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A short video about using Hypothesis in both online and in-person classes, which led to some thoughts about the value of online teaching. Dan Allosso reimagines student reading assignments as "renewable" rather than "disposable", using Hypothesis annotation and moving from in-class to asynchronous online discussion.

While solitary reading has benefits and is a common aspect of learning in higher education, it may not be the most effective way to read. Research suggests that social annotation (SA) tools—which allow students to highlight and comment on digital course materials as they read—have impressive educational benefits. SA tools can help with students’ reading comprehension, peer review, motivation, attitudes toward technology, and much more. But how does SA help students learn? To find out, we introduced the SA tool Hypothesis into three different undergraduate courses at Simon Fraser University. Together, students created more than 2,000 annotations atop more than 250 course readings over the course of a semester—all of which we collected and coded for evidence of learning. The outcomes of our research were thought-provoking and inspiring—and we’re eager to publish the full results soon. But for now, we’re sharing a sneak peek of the preliminary findings.

I just made a short video to introduce my students to Hypothesis. I’ll be using it for annotation and discussion in all my online and in-person courses this fall. After they’ve watched the video, I have the students create an account, follow a link I provide to the private group I’ve set up for each section, install the plugin in their browser, and leave at least one comment on the course syllabus.

As librarians, we are very familiar with annotated books and articles – documents with highlighted passages, notes in the margins, and maybe a few cryptic drawings included. Web annotation takes those practices and makes them available to use in marking up web pages and other web documents in such a way that when we return to those online documents, the annotations are still there – persistent – and are perhaps joined by new annotations by others, or even responses to annotations that we originated. These annotations are not actually saved on the web document however; instead they reside on the servers of the annotation service being used, and exist as an overlay that can only be seen by other annotators, depending on whether the annotation was made public, group-only, or private.

A slew of tools make it easier than ever for students and educators to have conversations in the margins of the texts they’re reading. I recently spoke with Jeremiah (Remi) Kalir, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, about digital and web annotation. Kalir coauthored an upcoming book on this topic called Annotation with Antero Garcia, an assistant professor at Stanford University. “Antero and I argue that annotation has been a social, collaborative practice for over a millennium,” Kalir told me. Social annotation today represents a paradigm shift from the traditional ways in which students and educators have interacted with texts.

This is the year I push Hypothesis as a public and private annotation tool. I am sounding adamant here because of the Jeremy Dean’s inspiring I Annotate 2019 panel address below. I am also making this a faculty professional development project as well, including helping my university adopt it as a tool inside of Blackboard. This project will include working with my own department and then working within the university to help other teachers adopt Hypothesis in their classrooms.

This study extends the use of expansive framing, a discursive pedagogical practice for supporting generative (i.e., transferable) collaborative learning, to a fully online undergraduate Educational Psychology course. This study examined how students expansively framed their engagement in a social annotation activity across the semester. Quantitative analysis confirmed the extent to which interactions in the annotation activity were expansively framed and found a significant correlation between expansive framing and open-ended exam performance. Qualitative analyses confirmed that expansively framed interactions made numerous connections between disciplinary course knowledge and nascent disciplinary teaching practices. More generally, the study showed that expansive framing can be easily and successfully used to support generative collaborative learning in online courses.

The digital format opens up new possibilities for interaction with monographic publications. In particular, annotation tools make it possible to broaden the discussion on the content of a book, to suggest new ideas, to report errors or inaccuracies, and to conduct open peer reviews. However, this requires the support of the users who might not yet be familiar with the annotation of digital documents. This paper will give concrete examples and recommendations for exploiting the potential of annotation in academic research and teaching. After presenting the annotation tool of Hypothesis, the article focuses on its use in the context of HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), a project aimed to improve the Open Access digital monograph. The general line and the aims of a post-peer review experiment with the annotation tool, as well as its usage in didactic activities concerning monographic publications are presented and proposed as potential best practices for similar annotation activities.

To become active and insightful interpreters of literary or scholarly texts, students must learn to attend to and trust in their own thoughtful responses to what they read. Instructors can help students to acquire this self-awareness by encouraging them to makes notes – as most experienced readers do habitually – on the texts that they are examining. Collaborative assignments using the open-source program Hypothesis can help students to develop the habit of textual annotation.

What’s the optimal amount of annotating? I’m planning to use Hypothes.is to have my students annotate readings and discuss their reactions and interpretations with each other online, this summer and fall. During the summer session I’m teaching an online “Readings in American Environmental History” course, so any discussion of texts we would do would necessarily be online. But I’m not particularly thrilled with the experiences I’ve had trying to run online discussions in my university’s LMS (D2L), which seems particularly ill-suited to the task. Maybe if we had something available like Slack and Canvas I’d be more excited about trying to do discussions in the shell. Even so, I suspect I’d be leaning toward using Hypothes.is directly. And in my fall classes (three in person, one online), I’d like to grow beyond the model I’ve been using, where the students’ written responses to readings are only visible to me. I think posting responses that their peers will read and respond to could be an incentive to more thoughtful engagement with the material. It will also set a baseline of sorts and may tend to raise the bar a bit as students see the efforts their peers are making. And beginning a discussion in Hypothes.is may make the transition to in-person discussion in class smoother and easier. Read more OERFuture.net posts about Hypothesis: https://oerfuture.net/tag/hypothes-is/