't know Lorene Needaker, become acquainted, she's lovely, my favorite. And here in this poem, we're using rich web-based media to help provide context. There's an example of an image, a historical place marker in Paw-Paw. There's a video of someone preparing Paw-Paw fruit. There's a link to Paw-Paw recipes. And then there's audio element of Lorene Needaker reading a poem. And that's all lives in the annotation layer, which we could never, ever do in print. We could have maybe included a CD-ROM with some of those elements on it in the old print days. But we couldn't actually annotate with the rich media kinds of things that we'd want to put on there. If you wanna know a bit more about that, that's what I talked about last year that I annotated and there's video footage of that if you're bored and have half an hour. So the next thing we wanna talk about is what we did specifically at Wisconsin. The first thing was, we took hundreds of these existing activities that instructors had built and we turned them into these basically instructor-directed close reading activities. On the left-hand side, you're seeing a primary text of some kind, French literature. And on the right-hand side, you're seeing a publisher layer in which the instructor is guiding you through some close, attentive activity. Here's some context. Here's some cultural information. Here's my two minutes of commentary on this part of the poem in audio. And then you have some interactive quiz component where you can check your knowledge and get real-time feedback about how well you understand this passage. In some of these cases, they're being done for a grade. In other cases, it's just being done for the user's gratification and to help them check their understanding. And that's level one, where we're saying it's still very much the critical apparatus that the publisher's providing for you, but it has these levels of interaction that we couldn't do previously. Level two is the thing that Jennifer's doing that's probably even more exciting for us. And so even level one is a step forward from those overhead projectors that my mother taught high school math off of and came home with her hands in multiple colors because she changed markers, marker colors to do different things. So even that automated feedback is a different level. But how do the functionalities that we have now enable us to do something different? And this is something I'm exploring in an ongoing project supported by Educational Innovation Small Grants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I'd say one thing we get is first that within fair use, whatever that is, we can deliver more text, not just these little snippets of instructor-selected text that the instructor thought was interesting, that when I was in grad school, you got on pieces of paper, but we can deliver more text and make close reading more pervasive. And second and related is democratizing the conversation. So instead of only having functionalities that allow instructor-driven close reading and conversation, students can ask questions. In French classes, they can add vocabulary glosses. Maybe I didn't think the word was hard, but students did. So they looked it up, they gave a definition, or when they get good at it, they'll put pictures, because that way you don't have to switch your mind from French to English or read the French definition. You have a picture there. Literature, and I also teach folklore in any language, has its nuances. It depends on symbolism. It's not about making meaning directly and it can be hard to read and interpret, hard in a good way. And so students ask questions like the example you see here. Am I crazy? Am I understanding this? And nobody wants these questions in their inbox. But students need to ask these. And this is important because we need students to feel comfortable asking these. And when we add a social element of crowdsource class source element to note-taking, students benefit from the notes, but they're also benefiting from the ability to ask questions in a different way than raising your hand in a classroom or emailing your professor, and this was an example from a blended class. Yeah, and I think the option that it produces for the first time is the option that your private experience of a text may be a conversation with other readers. And that's a really great move, especially if you're thinking them about becoming more skilled in the study of literature. And so to really build on that, I think it mitigates a pedagogical pitfall of misunderstandings and especially in the language's basic textual comprehension, which actually what I see in French just gets mad. When I see it in English, I just recognize it more of these problems persisting until the next class period. And so it would seem like a blended model of content delivery in what's an introduction to literature in French class could exacerbate this problem for students because you go longer between classes, right? So how can I justify this? Well, actually it's taking that dialogue that used to be reserved for that face-to-face space and that reorientation to the comprehensive and interpretive straight and narrow from somebody who thought Amelie Notome was really talking about a horse when she's in fact talking about a bicycle in this 20th century novel and it's through her childhood imagination. And the questions I asked you about that existed in a separate place, so you know, still lost that. It was two days ago when I read it. It was two days ago and I gave that intro in class but he waited until the last minute to do his reading, so you know. But this actually I think is really exciting because we have instructor feedback. We have that possibility of the in-text activities the H5Ps, but we also have that student-driven social reading and question-asking that put help, that put that, am I crazy? Is this really right? Affirmation or redirection within the students reach so much sooner and it empowers students because it's building confidence that when you continue reading that you're understanding and it's letting them move on to higher levels of thinking and analysis and that the close reading they're going to do, we had a comprehensive, we had basic comprehension here so now I can move on to the next thing and I don't have to wait till Tuesday or Thursday or whenever. And I think what we're doing here is you've heard many of these things before but here's kind of Jennifer's list of the five pedagogical things that she most appreciates with the online web-based annotation. And we're not getting rid of the instructor layer of that instructor-driven close reading. We know what students need at a certain level and we're gonna provide that. What are they likely to misunderstand? Where do they need additional context and we can provide that initially. Right, once the vocabulary they're not gonna get. And then they can ask questions publicly or privately at any time to clarify those things. Instead of, oh it's classes in three days, let me live with my misperceptions until that time and be like, oh, now it makes sense. The conversation can happen much earlier and even without me as the authority. And this is also allowing me to take a Tuesday, Thursday or Monday, Wednesday, Friday model and say okay, well we'll meet once a week. Because I mean many humanities departments you're serving a demographic of double or triple majors and I call it reducing your scheduling footprint. You've just made it a lot more accessible to your computer science major to your guy who's got to schedule a lab here in this block because you're competing not just for interest but scheduleable time blocks. And so that to me is really important. And one thing that these tools let us do I think is still allow us to package context with the text but when and where students are going to encounter the text. So I gave that intro in class three days before but still put off his reading to the last minute and here students are getting the context. It doesn't depend on them remembering what happened in a face-to-face class which avoids that really awkward I'm gonna rush to introduce this new text at the end of class so I can assign it to you now. Which I think we've all done. Questions can be asked empowering students building confidence transformative for other activities transitions even to in class discussions if you're working on a blended model and helping to equalize I find different levels of language learners you might have this come up with English as a second language too where the analytical ideas are there but the language skills can feel different and each annotation has its own URL which allows us to point to words and sentences without worrying about what edition you bought and what page number corresponds to the middle of the third paragraph on my page 33. I think it also really helps students with textual evidence which we keep on asking for if you've taught reading and composition and where is your textual evidence to support that? Well here they started with the textual evidence because they had to highlight it and a good point was made at that encouraging their students to highlight the block and not just the word in the earlier workshop and text becomes the discursive context Jeremy and Nate's discussion forum 2.0. I would phrase it as a spatial and temporal proximity to the act of reading. So students do it as they read that reading and writing are becoming very connected and it's not separate it's not somewhere else it doesn't live in a discussion forum so it's helping with scaffolding of assignments because students are building up quotes and things are gonna stay in context they can refer back to when they do an essay or other form of work and I think it allows students I know it allows students to say things they wouldn't say otherwise. And I know this because I've had students tell me they do not have the vocabulary in French to actually disagree with another student because in class you just say I agree and I'm sorry Professor Gibson but I need vocabulary on how to disagree politely in French. That was awesome feedback which tells me that they're saying things they wouldn't usually be saying. One of the French ever disagreed politely though. That's the question in the next class. Okay so. French speaking world. You saw the slide before the points are still true we'll move on. So the question is how did we build them and so we cobbled together three open source technologies if you're in the publisher workshop you heard a little bit about these. Pressbooks is the publishing tool. This is the home for the content that lets someone take their writing and their context and publish it to the web. It's also the place where they can upload their media their images, their audio, the other things that live in the annotation layer. We use hypothesis as the annotation tool. Go ahead. I'll let you finish hypothesis then I'm gonna do it. Okay we created a publisher group layer if it's useful or hypothesis did and supports it. And then we also are using something called H5P and we'll show those in just a second after Jennifer. So one thing I need to add about the hypothesis Pressbooks is that we're having students create knowledge that they're going to continue to own. Yeah. Anyone who's done scholarly work we build on our own work and when I started thinking about using this in a graduate seminar that's where it really became real to me because students are gonna study for MA exams I hope they're gonna write dissertations. Some of them will go on to do scholarly work and so why should they lose things that got locked down behind an LMS when they lose their net ID or when that course ends. And the hypothesis Pressbook integration means that I say they can show it to their stakeholders from the Google recruiter to their grandmother and I'm gonna have to add graduate education to my alliterative list because I think that's a really important point about what we're doing with our students' work and how they, how you own your own work. The three Gs I think we'll call it. Okay. So Pressbooks is this open source book publishing platform. It's built on WordPress and it's great. It is, each Pressbooks instance is a network of many, many books or many possible books. Each book has its own URL. They look like this. This is the landing page for a book in Pressbooks. It has a bit of information about what the book is and the license and the top left, a cover image if you'd like to include it. If you'd like to make downloads available in container formats, those are available for download on the homepage. And then there's a table of contents and additional metadata. So that's like the structure of this book object. Within the book, you have a little whizzy wig editing interface. We train people to use this in about an hour or less. It's very word-pressy and so. You don't have to be. Less than an hour. Yeah, you don't have to be still, you don't have to be me. This is pretty intuitive. Well, there's lots of people that we train. So some take an hour. Okay. And then on the right hand side, you got the organizing interface where you can move chapters and content around in order. You can also select whether that content would be included in the web or the export separately. So if Jennifer wants to take a big book and only use five of these chapters in her course, she can customize the export that way. And then we also support this plugin called H5P. People are able to create these interactive content elements using a kind of form-based builder directly in the dashboard here. H5P is amazing. It's an open-source project developed by the Norwegian government to replace flash-based interactive learning activities since those- It looks just as fancy, but it's intuitive. It's not broken and it's, yeah. So there are 40-something different interactive content types that cover pretty much any type of formative assessment or interactive element that you'd like to build and embed in your content. So we really love those tools and we add those to books and annotation layers all the time. And here's some examples of what H5P activities might look like at their kind of more beautiful end. On the left hand side is an image with hotspot annotations explaining a woman in tech's desk and how she came to be the woman that she is. On the right hand side, there's a flash card activity that helps you understand more about the flora and fauna of Wisconsin. So if you correctly identify that snail, it will give you a hint and say, good job. And if you don't, then I'll say, try again. Immediate feedback. Immediate feedback. Within the text. And you didn't have to be awake at 2 a.m. when I was taking that quiz, huh? It was nice. So this is how we integrate press, or hypothesis with it. There's a plug-in for WordPress that one of the lead authors on that is here in the room, so thanks, Benjamin. And there is a bunch of settings that allow press books authors to turn this on for any or all parts of their book so that readers and learners can use the annotation tool without having to install the browser extension or really know too much about what they're doing, except that they selected text and started annotating, which is really nice. Here's what it might look like all put together. So here's an example of a political science book about the state of nature. I can't remember who they're citing here. Maybe Hobbs or Locke or someone. Probably Locke, thank you, yeah. And so the professor has given an excerpt. They've given them a stop and think activity. And over in the right-hand side, you see an annotation layer with some social annotation happening. This is all just living directly in, in this case, it's Canvas, the learning management system. We've loaded it in via LTI. The student thinks they just clicked an LMS activity, but what we're really serving them is the live version of a press book with the hypothesis annotation layer just built in. And so for them, the cognitive load is very low. They're just having this experience like they would in the other LMS experience. They click next and they take a quiz. They click next and they do a discussion for them. They click next and there's another chapter with an activity that Jennifer's built. We have some wish list things that we've discovered that we'd like to be able to do. We may talk about these more in the do-a-thon on Friday and you have heard from us in the past. If you've managed the wish list you will continue to hear from us until they're all crossed off. But they're exciting things and we appreciate all the work that people have done without payment so far for us. Long may it continue. The last thing is if you'd like to see it in action or do it, sorry Rob. No, no, yeah please. If you're gonna do them, take as many pictures as you want. We're leaving this up for a bit, yes. You're on the hook now. I would highlight number one as being particularly important for instructors working at an odd ladder, blood didn't fire. You know they're all important, all of our children, we love all of our children equally but number one is quite important. Number one is number one. And you know that one's getting a little stale. It's been in the backlog for almost two years now. I don't know. So the last thing is the seeing in action and do it yourself. If you'd like to see it in action, we have a basic poetry anthology that we built for today. If you wanna play around with it there's a series of links there. And we also made a private group so you can see and feel what it looks like to do those things in a private group. On a public book. But more than that, we'd really love to hear your questions for us about what you wanna know more about or what we didn't cover well. You're kidding. Hi, I just wanted to say relate geographically to both of you because I grew up outside of Milwaukee in Wisconsin and I went to school in Montreal, so. Great choices, both of those things, yeah. Great things. I, again, thinking about studying in my French class in high school in Wisconsin really wishing that I had had an annotation tool, especially for vocabulary words that would kind of just derail my entire French reading, for example, or something like that. I was wondering, though, particularly in terms of teaching another language and using annotation in that, a big part of learning the language is speaking it, is hearing it. And I was just wondering, is that part of the audio files from press books? I mean, how do you kind of bridge the whole communicating in live time? Very much depends what the objectives of your class are. Great question, yeah. Because if you're teaching an intro to literature class, the objectives of my class might much more be your analytical and writing skills, which I can, in fact, teach infinitely more efficiently online than I can in person. Students do crave an audio component and I think the multimedia aspect of the annotations that steal head up is a really great example. And so there are anthologies of red French poetry online. Sometimes I'll provide it. Sometimes I'll wait for the students to provide what they think is interesting. Even when it's 19th century, Baudelaire, Le Fleur du Mal, you'll find French commercials on YouTube that are playing, that are word plays on that. And opening that up where you have, you can treat the text in its context and you have a place for that, but you also have a place for these wider finds and associations and making that multimodal, I think helps in an online, or I've treated it in a blended environment. So it is building up to a face-to-face discussion, but it's helping, I find, to equalize the language differences. Yeah, I think, so the context for this particular talk was teaching literature specifically, and literature in a foreign language has a language learning component, but there are also projects that we've supported in open education that talk about teaching language acquisition. So the very first textbook we ever published at Wisconsin was this beginning Portuguese textbook, and in this book, the emphasis is much more on language acquisition. And so you'll see throughout there's verb tables and then there'll be these interactive quizzes where you practice verb conjugation and you're getting real-time feedback here and seeing how did I do, and then you're practicing. You know, not so great, but I'm learning, and then down below you'll have more activities and I'm trying to get to the audio. There'll be lots of audio and then video content and obviously a lot of work, but then you don't have instructors. Zero. So we've got native Brazilian speakers speaking all of the words, so when you download this as an EPUB, the audio is built in. You come to the next chapter and it'll be a dialogue activity and the audio is there in the book. So there's lots of things that you can do with Interactive Web. The big thing that's important for me at least in this is that this book is openly licensed under a CCBY license. Anyone in the world can read this book and use it for free or they can clone this book with our API tool, make an exact copy including all the H5P activities and all the audio files and edit and revise it and make it more contextually appropriate for whatever situation they're teaching it. That's really important and using the open web and open principles makes that matter, right? Like we're granting people permissions but the tools also ought to provide the means to realize the permissions that have been granted. That have been there. So you could move, we need languages in K through 12 to feed into languages in higher ed. We know that and textbooks are generated for those different audiences but what if AP French or whatever can use some of this? And so that's some of, if you look at what the University of Wisconsin is based on the Wisconsin idea, supposedly based on the betterment of the state, it's like somebody was thinking of open educational resources back in the day. I know we're probably at time, Nate. So I've got the questions there. It is getting kind of late. If there are no more questions, we have a couple more things to do before we all fill our brains completely full but having a round of applause for this great comedy team. Thank you.