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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/

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.