 Hi, everyone. I'm Amanda LeCastro from Stevenson University, which is in Baltimore, so that's 45 minutes or three hours away, depending on traffic. We're more like three hours today. I want to thank Jeremy and Nate for inviting me here, especially because they specifically invited me because I have a new book chapter out on this exact subject, which I'll plug a little bit more at the end. But I've been thinking a lot about the ways that we can use social annotation, not just to teach reading and writing, which we've talked about a lot today, but I actually teach media history. So I'm thinking about how to teach the history of the book through annotation. So I'm sure that my fellow educators in the room are getting tired of hearing things like students don't know how to write, students don't know how to read, or frankly, students don't read, students don't write or write well, right? Now, we also hear students don't know how to annotate, or students don't annotate anymore. You can take this quote from William Logan as an example here. He's kind of lamenting the lost art of annotating. And I frankly think that's because we have a narrow-minded view of what reading and writing and annotating looks like. We think of it as in print form and print based. But scholars such as Cathy Yancey have proven time and time again that actually people are reading and writing more in this moment than ever before, and I contend they're also annotating more than ever before. Take this example, it is a screenshot from the Kindle app on my phone, and it demonstrates that 9,940 people highlighted this text. Can any of my literary folks guess what text this is from these small snippets? Yes, this is Orwell's 1984, a text which is popular, but is also capital L literature, and has had a nice resurgence since November 2016. So I think some of these highlighters might be students who are assigned this text. I think it's a good example of how many, many people are annotating, just because they want to, because they want to engage in a shared reading experience. So I want to shift this question from do students annotate or do people annotate to what kind of annotations do we privilege, do we value, and do we want to be teaching our students to do? I agree with Jason Jones who's written extensively on annotation that the foundation of a humanities or even broader to a liberal arts education is conversation, that we want students to be engaged in dialogue and discussion around concepts, not just regurgitating and memorizing. So I'm focusing here on the social aspect of annotation and kind of historicizing the social aspects of annotation. And thank you to Gardner Campbell who already showed you a few of these texts, right? We have Douglas Engelbart and Vannevar Bush up here. I also have the Talmud and the Early Modern Book of Hours up here, because in fact these texts are, I use them in my classroom to show that annotation has been used for social purposes, for instructive purposes, to provide directions on how to read a text, to provide definitions, to provide also that kind of internalized reading experience that allows people to connect across space and time, but also offers the ability for a networked or a connected series of texts. So I use this to model for my students the kind of long tail of social annotation, and I also use this as a foundation to prepare them to connect with the book traces project, which if you're unfamiliar with it, book traces is sponsored as part of nines out of the University of Virginia. It is, the project lead is Andrew Stoffer, and the idea is that they collect pre-1923 texts that include marginalia. Why is this important? Because this was an era marked by cheap printing. Paper was cheap. So a lot of institutions and libraries have multiple copies of the same text. Take Frankenstein, for example, the 200th year anniversary of Frankenstein, Go Mary Shelley, right? But most libraries have more than one copy of Frankenstein. The problem is that when we have budgetary and space crisis, which is conflating for many of us at this moment, libraries and institutions have to make the decision about which texts to destroy or move off site. If you follow anything about the New York Public Library, you're involved in this debate. Right? So book traces is saying, hold on, some of these multiple copies are being earmarked for destruction, but they actually include essential marginalia that scholars can use to study the history of reading and to study the history of these texts. So obviously a small group of people can't possibly find all the instances of marginalia and all the pre-1923 texts that exist in all institutions across the world, but we can crowdsource it, right? So they're asking institutions that have these kinds of collections and their stacks to engage their students in the work of finding, digitizing and archiving marginalia. So I have my students do this. I've had my students do this for maybe almost 10 years now. And back when I was at NYU, when I was a graduate teaching intern, I actually brought my students to the Butler Library at Columbia University to find these dilapidated books, often falling apart. And I asked them to look at the marginalia, determine whether this marginalia was kind of from a pre-1923 reader or a modern reader, like if it's Red Pen, probably a modern reader, right? And to kind of figure out what the marginalia was, what kind of message was it conveying, and determine whether or not it should be digitized and uploaded to the site. They learned a lot about information architecture here, right? They had to fill out the database, understand the database infrastructure. They had to understand why digitizing these elements were important, but they also learned a lot about the place of a library and the importance of a library. These are information literacy skills that often students don't get otherwise. It may be a surprise to you, but students find libraries intimidating, right? And they don't have a lot of experience with old books. A lot of what my students commented on were the fact that their hands were literally dirty, right, at the end of the day, and that they had big questions about how these books were being stored, preserved, accessed, and how the humanities plays a role in that larger conversation about how we preserve and access old forms of media, like how do we actually preserve history, right? So you can see from some of my students' comments, I had them do blog posts about their experience, that the kinds of things they found also taught them about the history and provenance of library collections. So they would find dedication pages, right? They would find things that showed how we actually acquired these texts, and they came to find that the library is more than just a place to study, right? But it held this kind of essential role in the finding and archiving of material. So now at Stevenson University, our library does not have this kind of collection, so we use the book Traces site itself to engage with these kinds of historical pieces of archival material and marginalia. But as you can see, they still are making these great connections between the kinds of marginalia they see in these texts and things like email, right? So my student, Ryan Rocher, says that the kinds of notes he found remind him of modern-day email. There are notes to lovers and friends scrawled on the pages, right, that people are having conversations in these texts the same way that we use Twitter, right, to have conversations with each other. He also found that it was really interesting that you could study the lives of these people, that often there was a generational notes in marginalia, right, where a mother passed a text down to a daughter who passes it down to her daughter, and they actually chart the whole history of a family in some of these texts. So then I want to move the kind of lessons they've learned from these older forms of media into the digital space. So I give them a printed out version of a born digital text that they've never seen before, and I ask them to read it in the classroom space, I give them a short amount of time, and as they read they have to make tally marks every time they got distracted. In about five minutes, most of them have 20 tally marks, right? I then have them do the same activity, but this time they have to annotate as they read. At the end of the activity, I ask them a couple basic comprehension questions about the text, and all of them have markedly better comprehension and confidence about the text after doing the annotation version of the exercise than reading with the tally marks. We talk about how this, and this is the text we use, and you can see it's a very transparent meta-awareness activity because right here, one of the poll quotes there, is the idea that we've always been multitasking, we've always had our brains wandering, it's not the digital space that causes this. They're also wandering when they're just looking at a physical page, but that we need tools, right? We need active, engaged learning to help us channel that multitasking and that wandering into something productive that will help us learn. So I have them read Kathy Davidson's Now You See It, which explains what attention-blindness is and about how 21st century readers can actually use their attention-blindness to think about what they're focusing on and what they're missing, the gorilla in the room as the cover shows, that they might miss if they don't pay attention to all the different aspects at the same time. We use that to understand how annotating can actually help us focus, but how social annotation can help us catch the gorilla in the room, right? So I have actually used several different online annotation platforms to use in the classroom. I did use Annotation Studio from MIT. I've used Google Docs uploading the documents and having students engage that way, but the reason I really like Hypothesis is because it mimics some of those things we saw in the 19th century annotations, such as multimodality. In a lot of the books that you find in the book Traces Project, you'll find things like doodles, locks of hair, pieces of clothing, flowers, right? Connections to other texts and other readers that are very interesting and multimodal at their nature. Read Jodi Shipka. She talks all about this. The other thing I like is, of course, the fact that you can make it public, which some annotation studios public within a class, but not public at large, and Google Docs, of course, has that multi-layer of allowing people are not in. This particular example that you're looking at is from a 100 level class, not from my media history class, and the reason why I bring this up is because in a 100 level class, I actually do keep it to a private group. I require them to do about 10 to 12 annotations and four to five replies. I give them a list of good annotation practices. We talk about definitions. We talk about references, looking up references. We talk about questions and conversation starters. I call them provocations. We talk about using tags and other things. This closed group gives them the ability to practice at the 100 level, the introductory level class that they can then move to prime time in the upper level classes and go public. If you look at the student writing on the side here, what I really like is that the students are answering each other and having an interesting conversation here with each other. I really like to use this as an opportunity to talk about being a good digital citizen and practicing good responsible, respectful commenting practices that hopefully will transfer to their lives outside of the classroom, perhaps to Reddit or YouTube, when they think about commenting and having a conversation with people in a digital space. I have encountered some bad practices, such as the student hitting on another student. He actually wrote add me on Snapchat and she wrote back nah. Then I brought that into the classroom and we talked about why that was an inappropriate use of the space. It gave me the opportunity to have those conversations. Having the conversations that come from the annotations in the physical face-to-face classroom is one of my favorite things about doing these exercises. Not only can I have the, that's maybe not the best use of the software conversations, but I can also take some of these really big important conversations and give them a larger space and time. Here you have one of my students talking about how he would love to do this in all of his classes for all of his work and another student saying, but what about all of the bad things that could happen in a public space? We were able to expand that discussion. This is from one of my upper-level classes, the book history class I've previously mentioned. For these public-facing engagements, I always choose platforms that I know encourage this kind of engagement. I usually pick articles that I know have other public annotations on them. I knew this article already contained annotations from other people around the world so that my students would be forced to engage with people outside of the class in order to complete the assignment. If you look at my students' conversation here, you'll notice that they're picking up on really nuanced language choices in the article and that they're actually connecting the work of my class to other classes they've taken at the university which is like a goldmine for us professors. We want them to say, hey, my critical theory class talked about reader response and I see a reader response at work in my book history class. It's exactly what we want our students to be doing and they're demonstrating that work here and I had nothing to do with creating that conversation. I also use this for rhetorical analysis. I have my students choose an article from a preset list of publications and they use it to identify author, audience, purpose, so on and so forth but I also specifically ask them to do a visual rhetorical analysis on the digital elements of the text so they have to comment on the image, the font choices, the color choices and the layout choices of the digital text which is another reason I like hypothesis more than an annotation studio or a Google Docs because those erase those digital elements that I actually want my students to be very directly engaged with. We do a whole unit on fonts so I want them to think about the font choices at work in the articles that they're looking at. This particular example, my student at the top you can see is actually connecting the hyperlinks used by hybrid pedagogy to the concept of hyperlinks Joanna Drucker talks about in another text we read in the class. So she's applying the conceptual framework of one book that we read to the practical usage of it by the journal. So there's actually been a lot of studies on this and I could get in big trouble for this because Blackboard is mandatory at my university every single professor no matter what you're teaching has to use it but there have been studies done by the one I'm particularly thinking of is by Van Der Pol Admiral and I should look up the other name that actually shows that the kinds of conversations that happen on hypothesis are more grounded in the text sustained conversations about one particular point longer and are involved more voices often than the Blackboard discussion boards about the same topic right. So let's see if I can look up that. Anyway the slides are tweeted if I can't find the names. There's also a wonderful study by Faye Gao that looks at 122 comments collected that demonstrate that the motivation of students writing with hypothesis versus the Blackboard discussion posts increase right that they write more that they tend to write more than is required by the instructor versus the Blackboard posts. I don't think I'd be a good humanist if I didn't also critique the tool so as many of you know hypothesis was a kind of an outcropping a variation of genius. My students are very familiar with genius or rap genius. They may not be familiar with annotating a M4ster short story but they do like to comment on who Becky with the good hair is right. So they know this they recognize this and they use those tools and they can transfer them to the annotation assignments I'm asking them to do but I do like to talk to them about some of the issues there at work there. So genius was criticized by the blogging community for basically allowing the site to graffiti works without the author's permission. All annotation tools do this right we don't ask permission to annotate but I do think that hypothesis has done a good job of allowing us to moderate comments you can flag comments sites can block the hypothesis add on. So what I want to do is just encourage my students to think about how we are responding to the authors especially those from marginalized communities with vulnerable voices to think about the way that we're engaging with work in a way that's respectful and thoughtful and that the author themselves might read. What the tool like annotation studio does is it kind of negates those arguments by keeping it in a protective space and removing it from the eyes of the author. What that prevents is conversations with the author right that actually have happened in my class where the authors have responded to some of my students but it does allow them a space to to not kind of have to worry about offending anyone which might in some cases when you want to talk about authors in a way that's that's brutally honest might be advantageous. So it's a it's a reason to consider other tools. For the final project in my book history class students use all of the tools that they've learned to actually engage in designing the future of reading devices and reading technology. So their final project is to pitch a reading device that will meet the need of an audience that's not currently being met by our reading technologies. So this is adapted from Kerry Krause the University of Maryland who does design fiction with her graduate students and my students have to put together an implementation plan and environmental scan, a marketing program and extensive research about a specific population that they want to address and how they're going to do it through a new technology. So this one is directly inspired by hypothesis. They wrote about hypothesis in this final paper and you can see that they designed a physical bookmark that would allow you to annotate a physical book but that would link you to all the digital tools so that your annotation is kind of moved away and allows you to focus but still gives you those reminders but you wanted to look up this word or you wanted to look up this reference or you wanted to save this note and connect to other things. This one was actually inspired by a student's aunt who is ALS and needed to use eye tracking software and dictation software to make annotations. So their idea was to allow eye tracking software to create the highlights and annotations and dictate what they wanted to annotate and wanted to communicate with others. I thought this was a really thoughtful, interesting project that addressed a very specific need. This is the full article that can be found in the Rutledge collection. I cannot distribute the full thing in for a year but you're more than welcome to contact me for a pre-publication copy to read and here's my contact information if you need it. Thank you. Hey y'all, I know we're getting close to the end of the day and we have just one more event but just because Amanda came penultimately, is that a word? Um, doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask her some questions. Does anybody have any questions for Amanda? All I know is that I definitely want one of those bookmarks. Oh my god. Are they a production yet? No. How many people here would like one of those bookmarks? Oh wow, okay. Tell that student that they got a market, at least in this small room. Yeah, here. I'll just hover. No, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Sorry, I was going to be loud and southern. I forgot your try to record. Sorry Nate. Could you elaborate a little bit on your list of good annotation practices and how you're presenting this to students if it's in the context of annotation or if it's separate from and if it's different for different levels? Yes, so I teach everything on WordPress. It is, my assignment sheet is up on WordPress. It is part of the assignment sheet where I actually list, I think it's like 10 kind of ideas for your annotations. It is not exhaustive. They're of course able to go above and beyond or outside of that list, but on there is the usual culprits of definition, looking up references, asking provocations, linking to multimedia, things like that. And then of course in the reply, I talk about respectful, responsible replies and conversation in that section.