From pondering annotation’s metacognitive magic to keeping vibe coders honest in the margins, Hypothesis Academy participants left no stone unturned. Here are some reflections from this summer’s Hypothesis Academy experience.
This summer, Hypothesis granted its 500th Educator Credential, an achievement awarded to faculty, instructional designers, and administrators who complete Hypothesis Academy. Our summer learners were a passionate group whose commitment to meaningful course design and attentive teaching inspired all of us at Hypothesis. With so many wonderful ideas shared, we wanted to highlight them for other educators seeking creative ways to use social annotation in the classroom.
Participants in our cohorts included faculty teaching computer science, personal finance, nursing, physical therapy, English, ESL, and more. The central challenges these instructors faced were AI’s disruption of college reading and writing and student (dis)engagement. We discussed how social annotation helps draw students back to their assigned texts while creating a conversational space to practice close reading in both in-person and online settings. Faculty also explored how new features like at-mentions and image annotation might be used to further focus students’ curiosity about course concepts and their classmates’ perspectives and experiences. Here are a few takeaways from our summer sessions, including new assignment ideas and new considerations for social annotation’s role alongside generative AI.
A Single Tool, Infinite Possibilities
As part of Hypothesis Academy, instructors designed an assignment to be implemented in a future course. These assignments reflected the diversity of their learners and institutions, which included community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and large universities. Over the course of the next academic year, Hypothesis will reach a range of college students, including:
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- Cybersecurity majors evaluating the U.S. national security strategy through scholarly research
- Developmental english and first-year composition students building critical reading and writing skills
- Future nurses strengthening clinical learning within a traditional didactic classroom
- Constitutional law students applying theory to legal experts’ speeches on YouTube
- Tomorrow’s coders giving their LLM-assisted software a vibe check in the margins
- Theater students exploring the foundations of drama through scholarly readings and online performances on YouTube
The range of assignments demonstrates the utility of Hypothesis across disciplines and departments as well as the creativity of our faculty partners. In terms of specific assignment instructions, Academy participants were especially enthusiastic about the use of metacognitive tagging; one education faculty member, for example, has students tag classroom ideas they want to apply in their teaching practice with “MFC” (or, My Future Classroom). Tagging can help students practice expansive framing, reminding them to connect the reading and their new knowledge to different environments, including future professional contexts. In this way, social annotation can be a helpful tool for career preparation.
AI’s Impact on Self-Efficacy–and How Social Annotation Can Help
Perhaps one of the most interesting topics that surfaced during Hypothesis Academy was the impact of generative AI on self-efficacy. In educational psychology, self-efficacy refers to a student’s belief in their own capacity to complete learning-related tasks. Students’ self-efficacy, which begins with seeing themselves as readers (a process called self-identification), is key to developing college-level reading skills (Baldwin & Nadelson 2022).
Participants posited that using generative AI to summarize texts eliminates the reading practices that boost self-identification and self-efficacy, as these are rooted in the work of “mindful reading,” a necessarily human function. (Ellen C. Carillo’s scholarship on mindful reading was shared by an Academy participant, and we are grateful to add it to our growing bibliography.) Hypothesis, meanwhile, supports mindful reading by offering a space to “make reading visible” in the digital learning environment. This kind of learning process leads to increased self-efficacy, as reported in a previous PITS survey shared by a Hypothesis faculty user (as well as other research on similar “anchored online discussion” approaches). In becoming critical annotators, students set themselves up for success after graduation, which, after all, is what faculty most want for them.
We look forward to continuing these important conversations with Hypothesis users. If you’re interested in joining us for a future Hypothesis Academy be sure to check out our registration page at What is Hypothesis Academy? As we gear up for our next offering in late Fall, feel free to join any of our partner workshops in the meantime by signing up at Hypothesis Partner Workshops. See you soon!
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