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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/

The team behind Hypothesis, an open-source software tool that allows people to annotate web pages, announced in March that its users had collectively posted more than 5 million comments across the scholarly web since the tool was launched in 2011. That’s up from about 220,000 total comments in 2015. The company has grown from 26,000 registered users to 215,000 over the same period.

I just discovered Hypothesis which is a service to annotate and highlight articles, posts, pdfs or whatever text you want and find all over the web and in any site. All their tools are open source and free, and they can be checked here, which make the services even more attractive to me. They’re also a non-profit organization, if you are wondering if there any commercial interest in the tools they’re developing.

Cultivating an engaging environment can be a challenge when teaching online. Having the interaction occur among students, instead of solely with the professor, can be even more difficult. It can be a delicate balance to try to not overwhelm students by the quantity of educational technology we use in a class, while still keeping things interesting through the element of surprise. The easier a tool is to use, the more likely students will feel comfortable engaging with each other. Hypothesis is a social annotating tool that takes these reading practices to a whole new level. When reading on the internet, you can select text and annotate it. These notes may be shared publicly or saved privately.

An introduction to the issues, methods, and techniques of digital archaeology, integrated with working code and virtual computing environments or 'notebooks' written in Python or R. The only thing you'll need is a browser! Intended for second or third year students, all materials are creative-commons licensed, and may be remixed to suit your instructional purposes. Funded by eCampusOntario. Digital archaeology is never finished; consider ODATE to be in ‘perpetual beta’. This means that you will encounter rough edges from time to time, and as technology and archaeology evolve, some topics will need to be added. Some will need to be pruned. If you feel so moved, we invite you to join us, and contribute corrections, additions, or deletions. All contributors will be credited as authors. Feel free to annotate with the Hypothesis toolbar at right.

Collaboration is the key to success for smaller publishers. This time of year calls for a look in the rearview mirror to see what the result of all our collaboration is. What did it mean for us to participate, network and share knowledge with our colleagues in organisations such as OASPA, AEUP, ALPSP, OPERAS, and the Ubiquity Partner Network? This year, we are also most pleased with developments that allow online annotation for all our books via Hypothes.is. This service allows all users to highlight and add notes while reading, and they can choose to make the comments public or private. It works for PDF files as well! This significant development has been possible for us due to the collaboration with Ubiquity Press and their engagement in the HIRMEOS project. So, the partnership works directly as well as indirectly.

This year’s President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Public Knowledge at SFU was all about the public aspects of knowledge production and dissemination at universities. Fittingly, I found myself reading and creating public annotations on the readings for the course using a tool called Hypothesis. I would like to introduce the two big questions that I chose to investigate: What do annotations say about their creators? While the benefits of social reading for the student was fairly obvious to me, I wanted to explore what kind of story the data would tell about the student. In an age of quantification and measurement, what does it mean to create public knowledge in the forms of online annotations? Can we use this data to evaluate students and their performance? Should we? What do annotations say about the original content? Academia is a world of competition. Publish or perish wonderfully summarises the environment that scientists and scholars are facing, as available job positions are scarce while their applications are assessed based on criteria such as publication volume or terrible indicators such as the h-index1 or Journal Impact Factor2 (JIF). Can we use annotation data to assess the articles? Does annotation behaviour reflect the engagement with the articles?

My experience with an openly networked public annotation initiative called Marginal Syllabus represented an opportunity to merge these approaches and offered innovative answers to my questions about constructing new peer communities and avenues for public dissemination of research. Through this initiative, in which one of my peer-reviewed journal articles was made available as a public text that could be commented upon, I was given the opportunity to imagine a different paradigm for conducting, consuming, and responding to research - one in which study findings become the start rather than the end of dialogue and in which diverse forms of expertise extend, refute, and re-mix the knowledge production process for the common purpose of making education more equitable and culturally sustaining. I share my experience with the hope of provoking further conversation about what it means to take democratic values seriously in academic research.

Academic publishers are looking for ways to engage readers more deeply in their content. By creating opportunities for students, researchers, and otherscholars to share information and interact with each other across disciplines, publishers of academic works will not only engage audiences more deeply; they can foster the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that can help tackle society’s biggest challenges. A recent webcast sponsored by Emerald Publishing discussed some of the tools available for supporting deeper engagement with content across disciplines, including Hypothesis.