 My name is Franny and welcome everyone to Liquid Margins. This is social annotation online and on campus. Today's guests are Mary Isbell. She's associate professor of English and director of first year writing. And sorry, I neglected to put your university. I'm not on my game this morning. So it's international professor of English. I'm at the University of New Haven. New Haven University of New Haven, right? I shouldn't have my head start. I think my, this might be decapped by accident. I don't know what's going on. We also have John Stewart and he is the assistant director office of digital learning at University of Oklahoma. And then on moderator today is Jeremy Dean. He's VP of education at hypothesis. And we also have a couple other colleagues from hypothesis here, Becky George and Nate Angel and myself. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy. And he's sure to do a better job. I've just done so. But anyway, happy Friday. Thanks for being here. You're doing great as always for any. I'm so excited to be here. I know both Mary and John from before the pandemic. This, this session is called social annotation inside and outside or off campus and on campus, but the secret title is, you know, like social annotation, it's not just for pandemics and we know each other from before the pandemic. I've met you both in person. We've both presented together. Have you met each other? Have you met before Mary and John? No, I don't think so. Okay. Well, you're two of the oldest school advocates of hypothesis at different different corners of the world. You know, Mary's been using hypothesis probably since before we had a learning management system integration, I think, across two different LMSs now at the University of New Haven from Blackboard to canvas. And John, certainly before the LMS as well, I remember we had, you guys integrated hypothesis with wordpress there. You're enough of a developer that I know you helped us start to explore certain ways of viewing data even before we, we had kind of dashboards for users and stuff like that. So you both have been around a long time with hypothesis, which is why we've invited you here today. And I'm very happy to see you. How have you been? Where you want to share a little how you've been? Yeah, I'm surviving. I'm joining you from my mother's apartment attached to my home where my two children are over here. Hopefully we won't hear them screaming. I feel like that's an important part of sharing how I'm doing. I don't have a care still. The semester is almost over and I'm very excited about spring and summer. So yeah, I'm doing great though. John, how are you doing about the same for me. My daughter's right behind me eating lunch already. And I've been home with her for, you know, a year now and just feed her constantly and do dishes. And then occasionally get to work on school stuff. So John, you've been working from home this whole time. Yeah, I had been all calendar year 2020 this year. I've actually been back in the classroom and I've been using hypothesis face to face this semester. So that's been interesting. You know, in addition to all the times in the past. And Mary, are you. Have you been going to campus to teach? No, so our situation made remote teaching the smartest choice since we were trying not to expose my mom to the virus. So I taught remotely for this entire year. And actually the spring semester, I wasn't teaching because of maternity leave. So I hit the ground running in fall, but it wasn't part of the crisis of the last spring. But yeah, it's been, it's been all remote and hypothesis has helped a lot with that actually. So congratulations. You've had a child during this crazy year and a half. Yes, I have. He's almost 16 months old. Congratulations. I wanted to start off by reading this quote that I actually got turned to by Joshua Kim and his regular column in inside higher ed. It's a quote from a Peter Bryant, who's a professor and associate dean at the university of Sydney business school and a blog that he talks about what he calls the snapback, you know, personally, familially, all different, you know, athletically, maybe academically, professionally, there's a lot of desire to return to normalcy, right? I actually just got my second shot this morning. I'm feeling fine so far. And so I'm excited, you know, the person who gave me this shot asked like, do you have any travel plans this summer? And I was like, well, I don't know. I sure would like to go to Maine and visit my family and go to Minnesota, visit my wife's family, but I don't know. But we do have this desire to return to normalcy and he calls that the snapback. And what he's trying to do in the blog is kind of ask us to pause and reflect on what we've learned during this time that might stay with us beyond the pandemic, you know, like maybe the N95s we can at some point burn them. I think probably not. But, you know, certain things we will stop doing, but certain things, you know, we will stop doing that. And I think that's what we're trying to do. And I think that makes sense. Actually, I was standing there in line today for the shot. And I was looking at the stickers, you know, the six feet distance stickers. And I was just thinking like. Everybody who's been alive at this time is going to know like. Six feet really clear in their head. You know, they've just been standing at six feet distance for so long. It's going to be a measurement that we just kind of automatically recognize. I want to read this quote. And then we'll now turn into this more of a conversation. It's about knowing what we have learned in our liminal year, year or two. This isn't about case studies, conference papers or vendor demonstrations. It's about knowing the human impact of what we have all been doing. It is understanding the affordances of a horrible situation and knowing what we have learned from experience and telling those stories to the right people. At the right time. Not when we can sort of participate in that. Today. I saw a post this morning of a Twitter. And it was published by Paul Manson, who's a visiting professor at read. And he says tools I've used during the pandemic that I want to keep. And it's got some checklist. I don't know how you do this in Twitter, but it's an in class chat software. Allow them all to speak in ways that work for them. Zoom office hours, lower barrier to check in. And then a thirdly online reading discussion tool, hypothesis for sure. What tools have you and I would say tools and practices. What tools and practices have you discovered or rediscovered over the past year. That you feel like will be part of your repertoire when you, we hope, return to normalcy. Mary, you want to start us off? Sure. So I think I, we did transition to canvas in the summer before this academic year. So some, a lot of things I've changed had to do with transitioning into both using canvas and teaching remote synchronous. Hypothesis was one thing that I was now using inside the LMS. And so I think I, I upped my game in certain places there using canvas. I developed a couple of new strategies to have students return back to the annotations that they've made. Another tool that I'll throw in the mix though would be any sort of collaborative writing environment. I switched after taking an excellent course on data code and ethics during the digital, digital pedagogy lab. I made this switch away from Google docs. I'll share that here and transitioned into using our own universities, Microsoft OneDrive system to use shared word online documents. Either way, I had always used them to do one off revision workshop activities in class. But what happened this year is I just created one document that we used all year and the new content went up at the top. And the way I was using that was in tandem with Hypothesis. I was having students pull things that they had cited and talked about in that social, social annotation space, pull them into the shared document and then use that as the space where we communicated with each other. And it felt so frustrating at first to not see their faces until I adjusted my expectations about why cameras weren't on and all the reasons that one might feel exhausted by having Zoom on even if one were in the perfect circumstances. That I started to just say hello at the beginning and then everybody's cameras were off and we were in this shared document and then cameras would come back on at the end. And that has proven so productive. We get so much done, so much synchronous discussion happening that I've really enjoyed that and I'm going to keep it. I'll stop there for now. I'm sure more will come up. Yeah, I really like that idea of the shared notepad, the shared, you know, class notes. I haven't tried before with just a single document for a whole class. But yeah, I was doing similar stuff with my class and in Google Docs, having shared notes for each week usually. And for me, that's part of how Hypothesis sort of fits into what I'm trying to do is shared note taking and thinking out loud more broadly. And so the other piece of that for me is blogs. And so I've got my students set up a blog with each of them and they blog weekly. Either what I did was I gave them sort of an assignment bank and I said choose from any of these prompts reflecting on what we were talking about this week, bringing in outside sources or outside articles that they read, talking about their favorite music or movie or anything else that they're engaging with or, you know, about a half dozen other prompts each week and just trying to get them to think about how what we're talking about in class relates to the rest of their world and reflects their own interests in the broader world. So that's been the main space for me. But yeah, I see, I see all of these tools is doing the same work of thinking out loud and trying to connect in class with authentic learning. I was going to ask what is the class you're teaching that you were describing that work in? Oh, sure. Sorry. Yeah. And we introduced me as assistant director for an office of digital learning, which is my job. But right now I also teach history. And so right now I'm teaching a history of science class where we're using hypothesis. And so it's an intro to history of science. And we've actually been talking a lot about public health this year and then the other class that I'm teaching, we're not using hypothesis in this other one, but a lot of similar work is on the history of the Tulsa race massacre, which is coming up on its 100 year anniversary on May 1st of this year. And so anyway, I can talk more about that. If anybody's interested in the history, if you don't know the story, but both those classes have been really interesting. Yeah. And one thing you're you're reminding me of is that other piece of that writing for the public writing for a real audience. Did you, which blogging platform where you having your students use, could they choose or what were they doing? Yeah, so we, we have a domain of one zone initiative here at OU where everybody can have their own domain space and build whatever kind of websites they want to. For my class, I was encouraging them strongly to use WordPress. And so each student has their own full WordPress site setup. And then we use canvases or LMS. And so they can submit their blog posts into canvas. And it brings it into the grader for me. And I can use the grader just to see what they've done. Yeah, just as an assignment type, you can ask for a URL submission. And so it brings it all in. So that's been really nice. I have installed. Well, I've got an installation going at the University of New Haven of open lab, which is commons in a box, but customized by city tech. And it's, you know, you may all be familiar with the sort of that. And it's because I so want to be a domain of one's own campus. And we can't, this is, this does allow students to create their own projects and associated WordPress sites, but it also means that I get to create a WordPress site for my class and students can join as members. And so a lot of, I was experimenting for the first time really with that as well, having students turn projects into public facing work, which was great. But I think part of what I've wanted to do with all of my classes for years now is just no disposable sort of assignments. I don't like, you know, marking something up with the red pen and giving it back. And so, you know, having them think about who their audience is having them write for each other and having them comment on each other's, but we don't actually use comments in the blogs anymore, but we use hypothesis and we use some other stuff to, you know, give feedback. But yeah, that idea of, you know, talk to talk to your parents, talk to your roommates, talk to your friends, talk to your friends. And just the broader world rather than to me. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think we're on the same page on that front. And I actually have thoughts about that. When you have hypothesis. What do you do with the comments tool? I don't find students gravitating to use it. On their blog posts, even potentially not making them, like not turning it on. You can turn it off on each blog post. So, yeah, really interesting. to be more deeply integrated with both those versions of WordPress so that your Canvas hypothesis login will work across those platforms. I'm wondering if each of you can reach back into your memories about what first attracted you to social annotation or hypothesis and talk a little bit about that and then also how your practice maybe has changed or evolved over the past year. You hinted at this Mary in terms of returning to annotations, but John, maybe we can start with you this time about what first interested in social annotation and if and how your practice with annotation in the classroom has changed over the past year during the pandemic. Yeah, it's a similar story sort of returning to what I'd been doing a little bit in the past. One of the things about history of science is that it's a smaller field of history. We don't have textbooks in the same way that American history course does or European history course does. And so while there are books that are commonly used, a lot of our resources that we give to students are articles or other online resources. And so one of the challenges of hypothesis is that it doesn't work as well with a physical textbook, but there's just not a thing in my field. And so all of the assignments that I gave to my students this semester were either PDFs or web posts, blogs, articles on NPR or whatever. And so everything was annotatable as far as our readings go. And so it just was a normal fit for me. It was a really logical use case for me. And that was one of the things that first attracted me to hypothesis is it just works really well in my space. And this semester, it had that same function. The other thing I like about it and the other way that I've used hypothesis in the past is sort of as a curation tool. So it's great for annotation obviously, and I think that's the main way people think of it. But as I'm going through and just reading things and coming across whatever in my daily practice, I can leave a comment and sort of collect that thing for myself. And remember, I came across one article on NPR where they were talking about genetic splicing of humans and apes of various sorts. And they're looking to be able to grow human organs basically on monkeys. We had just been talking about the Island of Dr. Moreau in my class, which has the same themes. And so I read that immediately thought of the priorities discussion and marked it and then passed it on to my students. And I had that sort of experience on a nearly weekly basis throughout the semester of just being able to pull things into my class and encouraging the students to do the same. I love that. Not a disposable tool for you either, right? As a scholar, as a teacher, something you're using and then connecting it with your teaching as well. Mary, what about you? What first attracted you to hypothesis or social annotation? And how's your practice evolved, especially over the past year in a new teaching context? Yeah, so what attracted me to hypothesis, I wanted something like hypothesis to exist before it did. I feel like I was, I had as a graduate student encountered in teaching first year writing courses. I was also serving in sort of a graduate student leadership role in the first year writing office. And I was frustrated by the anthologies that we often used when teaching our composition courses. We had two courses then, and I think they still do at UConn. One is you learn writing through nonfiction and one you learn writing through literature, quote unquote. And when we would teach that other course, you would often choose an intro to literature anthology or some kind of textbook that gathered together readings for students. And I was always frustrated by the apparatus of those anthologies. The apparatus got in the way of what I wanted students to do with them. They presented literature as content to be mastered, certain kinds of literary techniques needed to be learned and regurgitated. And that just got in the way. So I worked on creating an anthology with my colleagues, my fellow graduate students. And that anthology, I won't go into the details, but I worked on trying to publish something that would pull it all together nicely but have the apparatus we wanted in. It wound up despite our best efforts costing a ton of money. And it was so frustrating because I knew that most of the readings we wanted to choose, some were under copyright and that was a different story. But most of the readings we wanted to choose were in the public domain and it shouldn't have cost anything. And there should have been a way for us to be able to give students a way to engage. So I first was using Annotation Studio that I learned about that MIT had developed. And that's actually what led me to meeting Jeremy and learning about hypothesis. And so for me it became, this will be my non-anthology way of gathering readings. And it worked really well. I always wanted students to read and respond. My goal in the writing classroom at least is to have students engage on the level that they want to engage. So what surprises you, shocks you, any reaction you have, my goal is to teach them how to take that and use it to develop an original arguable claim and to recognize that the thing they think can develop into something exciting to say, not just wait to figure out what everyone says in class to figure out what the right answer is. So I've been using it that way. And the way things are changing now that I'm really excited about actually is I'm starting to realize that that can be the first step toward collaboratively creating an addition with my students for future students. So this, all things are kind of meshing together. But this idea of I don't want disposable assignments. I want the writing that my students produce to wind up somewhere is coming together with annotation so that I'm kind of thinking now, not kind of I am pursuing a project where students will write initial annotations in hypothesis, revise them in hypothesis and then submit a formal assignment which is a sort of focused annotations in a particular area that they think will improve our classroom addition. And then during the summer or the winter break I'll incorporate that into an addition that moves forward and it won't, that then won't be in hypothesis. So it'll be in the actual text. And so that's a big thing that hypothesis has facilitated. I wouldn't have thought about things in that way without it and it's gonna be an important tool to develop it for sure. Are you thinking about centralizing those texts that the students collect into sort of a digital anthology or are you thinking about leaving them sort of spread out all over the web but then using hypothesis to like string it together in a web? I like that question. The project started thinking I'll be making an anthology. And I was thinking about it in terms of some of you might have come across this initiative at Purdue called Cornerstone, Living for Learning. It's an initiative to, it's NEH and Tegel funded and it captured humanities professor's attention across the country for sure because it was here's funding to develop an integrated core curriculum experience in the humanities for schools that have pre-professional programs primarily. And that's our instance at the University of New Haven. I teach core courses to students who are not English majors. So I got really excited about that program and part of their program at Purdue at least has a set of transformative texts. And so my initial idea was to develop an anthology of transformative texts that we determined together we would work with. And as I thought more and more about it, I realized my pedagogical, my approach to texts says it's not so much about what the text tells you it's about what you do to the text. And so an anthology says these are the things we find valuable for whatever reason even if they're troubling or what have you. So long answer to your very simple question. I'm thinking more that it's distributed and I'm actually thinking that I'm one person creating additions with my students but the project's morphing into being more here are the resources that any instructor can use to create additions with their students. And there will be a hub to sort of share additions if people want to make them available to others to use. But mostly my dream would be that people would get the bug and start thinking of editing as a collaborative effort to undertake with their students. I wonder if you guys have noticed any difference in how your students have responded to hypothesis during the pandemic. When you've taught with hypothesis in the past they probably still met face to face and got to socialize and connect and converse and discuss course content then. But when we remove some of the more, you know the social aspects of teaching and learning if you are teaching face to face did you find students more open to the tool or more dependent on it in any way? I was just gonna say even going back to face to face this semester the students are still making connections in hypothesis that they don't get to make in the face to face classroom just because of social distancing. And I think even without the social distancing they see each other's comments in the readings and respond and start having conversations there with someone that they might not have talked to prior in the semester or someone they might not have connected with. And so I think I do like that hypothesis. I like that there's no avatar I guess in hypothesis that you don't necessarily know what the other person looks like or who they are necessarily in the class. And so there's no preconceived notions and you're just responding to the thoughts. And so as a social media tool in that way I like that the conversations there are sort of have a different context I guess than what they're having in the classroom. Yeah, grounded. Yeah, that's great. Mary. What I used to do in the in-person classroom was have them all annotate and then I would kind of gather some notes of what I was noticing. And then the beginning of class was, okay, these are some threads, let's go. And then it would almost be like that avatar would meet the person and they would say, oh, that was you saying that and that was you saying that and that would sort of make it come alive. And that didn't happen in the same way but because I would have them move from hypothesis into pulling the thing they, so they might annotate 15, 20 passages in a reading that we were doing but I'd ask them to go back through what they had looked at and pick two that they really wanted to sort of share what they thought about it. And that then goes in the sort of shared word online document space. And they're their name show up, what they're putting is under their names and they start to comment on each other and that's the live activity during class. And yeah, it's not the same as in-person but it's still, I think had them start to develop this or recognize the personalities of what was being pulled out, I guess. Mary, can you say more about this assignment in terms of, so I've annotated 15 times in a text and then the next step is to grab my reference and my annotation and bring that into the Microsoft word space. So it would be some of the original text, my comment. And then I say more, I like elaborate. Yeah, elaborate. Basically it wasn't even so much, I gave them the option to sort of say again what they said in their annotation but I would frame the discussion in a certain way after having looked at how, so for an example, I was using this, not in a composition course, this activity but for a course on review writing, the art of the review, reviewing films, reviewing television shows, et cetera. So we would read reviews that we decided on together. We'd found a review of John Mulaney's comedy, Netflix special, so they'd all read it and annotated it with hypothesis. And then in class, I wanted them to isolate some moves that the critic was making in writing about Mulaney. So they would under their name share a quote and then identify what they thought the rhetorical move was that the author was making. And then the next step of the activity was for them to respond to each other. And that's where the discussion got cool, right? Because the comments in the document was where the back and forth was happening and everyone's together. So there's hypothesis annotations as homework where they may be in the document at the same time or not. And there's also hypothesis annotations live during class which I had also done. And this kind of brought pieces of that together but because they were all in there together all the typings happening at once. It made up for the fact that I didn't see faces on screens and there was action. That's super cool. One strand that I'm hearing here is that I really like is just the idea that an annotation is in an end in itself that it's the beginning of something that continues in face-to-face class time when some more collaborative authoring tool like you're describing, Mary, that's really cool. I wanna open it up to our guests and also to our audience and also to my colleagues if you have any questions about what Mary and John have said. The crowd has been a little quiet today in the chat. People have been commenting about how much they wanna take classes with these folks because the classes sound so interesting. We don't have any active questions but I know you probably have some more of your own Jeremy. I have some as well, but I'll let you go first. I mean, let me just get the sound bite in there. Like social annotation, is it just for pandemics? I mean, hypothesis over the last year has seen tremendous growth, tremendous adoption. A lot of new schools have gotten you guys been around forever and University of New Haven is actually one of our first customers. Oklahoma is now a piloting for the first time but there's a decision coming up at Oklahoma, right? Should you guys subscribe? I don't have to put it in the context of your specific school but there's a lot of decision makers and teachers themselves that are sort of deciding with this snapback, with the return to normal. Now that can go into face-to-face and see my students for those that teach face-to-face, do I need tools like this? I'm assuming the answer is yes, but I guess the question, the follow-up is walk. And if you want to say no, you can. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's always been about, before COVID and still having the discussion at the level of the reading and not waiting until sort of the end analysis. So yeah, from the researcher side, it was always about thinking out loud and discussing stuff as I was reading it before I get to the stage of writing an article or trying to put it in the context of like a broader book project or whatever. And then with my students, being able to point them to specific passages and then see their reactions to specific passages. And so it's a tool that, yeah, I will continue using after COVID and after everything else. And then I just, I keep thinking of other use cases in other classes. I'm working with one class, it's actually an architecture and they're doing a oral history project where they're taking all of these oral histories of Oklahoma City and they're coding for locations and affect of those locations within the oral histories. And hypothesis makes that really easy. You just highlight a thing and then you can enter in the geolocation or description of the location that's mentioned. And so it's, whether you're doing that asynchronously, synchronously, face-to-face or online, the work still needs to be done and hypothesis makes it easy. So yeah, I hope, I know that I'll continue using it. I hope that the school continues using it. The argument I think for the LMS integration, the cost to an institution being worth it has to do with the fact that I'm this sort of weird professor who was seeking this tool for a long time and like an eager early adopter and happy to experiment and happy to deal with the discomfort of students when they're trying to get a new thing set up when it was a hypothesis in the wild, right? And I could put up with that. There are so many of my colleagues who are more hesitant about using technology and who at the same time would complain about students not reading would say, I give them these assignments and I don't think they're reading them. And I think I could say to them, I don't think they're reading them either. You don't have a good way yet to hold them accountable for reading, not only hold them accountable for reading but give them a way to read in an engaging way. Like, it's not about like replacing the quiz with the annotations, it's about giving them this experience of the value of reading and that's something that's gonna be done with what they've come up with during class. It's not just that the professor's then going to lecture all the things that were in the reading. So the reason I'm sharing all of that is because the value I think to an institution is that the instructors who might be a little more hesitant to try won't have as many hurdles when using the integration into the LMS. And I've talked to many who've given it a try. They put up a PDF students annotated and they're blown away by the level of discussion that was occurring. And that's the beginning of a flipping of the classroom. Even if that instructor hadn't already drank the Kool-Aid of a student-centered classroom where there is no lecture, you're gonna get drawn into that because you're gonna see everything your students wanna share. So from the perspective of just professional development of faculty, I would say, I think it's valuable there. And I don't think you'll have as much experimentation if you don't have the app in the LMS. There's a little humorous. Those are great points I thought. There's a little humorous chatter going on in the chat now about what's hanging on both of your walls. John has apparently the world's largest diploma. Well, maybe not. There could be people who have even larger diplomas because they have larger walls based on how he says it works. Mary, what is your thing on your wall say? I have been so self-conscious of my location for teaching because this is my mother's apartment. She'll be happy to know that this will be on the internet one day. So I have told every class, especially in the fall, I was so hyper aware of this being in the frame that I would say to my students, can you guess what it is? Whoever guesses can some kind of, you know, recognition. Are there any guesses? Nobody ever took me up on it. It never became like the buzzy thing in my class that I wanted it to be. But does anybody have a guess? This is giving me a... There's a little bit of glare on it right now. So it's a little hard to see. Hey, I mean, this is basically like, I gave you the perfect amount of glare to make this really hard nut to crack here. If I were to tell you that this said what a... Word? Word? Wonderful world. A? Yeah, so... Is that from the song? Yeah, you could imagine that the decor choices of my mother might involve Louis Armstrong. Oh, I'm a big fan, love that. And so it guides our day. Nice. So that's what we've got going on. Thank you for asking that because I wanted somebody to talk to me about that since I started teaching here. That was a very important question, Nate. Yeah. I have another follow-up question that's a little more serious too if you will allow, Jeremy. Thumbs up. You guys may have heard, I'm gonna throw a link into the chat here about the research project that Hypothesis has launched with the University, or Indiana University, sort of thanks to a lot of guidance and work by our scholar-in-residence this year, Rami Kalyar, who's at the University of Colorado of Denver. And this will be certainly near and dear to Mary's heart and John's too, I'm sure, because the research project is designed to explore exactly the kind of intersection between kind of first-year reading and writing experiences like in the composition and English field. And I'm kind of curious, if you haven't heard about it yet, this blog post kind of lays it out, but just given the context of your work and I'll go to Mary first on this, would you say that you find, and I know you've addressed this a little bit already, but would you say that you find with your students that social annotation ends up being something that empowers writing as much as reading? Is it both or is it mostly about just the reading? Well, the reading is the beginning of writing. And so in that regard, I mean, the way I teach writing is to try to empower students to trust their impressions because in order for them to learn to develop original contributions to make to scholarly conversations. And that's what I'm driving at when I teach academic writing. Then I need them to trust that their impressions upon reading something, whether it's a scholarly article or a work of literature has value and not defer to my sense or whatever they can glean implicitly from class discussion about what am I supposed to know about this? And so I find student writing extremely stilted when they come in often from having been taught in whatever ways they have that there are wrong or right answers and that you have to convey certain knowledge of certain techniques. I have to undo all of that and social annotation helps me do that. Classroom discussion helps me do that but social annotation shows them as it's occurring, the variety. I used to be, I'm gonna go into the weeds on this. Stop me if you need to redirect but I used to be a little concerned about students being able to see each other's responses before class discussion because I used to think that the power of the class was the moment when the student said, I kind of thought this and then the student across the room said, I don't respond that way at all. But what I find in that moment, you can see the multiplicity of interpretations that are out there and I can model in the front of the room that could become an interesting claim. That could become an interesting claim. All of these things can be alive and that's exciting. I used to worry that having them all annotate together before class, they'd all just pile on to certain ideas and I've experimented with that. I've had them keep their annotations private at first and then share them in some way. But the more I teach them and the more I talk to them about what it is they're doing that they want to try to contribute something and not just jump on and say, I agree or push them to say, I agree but with a difference or I disagree in this way. All of that drives toward them developing claims that are arguable. It's absolutely crucial to the way that I teach writing. Yeah, I think that says it better than I could have but I did want to point out that the two biggest user groups at OU for hypothesis are creative writing and the history department. And so it's the two sides of that coin of annotating the historical texts that the history department is reading largely and then the creative writing using it to annotate. And all of our creative writing courses are taught using various sorts of literature and so they have the students engage with that literature and then write off of it. And so they're marking up both what they're reading and what they're writing. And then in my own classes, history of science is largely populated for the students by pre-meds and by other sort of STEM majors. And so they take our courses and we're expected to help them learn how to communicate with each other and how to write from a humanities perspective. And so hypothesis is great in helping me get them to analyze texts but also start that process of writing collaboratively and individually. And so yeah, I think it's a great transition tool in terms of seeing the connections between what you're reading and what you're writing. And I actually want to share something building on this because there's an activity that I built this semester that I think works exactly to, I'm so excited about this research project. I didn't know about it but I'm excited to learn about it. One of the things, as I was just describing, having students respond initially and then helping them recognize that what they first were thinking as they were reading can be the beginning of essentially a question that then they answer and that becomes their argument for their paper. I've realized that they respond in so many different kind of categorizable ways. Some respond with anecdote. They say, this reminds me of this thing that happened to me one time. Some respond immediately with a claim. Some respond immediately to a text by saying, I would argue this about it. Some respond with questions. Some respond by having had a question and already answering it by looking something up, giving us a definition or a gloss on a term. And so when they do their first round of annotations and we come to class, I introduce the categories that I've come up with and I ask them to go back and categorize what they've done and tag in that way. So we've been playing around with tagging and helping that essentially what that does is it helps me teach them the various components of building an argument that you need all of those things and that some of them come quickly to some people and some of them take longer but they can watch what everybody else has done and see how they would categorize it. And then when I ask them to do another activity and I say, all I want here are objective observations like these are just that no one would disagree that this occurs in the text. That's something that they can recognize what that is because they've tagged what they did before to see where other students were doing that. Is that making sense? Yeah, that's super cool. That's great. I'm gonna jump in here because we're a little bit over time but if people wanna keep this discussion going, that would be great. I just want to be cognizant of people's actual time and if you have to jet anywhere. So it's up to you. And again, also to people who came here today to see this, if you have to go, there will actually be a recording of this in the coming days, hopefully, so we'll reach out and share that with you. But John and Mary, do you wanna stay over a little bit? Keep the discussion going? I wanna share our last thought. You just, I think you just went the wrong way with me. I thought you nodding. I unmuted myself to tell John that I thought he should go first because he seemed like he had something to say. Oh, I was, so in addition to teaching history courses, the main thing I do is help everybody with their blogs here and here at OU. And so I work on a lot of web and DH projects and I was just imagining different ways of building this anthology, just using the hypothesis API and how you could have a sort of live updated table of contents with all of the stuff that your students are annotating, just pulling straight off the hypothesis API. And I was imagining to build on that. I would love to hear what you're thinking about that because you're talking about the project I was describing. Yeah, and just the way that you're using tags and the way that the students are going out and collecting things and, you know, whether that's directed by you or sort of in the wild, as you said, by the students, you could just live pull off of the groups tags and then, yeah, whether that's literally a tag cloud or sort of an automated table of contents of all of the different pieces that they're pulling together and then just linking out to wherever that is with the students annotations, you know, sort of live on the web, but your whole like anthology could be a single webpage that's just live updated, pointing out to all of these different resources that your students are collecting and annotating. I like that a lot. Would you like to join the project? Please, Sean. I think I could still show you how to do that. It's been a little while since I played with the API. I was thinking that the John Udall could probably do this in his sleep, but when I think about it, yeah. When Mary started this project, she's like, who's doing crazy, weird, like funky stuff with a hypothesis and I sent her an initial list. And I don't think John was on it, but I was a mistake. John should have been on there. He's always been trying to break the tool in all the best ways. Yeah. Yeah, I want to hear these ideas because actually a lot of the stuff I was thinking would be kind of using hypothesis and then building something that could be annotated with hypothesis later, but not necessarily thinking about the tagging in that way. So that's really helpful. And I'll be bothering you, John. You can expect it. Yeah. I think Jeremy has probably beaten this horse beyond death, but the metaphor of the mimics and the idea of showing our work as we read through lots of different sources and those connected paths. And it sounds like your anthologies is very much in that vein. And so yeah, just being able to chart those paths around the web as they develop. And obviously the downside of that, of leaving things out on the web rather than collecting them into a single space would be if any of those resources stop being maintained or go down or whatever. But that's something that, you know, I heard all you could jump in it. I have a closing observation, which is that the blog post that I started off by quoting sort of suggested that the world, that people, that teachers are fatigued and just ready to return to normalcy and that there's going to snap back to something that was before. And that's not what's happening here. I see two educators here who have always been innovative, innovative, continue to be innovative in some ways have been energized and more imaginative or, you know, that at least has continued through this difficult time. So that's a very optimistic thing for me to see that great teaching continues, great teaching continues to evolve. And we've had a great conversation with two great teachers today and I thank you for your time. Thank you, Jeremy. Yeah, I want to thank you too. This has been great. And maybe we have to think about, there is no normal anymore and go forward with that notion and all. And maybe there never was. Maybe there never was, yeah, exactly. So, okay, great. Well, again, I want to thank you both for being here. Mary and John, this was a really great, the good margins and thank you for everyone who showed up and everyone at Hypothesis. And again, there'll be a recording of this soon and we'll share that with you and join us again on liquid margins. And again, thank you for being here. Take care.