Press

Hypothesis is transforming teaching and learning for the better. Seasoned educators from numerous institutions have praised Hypothesis, not only for reshaping classroom communication and teacher efficiency, but also enhancing how students perceive their own learning journey. Thousands of annotations later, Hypothesis has undeniably spurred deeper textual engagement, collaborative discussions, and community, while strengthening vital academic skills.

Hypothesis est une plateforme en accès libre et gratuit, qui se démarque des nombreux autres outils d’annotation par des fonctionnalités plus vastes. Elle offre notamment une expérience de cocréation participative de connaissances plus vivante et authentique aux étudiants dans le cadre d’une stratégie d’annotation collaborative.

Hypothesis is the social reading/collaborative annotation tool that can be added as an activity to your Moodle site. Read more here about ways that you can use Hypothesis for class assignments. Until recently, only publicly available websites or PDF files stored in your Google Drive were able to be used with Hypothesis. Thanks to a new collaboration between Hypothesis and JSTOR, now articles available through JSTOR can be easily used within Hypothesis.

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NY — Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) announced today that the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv have received renewed funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). CZI has supported bioRxiv since 2017 and medRxiv since 2020. The newest grants, totaling $6.1 million, will support the expansion of the servers’ operations until 2024 and a partnership with the annotation platform Hypothes.is to improve processes for commenting and providing feedback around preprints.

And one of the strongest affordances is how it allows students to thread conversations in the text they are discussing, and not asking them to read something and then have a conversation on a class forum hosted elsewhere. By keeping the conversation in the document itself it can help tie what is being discussed directly to the text.

No fancy tools are needed. Students may, for example, work together on a shared Google document. But for PDFs, webpages or other artifacts, they may need a tool such as Hypothesis, a free browser extension that allows users to make private, semiprivate or public annotations. (Update: The browser extension is free for users on the web; schools that integrate the service into their learning management systems pay a fee.)

Students also enjoy using Hypothesis, a Web 2.0 social annotation tool integrated into the UDC LMS [Blackboard Ultra]. Students can comment on readings in the margins or type answers to questions using text, audio, videos, website links, or pictures during class for everyone to review and reply. Students can access all activities in the LMS course site at any time to revisit the material or continue the conversation.

That said, there is still a bit of a hurdle to learning to use Github issues. We looked for a way to have more of a Google Doc comment experience. That led to integrating Hypothes.is in the HTML page for the Data policy. To add Hypothes.is to our workflow it requires exactly one line of code: Hypothes.is code snippet This can be added directly to the HTLM file or we were using R markdown and RStudio IDE as the visual editor. In the YAML section of the R markdown, this one line is included in a stand-alone html file seen here:

For teachers who are using social annotation with tools like Hypothes.is in their classrooms, Allosso’s book is an excellent resource for what students can actively do with all those annotations once they’ve made them. (Here’s a link to my annotated copy of a recent working draft if you care to “play along”.)

Using the Baldwin Test’s elements and the social annotation tool Hypothesis, teachers and students can join together to annotate an educational technology’s press release or website, making observations about the language with the Baldwin Test as a guide. For example, install the Hypothesis web browser app, open the website from Evolv Security explaining its product Evolv Cortex AI, and come join the conversation I’ve started about a technology company selling school districts its problematic scanners (Singer, 2022).