 It's off here. Welcome to liquid margins episode 40, leveraging social annotation to enhance open education resources. We're really here to talk about. We are an open pedagogy and I'm very excited to do so before we get started, though, a few housekeeping notes. My slides will advance forward. We have some upcoming episodes of liquid margins. If you're a fan or you're becoming a fan on June 8th, we'll be talking about hypothesis on campus at scale. That's going to be a conversation with our campus leads, the folks who run hypothesis on the campus side to share their perspectives about implementing and rolling out and scaling hypothesis usage at their institutions. So, especially if you're in an administrative position at your institution and helping instructors get active with hypothesis and deep in their engagement, this will be a great episode for you. And then we'll have, you know, on June 28th, an episode on social annotation in STEM, we've got a great group of panelists from chemistry and biology and computer science and math to talk about that use case, which will hopefully balance today. Because although I sent the invitation widely, and I'm an English professor by training myself, the 2 folks that came through for me today as panelists are also English pressers. So we are a little heavy on the English and the humanities today, which is fine by me. And I think a lot of the conversation won't be disciplinary focused, but if you're a STEM educator and wanting for more STEM specific stuff, tune in on June 28th. This is not a presentation around how to use hypothesis. So, if you're here, like, what is hypothesis? I need to understand how it works and how to get started in my class, depending not exactly what this is about. This is a really more broad or deeper conversation about the pedagogical aspects of using social annotation today, focused on OER and open education practices. We do have other resources for that kind of getting started stuff so you can reach out to education and hypothesis for a demo. And there's also some videos on our YouTube channel. Finally, if you have a question, we have disabled the chat because there's a lot of folks here, but we do have a Q and A turned on and we have some of our customer success managers. Moderating the Q and A. So, if you have questions, you can click on that Q and A button and ask a question. I also do want to note that I'm suspicious or I suspect rather. That we have some OER experts in the audience. And so, if you are OER user and a hypothesis user, and at some point you're interested in actually speaking your part, we'll have an opportunity to take you off a mute. Or to promote you to panelists. Don't worry. It's, you know, it's not scary to be promoted to panels. It's going to be brief, but we can invite others to the conversation later on. But the Q and A is there throughout. And then let's see, is that the end of my housekeeping stuff? Oh, close captioning to see close captioning enabled via the closed captioning icon in the zoom menu. All right, I wanted to say a few words at the beginning here just about OER and open education practices before we introduce our panelists. Hypothesis has long been a fellow traveler with open education resource or OER movement since we started working in education. The OER movement is founded on the principle that to make education more accessible, we need to openly license educational materials that they should not be proprietary. And similarly, hypothesis was found on the principle that a technology like social annotation should also be as widely accessible as possible. And so our code has been openly licensed or open source from the start. We also have successfully advocated and making web annotation an open standard so that it would be easy to build on and integrate with other platforms and tools. And similarly, OER is easy to build on, adapt and extend for diverse educational context. And then finally, the OER movement has moved, I think, beyond just licensing and into other aspects of advocating for open. Open pedagogy, which I hope we'll talk a little bit about today, has emerged as a practice that just as OER decenters traditional notions of authorship and authority, open pedagogy decenters authority in the classroom positioning the student as a scholar and a contributor to knowledge production. Hypothesis and social annotation have long been mentioning discussions of open education and open pedagogy as one of the means to empower student agency and privilege student voice. So with that, I'm thrilled today to be talking about OER and open education more broadly with a couple of hypothesis and OER users. So without further preamble, I'll go ahead and introduce them. So today we have with us Susan Dara Wright, adjunct professor of writing studies at Montclair State University. Welcome, Susan. And Bridget O'Rourke, director of the writing program and professor of English at Elmhurst University. And I don't know if I introduced myself, but I'm Dr. Jermaine vice president of education and hypothesis. I do also happen to be an English professor by training again. We didn't intend this bias and we will try to be agnostic in our disciplinary conversation to some extent here today, although I'm actually fascinated to hear about your writing programs at both these schools and we are an open education practice. But let's go ahead and get started with the conversation here and start talking initially about open education resources. And this is a chance, I think, for you guys, in addition to this question also to say who you are and what kind of institution you're at. I think it's helpful, you guys are from different types of institutions and different parts of the US. So feel free to add a little bit of background context here, but I'm curious in general about what motivated you to use OER in your courses and maybe we can start with you Susan. Hi, as you said, my name is Sue Wright. I work at Montclair State University in New Jersey. We are a very, very large public university that is located really in a big urban hub of New Jersey. We're about 20 minutes outside of New York City and we're right in the intersection of Patterson, Pasek, Newark, Jersey City. Those are our big catchment areas for our students. We do have a large showing also from across the country. We have quite a few students who are from out of state, but we are basically a commuter college. With that said, we do have a large urban population. We have a large co-requisite population in our course. So we have students who come in at many different foundational levels. We have students who come from very affluent communities like Upper Saddle River and we have students who come from Patterson, Pasek, Newark, Jersey City, Camden to name just a few. Our classes are very well mixed. We do not have a remedial program per se. We are an exclusively co-requisite class. So we do have students of different economic backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, different ethnic, different linguistic backgrounds. So our classrooms really need to accommodate all of those as well as student individual needs. So for us at Moncler State, that's really what drove us towards OER. My experience with OER goes a little further back than that as an individual instructor. I came to OER probably about seven or eight years ago and I was looking for a way to accommodate really my students' needs in my classroom. I wanted a textbook that I could make my own and I wanted a textbook that could reflect my students because at the time textbooks were still very, I want to use the word parochial, they still represented what students were coming out of high school seeing, which were very traditional voices. There were people with very traditional backgrounds that didn't reflect my students. And to be honest, we're very expensive. For an anthology that even 10 years ago was costing my students maybe $50. Today, that same textbook, we're talking about 80. I would only be using about a quarter of that textbook. And a fair percentage of that was outside of copyright. So my students were paying for copyright free material as if it was copyrighted. And I investigated alternatives, things that I could bring, topics my students were interested in. And that led me to OERs, which at the time were very graciously shared with the academic community by schools who had created books specifically for their programs. There was a great textbook out of the University of Hawaii, which I went to and used four portions of my class where we talked about the environment. But it had the requirements and it had the pedagogical aspects, and it had the community for Hawaii represented in the textbook. So it didn't represent my students in New Jersey. Then I would go and find another textbook which had a wonderful section on how to use quotes and how to use sources. But that had been kind of fine-tuned to be used, I think that one came from the University of Texas, and it had their syllabus and their requirements and their rubrics. So over time, happily, OERs have become much more mainstream. And there are companies out there that are nonprofits that are offering textbooks that are OER, that are available for me to go in and fine-tune, to add my rubrics, to add my student writings that stand out that I want to use for activities in my classroom. So my motivation came from my desire to see my students represented in my textbooks, to acknowledge them and in all honesty, to acknowledge their economic disenfranchisement and say, you're not saying something that's not real. This is a reality and show my students that they're not alone and their desire to move forward in the face of some of these disadvantages and to move forward in the face of saying that there is a community there, both within our university and institution and within the academy itself, to support them as they move forward. Just lovely. Your students are lucky. In short, that's amazing. Bridget, tell us a little bit about your story of coming to OER. Well, I would echo a lot of the things that Susan has just said. We're a very different kind of institution. We're an Elmhurst University as a small private university in the liberal arts tradition. We're about 20 minutes west of Chicago in the Western suburbs. We are an increasingly diverse campus. We just celebrated our 150th anniversary as an institution. We started as a college for a seminary, really a pro seminary for German evangelical men. And we've sort of, we use the metaphor of the ever-widening circle of a more inclusive and accessible university in the 21st century. So we are, we have recently been named as Hispanic serving, recognized as a Hispanic serving institution and received a federal grant to support equity and inclusion, particularly for our Hispanic students. The motivation really for adopting OER in the first year writing program has come from several factors that converged in a really fortunate way for the faculty in our program. One is that we had the institution offered $500 OER grants to faculty who were adopting OER who had used paid textbooks. And this was a great opportunity for us, especially for adjunct faculty, to adopt OER because there are sort of hidden costs with adopting OER, especially creating it, but even just adopting existing OER takes time to find materials and to adapt the curriculum. And so those $500 grants were really made the OER more accessible for adjunct faculty in a multi-section course like first year composition at Elmhurst. So we had seven faculty this year who have adopted OER in multiple sections of first year composition in the fall term. Last fall we saved students over $12,000 in the first year writing program. So of course the cost is a big issue and faculty in our writing program had noticed that students really, they didn't, they weren't buying the textbook. Sometimes we find out in the middle of the semester that they hadn't bought the textbook and were, were just falling behind on assignments because they didn't have the required materials. So that was part of it. As we've kind of gotten into OER we found that there's different issues with accessibility. And those have to do with the same accessibility issues that we saw during COVID, you know, lack of access to technology, lack of access to high-speed intranet. And so those, and even, you know, kind of universal design issues making making resources available to all learners, learners with disabilities included. So OER is, makes text more accessible generally in terms of cost and also in terms of technology like text text-to-speech type technology that, that makes these, these materials more accessible to, to all learners. So cost is a big factor, flexibility. The idea that we can adapt and adapt culturally responsive pedagogy through more text that are better targeted to our student body, all these things make, make hypothesis very, or make OER and hypothesis together, which is how we've been using it, very attractive. And then the $500 grants made it like kind of even more accessible for our faculty as well. That's great Bridget. I, I love your point about the technology accessibility, right? I mean, there's the content that can be locked in and proprietary in a textbook, but especially as things are getting delivered in digital platforms, you're also locked into that platform and what tools are available there. And you can't bring your own note-taking tool and maybe they have a note-taking tool or maybe they don't. And so that aspect of a broader, you know, technological accessibility, super intriguing especially when you think about hypothesis. So I think you guys have touched on this a little bit, but let's, let's just focus on this question. And I'm curious in terms of like, how is teaching with OER different from teaching with a proprietary textbook? I'll just replay the cynical devil's advocate here. And, you know, before, before we came on recording, Sue, you were sharing like, you know, here's my open stacks book, right? And it's, it's a textbook, right? I mean, how is it different from Bedford St. Martin's or how is teaching with it different in your, in your experience? And yeah, let's just keep going in the same order this time around, Sue. I think the major difference between OERs and traditional print textbooks, even if an OER like the open stacks students can purchase, because I do have some students who prefer, myself included, a paper textbook. They prefer something that they can get their hands on, that they're not dependent on high speed internet, that they're not dependent on having to read, let's be honest, our students do everything on their telephone. They don't have to read a textbook on a telephone that's for all intents and purposes a glorified three by five index card. So having the opportunity to have something that was print on demand that is the most current update for basically cost that I can get a textbook that if Bedford St. Martin, for instance, printed it would be 80 or $90, my students can get it for 20. So there is a significant cost differential. However, even if that is something that is still too steep or something a student's not interested in, our students live in an old digital world, they're happy reading on a telephone. I'm a little older, I'm not. So they can get this immediate right on their phones, have it right there. So there is an immediacy factor. And there is for me, the best benefit of an OER is I can get right into the nuts and bolts of the text. I can open up and say, you know what, I don't find the presentation of this reading to be the way I like it. I can go in, snip it out. And I can say, you know what, this reading from a student who talked about learning to cook with their grandmother in the Dominican Republic and what it was like to use, you know, I teach a course that's on food writing. And this one student from the Dominican Republic talked about using goat meat and how even when her grandmother comes here, the meat, even if she buys goat, isn't the same. That to me is a big nod to student ownership of text and to student ownership of the course. It presents and allows students to say, I may not be Dominican, but you know what, when I buy plantains here, they don't taste like when I'm home. When I buy a specific meal, it doesn't taste the same here because of, so I can snip out that standard kind of sanitized reading that comes in textbooks and include a student voice. And when we talk about a paper, I'm talking about a student voice. I can say, you know, especially with the student I know, why did the student make this choice? If you were making this same choice in a draft, what would you be thinking? And I knew the student, so I can allow that student to come into the class. Or, and as I've done with programs like Padlet or Flipgrid, I've actually had students create a little introduction to their paper. And I've dropped the video right in and said, okay guys, watch this student from last semester talk about their paper. And they see a face. They hear a voice. There's an added authenticity. And for me, the struggle of adapting an OER is worth it because it's authentic. And I think I'm just going to turn it over to you, Bridget, because I don't want to belabor a point. Yes, thank you. I mean, the idea of authenticity, I think, was when we did a survey of our students who were in sections using OER. There was this sense of that these materials in OER, the students were aware that these materials were curated by faculty specifically for this course. So it's almost like having a custom textbook in a way. The faculty in our program generally don't use like a single OER text, a textbook. We use a lot of different OER materials. That does support, and I would again affirm what Susan was saying, that it supports culturally responsive pedagogy. This was really apparent to me last fall when we read Gloria Angelou as How to Tame a Wild Tongue. And when we talked about the use of Spanish in that text, I was really blown away with the number of students in the class who said, I've never seen Spanish in any assignment I've done in school, anything I've read in school unless it was a Spanish course. And the other students echoed that comment, and I asked them, well, how did you feel when you read that? And they said, proud, or surprised, or affirmed and empowered, I think one that used the word empowered. And it really just showed me how important this is for students to see their own experience reflected in the text that we use in first year writing. Another difference between, for me personally, between using a paid textbook and adopting OER, and as program director as well, is that the texts that are open educational texts that are freely available online are accessible to annotate in hypothesis. And this was using a paid textbook even when it was online, if there's a firewall, you can't use hypothesis. And so that was a barrier for faculty in using hypothesis and adopting OER has removed that barrier. And some of our, you know, adjunct faculty are really, it's really kind of exploded into a lot of creativity in using social annotation in first year writing and encouraging active visible social reading. So that's a big difference, I think when with the textbook, it almost seems like the textbook is sort of this very highly individualized. I mean, not individualized in the sense of customized, but this kind of like they access it on their own, you know, and there's really no other way to access it if it's password protected. And, you know, we can show it on the screen in class, but there's not a way for students to engage in it, like they can with hypothesis. As I said earlier, there's one thing that's different with OER is in some ways, OER is more accessible, but then there's other challenges with accessibility, particularly when we're using a lot of different readings and throwing them up on Blackboard. Sometimes students really like to have one text, you know, it's for accessibility. Some do prefer to have a print text, although what we found in the survey was most students don't, but, you know, a significant minority would rather have a print text. So some of our faculty have, for example, made their, you know, make print out like horse packs of OER text. So there's different issues with accessibility, but generally, especially in combination with hypothesis, we find that students are more likely to engage with their texts, with texts that are OER. And one more thing I would add is that it enables us to use a lot of more multimodal texts, and both for reading, viewing, listening, you know, podcasts and YouTube videos and all sorts of media, but I think it also kind of comes into the open pedagogy issue with encouraging students to compose their own multimodal texts as well, which a lot of our faculty are doing in OER. I think really having multimodal texts to model and demonstrate then helps students to be able to create their own as well. That's great. Thank you, Bridget. I'd like to piggyback on that for just one moment. Another aspect that I have seen that OERs enable is it takes a text from being something students are basically passive consumers of. Students take a text, read it. Hypothesis allows them to get into the text and add their comments. We have a shared ownership, but OER also enables you as the instructor, depending on what vehicle you're presenting your OER through, to open a text into a program like Word or Google Docs, which is absolutely free, and I have actually gone in and included assignments into the textbook so that the textbook becomes an all-in-one text and workbook. Students don't have to go and say, I need to look up how do I brainstorm for a literacy narrative? They don't have to have one textbook open with their literacy narrative, one textbook open that's their handbook, one textbook open, one notebook open, or a screen that they do their writing. I've actually gone in and using Google Docs, created a space that says, now that you've read about this, let's try an action. Students can actually use that as either a common notebook that then they can share within their groups through share settings in Google, or they're able to keep it private and say, hey Sue, I hit a snack. I don't know where I can take this idea. Could you go in and look at page four and give me feedback? And I can hop right into a student text. I can drop a note that's private between me and the student or share between the student and their group and say, you have a really good idea here, but did you think of asking this question? So I can go in and using an OER, model good critical reading, critical thinking, and critical writing skills that benefit not just the one student but the class. And students themselves can then say, could we add this into our text? So if a student finds a source, I can go in and say, you know, that's really good. I can't get that in, but I could put a hyperlink here. So it allows the students to not just be consumers of text, but to be creators of text and to understand that their voice has that power to it, that it's not just me saying, yeah, you're right, you have a good point. There is an acknowledgement from me and an acknowledgement from the community we're in that, yes, I really like this. Thank you, Jared, for including this thank you, Julius. You said it better than I could, which for my co-requisite students, they've never had that from anyone other than the teacher. Bridget, I see you nodding reciprocally. Did you want to add to anything? No, I just agreed, you know, that I just completely agree with what Susan has just said. Sue, would you mind just defining really quickly when you talk about the co-requisite students? Can you just define that for the audience real quick and what you mean there? Co-requisite is a classroom where I have students of all level and academic need. I can have a student in my class who was an AP English major in a very highly competitive high school sitting next to a student who was very average in an average high school or a student who came who was superior in an urban school and their needs and developmental, what's the word I'm looking for, their needs and their academic challenges are not unique and uniform throughout the course. So we do a lot of supportive instruction. We offer probably about a quarter of our classes now are done in a four credit structure where we have an in-class workshop so that students are not hitting kind of walls of meaning where when I give an assignment and I'll say something like, I need a good strong piece of writing that has a strong narrative voice. To one student that may be all they need to understand the assignment, but to another student I will really have to explain in my rubric, in my setup, in my assignment exactly what that need is. So some students need more scaffolding than others and we have this all in a mixed classroom. I don't know Bridget would you add anything to that? As a program director I'm an adjunct so as a program director you may have you definitely have much more insight into how those defining terms are maybe cataloged for the institution. Yeah there are a lot of unique factors in that ours is our program is first year writing is a prerequisite for our integrated curriculum aka Gen Ed programs. Well like a good interview I feel like you guys have always sort of anticipated my next question and I shouldn't have shared them ahead of time but you guys are pushing us forward in a great way so I'm much appreciated there. So I'm going to skip the next thing in my deck here because I think you guys have touched on that and I just want to transition to talking about open pedagogy. I think we've actually defined it pretty well and you guys certainly get it. I'm just going to offer a definition real quick for the audience of open pedagogy. This actually comes from the UTR LinkedIn website. Open pedagogy is the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. Sue has already touched upon that. It's a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. As creators of information students in these courses gain a greater understanding of the rights and responsibilities associated with information ownership. Practitioners of open pedagogy instructors embrace collaboration student agency and authentic audiences. And then this is a nice slide for y'all to help sort of understand it comes from Rajiv and Robin Rajivian Giani and Robin Derosa too. Long time hypothesis fans and OER advocates and open education practitioners. So shout out to them but let's start talking about open pedagogy. I think we already have and let's dive into the hypothesis of it all specifically. How do you use hypothesis social orientation with OER and Bridget maybe this time we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about how you're using hypothesis in your courses and I guess your colleagues since you sort of represent a group. Great. Well a lot of us are using hypothesis for well let's see open pedagogy first. I'm thinking of this idea of a community centered learner driven learning and I think this is really so important in the writing program especially with first year students that that level of engagement of centering the students in the classroom is really essential to to our program and to students success in the program and I see that a lot in the in student feedback and so we have really exceptional instructors who are really finding ways to meet students where they're at and to engage them in their own learning and reflecting on their own learning. One way I'm thinking of in particular that kind of works well with the open pedagogy and also integrates hypothesis is something we call like a jigsaw approach to analyzing the reading. So actually just one of just the other day one of my colleagues was presenting on her use of hypothesis in the first semester composition course where she had students reading you know a lot of these students are differently prepared from from previous generations of students so we know that students have changed during the hypothesis during remote learning we haven't figured out all the ways things have changed but we know that they've changed but one of the ways is a real I think it's been challenging for students to read complex academic texts and and to read them skillfully and Liz Stark one of our faculty presented recently about using she used a long academic text about 43 pages and it was on the final girl trope in horror movies the the special topic in this course is is horror and so there's a level of student engagement and they get to choose for example what films they watch as a class from a from a list curated by the faculty member and when they read this long text that's a foundational text in film criticism about the final girl trope in horror she has them she breaks them up into groups and assigns each of those groups part of the text so that they really only have to read annotate and in hypothesis and analyze one section of the text and then they bring together they present to the whole group here's what this you know this part of the of the text is saying and here's where it fits with the rest of the text so they use you know it's a combination of doing online annotation because we use we teach first year writing in computer labs all of our first year writing courses are computer and computer labs they use hypothesis to annotate and understand as a group and then they put post-it notes on the board or write on the right on the white board their kind of summary of that section this really helps students a lot especially they've read their section before a class so then they read and annotate before they come to class and then look at their annotations together to summarize that part of the reading and what what we hear from students is things like I I wasn't sure that I was understanding this until I saw this other student's annotation and then I knew I was on the right track and um you know so they're learning from and with each other and they're learning to read collaboratively and learning to read socially um which I think is something that because of their engagement in social media they're they're they have facility and capacity with that they just need to figure out we need to figure out as faculty how to scaffold that capacity into academic writing and um Liz Stark uh does an excellent job of that um they also um create a lot of you know that the annotations themselves then become student-created content which is really important to to open pedagogy as well so um that's just one one way that we're we're implementing open pedagogy is through analysis and synthesis of complex readings facilitated by hypothesis via Blackboard. And one quick follow-up Bridget and before we hear from you Sue because I think you might take us in this direction as well is our instructors annotating in your experience within the courses or is it mostly the students? Well that's a really good question um I think it probably varies and I'm not sure across the board but Liz Stark in particular she responds to their to the students annotations um sometimes you know when I use hypothesis um I'll often use you know I'll model for them what annotation uh looks like sometimes I'll uh often I'll use an annotation to actually post the prompt so that when they're reading you know if I'm asking them to for example analyze specific rhetorical appeals or something like that I'll um post you know somewhere up at the top you know here's what I'd like you to do I'd like you to post you know having a specific prompt really helps students I think um you know rather than just read this and annotate it um and then I will show them you know here's a here's an example of an ethical appeal and uh and then I sometimes will show them you know how to tag um a particular section as well so um that's a really good question because I generally don't annotate alongside the students but I think that would be a way to kind of equalize that you know the students as the students and teachers as co-creators of knowledge and I think this is really you know it is important to the open pedagogy that what students find when they're analyzing these complex texts is that they can read them they can understand them that they're creating knowledge together about what this really difficult challenging text means and to have the instructor sort of being that guide on the side but also engaged in that same process as well as opposed to just kind of standing above it like I know what this means now you figure it out um then makes it you know then they would get to see more of the instructor you know themselves you know struggling you know with what does this mean you know what does you know sometimes it's ambiguous what you know and scholarship can be really dense and impenetrable so to see that instructors struggle too or instructors ask questions too about the text or engage in that dialogue with the text I think would be a good example and one last question before I kick it to you Sue just because this one came up in or I think this relates to something that came up in the Q&A but our folks our instructors grading student annotations uh or are you Bridget um is it part of the grade uh workflow time do formative assessment on the annotations we don't generally grade them but we do often instructors will assign some kind of credit so it could be sometimes I just assign one point and it's essentially a per completion yeah yeah uh that's great and because Thomas asked in the Q&A that he's had less luck with students annotating but certainly if you make it an assignment that's required um that does kind of put it more into the to the required workflow for the course all right so tell us a little bit about how you use uh hypothesis social annotation with OER in your courses well of course a lot of um what I do or Bridget's already covered because the I think the one of the strongest things that social annotation with OERs offers is a community learning space I sometimes will use a document where I'll post a piece a student piece of writing and we'll do like a group think we'll do a brainstorm we'll get into a word document um that I've moved over into hypothesis and we'll mock up a peer review and there are other times where I'll post something that as Bridget was saying is a rather lengthy or dense text and I'll seed that text with some questions or I will look and go I know this is a word nobody knows and if four students in my class knows this word or understands this term or is willing to look this term up on their own um I'll be surprised so I will go in and I'll provide a link I'll go out and find a YouTube video and say you know something that if we're reading and it's Dorita comes up and I go okay well no one is going to have any clue what that means but you kind of understand the difference you know what that is or I'll put a Wikipedia entry link in so students can easily and quickly find and practice that kind of research that we will ask of them later on in the semester but especially in the beginning of the semester I I think my use of social annotation kind of mutates and morphs and grows I kind of think of it in three stages during the beginning of the semester I use it to be a community builder I want students to come together and see that we are all myself included we're on a journey in this class and as everybody who teaches knows every class even if you're teaching the same syllabus with the same books with the same readings every class is going to take it in their own unique way based on the composition inside that classroom and I think if we don't acknowledge that to students there's an automatic barrier between our course and our students and ourselves and our students so in the beginning I explained to them the hypothesis is kind of like our social media classroom this is where you can come to be you and I love that hypothesis allows students to bring YouTube videos in allows them to speak with emojis allows them to use the language they use when they speak to each other and then I can during the middle part of the semester start to say okay well now that we're used to communicating these ideas how can we begin to reflect the language that an assignment would look for or since I'm a first year writing instructor your business instructor or your philosophy instructor is going to be looking for how can we move from what we socially use into a more academic prose because a lot of people look at social annotation they see the word social and go this is like social media I can speak in pictures I don't have to use my words I can throw a meme up and that says everything and I don't think that's fair to the text to the students or to social annotation to not build off that and say now that we're inhabiting this intellectual space how can we leverage it and make use of it so now I can say have you noticed how I add annotations about what does a term mean how can you apply this concept to another class I've been seating and asking you questions what have you garnered from those questions and students now can start taking credit for the learning they didn't realize they were doing because learning is something students want to see on a test they want to see I got a hundred they're trained in this from high school they're trained in this and they're told it's their SAT scores or their GRE scores that define them and in at the university level we're starting to move away from that and students aren't following us on that trend of academic and intellectual liberation so in the middle part of the semester I kind of ramp that up a little bit when we get to the end of the semester now I start to ask them I'm going to pull back from the text I'm not seating this who wants to volunteer to be a discussion leader and I'll give them access to the text in the beginning I'll say you guys read it here's this is a group presentation you read it you see it you be made you know what I've done do it and then they run the show and I actually come in and play student and I actually will come in I use our school mascot of Rocky the red or and I actually pretend to be a student and they know I will play devil's advocate I will go in and be the most annoying student that I've ever had and I will go I don't get it what do you mean by that and they know what I'm doing but they're used to and they're prepared for this idea of academic give and take of argument and counter argument and how do you respond to people so that you put yourself in your best academic foot because the objective excuse me for me is that self-determination I want them to be autonomous thinkers I want them to go out and see that their choice their decision is not just about making the teacher happy placating the teacher to get the grade it's about discovering something they didn't know that they're competent because for my students they come from school districts where for instance Patterson has been run by the state of New Jersey because that school system needs oversight they don't feel that they can compete I know they can but how do they know and have the confidence for this how can they take what they learn in course A and relate it to course B so I may choose a reading for my food class that is about environmentalism and how can you as three groups from the biology major make this about your major and then teach that to me because for me that's what social annotation is it's directly responsive to that course to those students so that they see themselves in there not just as a application but as an honest co-author of meaning as you pause for a second those are great did I go too fast on that no I get excited sometimes I'm doing the thing where you know there's an amazing performance and the audience doesn't like it's under some kind of majestic moment and they don't they like don't applaud immediately so yeah that was incredible so really inspiring I just think it one of the really neat and powerful things about OER is you can start talking about licensing and proprietary content and you get to this place where you start talking about self-determination for students and students as scholars and that's just one of the really amazing things about the OER movement is that you know it kind of can be boring and kind of about licensing but then not that that's boring sorry copyright lawyers but it's not as exciting as this idea of just students being empowered but it really does start with that that licensing piece that free the text that frees the students that frees the teacher for all this kind of activity amazing there is a question from the audience from Colleen Sweet about and I want to fold this into a broader point so you had talked about I think building a community of collaboration a community of learners right and how do we do that and I'll just say you know hypothesis is not necessarily magic bullet we can edit that out of the recording later but it's not necessarily a magic bullet in the sense that you know I've assigned hypothesis and now students are suddenly going to be independent thinkers right I think you have to do a lot of the thoughtful work that it's clear that Sue does and Bridget does in terms of like how you set up the assignments how you prop the assignments that not just the tool but the culture of the classroom evokes you know student ownership and student authorship and things like collaboration but the question from Colleen is have you ever used hypothesis in synchronous in asynchronous courses as a way to encourage collaboration among students so I'd be interested in your response to that asynchronous courses encouraging collaboration among students and other ways that you encourage collaboration and Bridget maybe this time we can start with you I haven't used it in an asynchronous course but I did use it during remote I used OER and hypothesis in OER sorry in remote learning so generally our courses when they were online in first year writing they were synchronous but often I use it asynchronously because I'm assigning it for for out of class work so yes I'm not sure I'm not sure I understand like the full context for the question but I haven't used it in asynchronous course I've used it in synchronous courses but assigned both in face-to-face and remote learning assigned things for asynchronous assignments so it's mostly used asynchronously because they're doing it for homework well like Susan said we also use it in class I think at least that's what I picked up that you're actually doing annotation in class and we do that too um but I would say there's there's a mix of using it in class and out I use some of it in class but I do use it asynchronously as Bridget said for assignments that they're preparing at home I like it because it allows them to work at their best I think another factor of hypothesis and OER use in hypothesis is that our students really don't work on the same diurnal system that we do my students do their best work at 10 11 12 1 2 o'clock in the morning and hypothesis allows them to come into a text when they're at their best where my class at seven o'clock in the morning they're not at their best I I do a lot of come on guys wake up whether I'm face-to-face in the classroom synchronously in zoom there's a lot of I'm gonna do a poll now to make sure everybody is awake and everybody is with me into mentally as well as physically but hypothesis allows them to come into a text to leave notes for each other to converse in a format that again as a 50 something I like having this kind of a conversation I want to read someone's face I want to hear the excitement in their voice I want to see them nod their heads but my students are used to having twitter conversations they're used to being in Instagram and DMing each other so that there's a lag between the conversation and they're able to have six conversations simultaneously now hypothesis allows me to leverage that and allows me to invite them into a text and say if you need time to think think because that I think was the biggest discovery for me during the pandemic about students and conversations in general they don't like the spotlight being on them they like being able to step back and go is there a better way to do this can I explain this do I have to look up how to spell this word they're much more self-conscious and they're much harsher critics of each other than we are as instructors of them so they're not for lack of a better word performing to an audience of one they're performing to an audience of everybody in the classroom and they're very aware of that social media judginess that we as instructors stand and go well this is who we are they've never claimed that who I am without a social media kind of shadow looming over them so hypothesis allows them that natural breathing space and allows them an ability to get comfortable with an idea before they put it out there for global consumption I hope that makes sense it makes a ton of sense and I think it's a big part open pedagogy right is that you know you're you're you're a scholar you have a voice you have things to share but not everybody's ready to do that immediately and I think it's great to create context in which they practice and they have space to you know inhabit that voice and then yeah eventually there's more public areas beyond the classroom to share that with Bridget do you want to add one thing or well yes I mean I think that this is a really important point to make in terms of student engagement that if we want students to see argument as conversation we need to have that I think practice hypothesis gives them good practice in that and I think students are more reluctant now than they were in my experience in past years they're more reluctant to speak up in class to verbally orally in class and I think partly that can be attributed to remote learning students having their sort of cameras off and muted during remote learning but I think it's also based on what I've heard from students it's also part it's a reaction to the political culture that we're in they see people on social media get canceled you know and and they're they're reluctant to express their views at times especially orally face-to-face and so having an opportunity to compose and deliberate and and write it's both that serves really well the objectives of a writing course but it also enables the students to really kind of move out of their sort of you know the tone of silence that that some of them can be and and really they I've you know heard students say that I'm getting more comfortable I would never express my views on a controversial issue in a social context and I'm getting more comfortable doing that and for a lot of our students this is the first time they're getting out of that echo chamber where they curate they live in the curated community where they know they always agree with everybody so whatever your course is they're sitting next to someone who it's not political it's religious it's just a lived experience and they're unsure how to move through that and that for me is where community membership comes from and that idea that they start to identify as a member of our class or our institution or our program so they don't see themselves just as student they see themselves as learner they see themselves as writer maybe in training maybe an apprentice but they don't have that kind of stigmatized view that they are school student anymore yeah because they're interacting at this different level yes and just to add to that the role of citizen you know this is really preparation for citizenship amazing place to end there I love that connection to the wider public discourse I have to do a couple housekeeping notes before I give you guys a big thank you one some of the audience is probably customers of hypothesis and can turn around and do the kinds of things Sue and Bridget are doing or maybe already are we can get you on another liquid margins if you have a story to tell some of you are not yet customers of hypothesis and we do have a summer boost promotion going on right now just through the end of the month if you get in touch with education at hypothesis before the end of the month you can get a great deal on a starter package over the summer get hypothesis accessible for everybody in your institution and a chance to really try it out try some of the stuff that Sue and Bridget are doing and see if it works for you so please get in touch with education at hypothesis if you are interested in becoming a customer and having this experience if you already are a customer a couple things to share and we have a summer workshop series coming up on annotation starter assignments creative ways to use social annotation multimedia and tags in annotation gradient feedback in annotation so check out our website for that although this will also be included in the follow-up messaging to the group and then finally hypothesis academy this is something we launched in january it's been a tremendous success it's really I mean if you see the way that Sue and Bridget are riffing off each other and engaging with each other and I think probably both storing each other's ideas for implementation this is what hypothesis academy is it's instructors coming together some new hypothesis some veteran users and sharing ideas co-creating assignments it's run by christie the caroless and our and our customer success team couldn't recommend it more again this is for customers only so but you can check out our website or follow the links in the in the follow-up email to get involved we have three of our normal hypothesis 101 courses running this summer one started in just a couple weeks and then we've also developed a social annotation in the age of AI you know if anybody's heard about this thing called artificial intelligence or large language models are generative blanking on the word all of a sudden maybe you've heard of it maybe for the chat gpt we're engaging with it we're thinking about ways to use it and also ways to teach in ways that will maybe make your students less reliant on it so please join us and what a great conversation sue Bridget you're both inspiring educators i'm really just this is why i love doing this show is talking to folks like you and i'm having i'm gonna have a great afternoon because of this conversation so many thanks and your students are very lucky to have you thank you so much Jeremy thank you thanks for inviting us have a great afternoon everybody go forth and annotate and i want to give you guys a plug for hypothesis social annotation 101 i did the course and it was so much fun and so interesting to interact with people who didn't teach only in my discipline the best thing about that is it gets you out to see how your faculty in other disciplines are using hypothesis and how what you do kind of trickles in so i can't recommend that enough i think you guys do a great thing with that wow uh so we're just going to be slicing and dicing everything you said today into little promotional videos for hypothesis and that's a great one for christie to add to our website and seriously so so much thanks just inspiring to hear how you work with your students they're very very lucky well thank you okay have a good one bye bye you too bye