III. Where we are at: A Real-Case Study of Using Hypothesis to Foster Bildung

[INDEX]

00. The Educational Value of Social Annotation

So far, we have only thought in hypotheticals and abstract concepts about challenges to Bildung. Now we can turn to actual real-world projects that are already in use and analyze them regarding their Bildung potential. There are many projects out there that intuitively or more explicitly address many of the challenges to Bildung we discussed in our previous chapter.

One such project is the social annotation tool “Hypothesis.” Following the memex idea closely, it allows students to add their annotations to texts they read in class into the margins. In the following chapter, we will discuss how this simple practice can and does foster Bildung.

I chose the Hypothesis tool because, to the best of my knowledge, it encompasses almost half of the problem areas that I have discussed so far. It is the best example of learning environment I can think of that deals with much of the complexity of Bildung.

The following are my personal takeaways from the wonderful “Liquid Margins” series, a podcast series in which educators from all disciplines share their personal use of the Hypothesis tool and how it helps them to get ideas across and make reading more social and engaging.

I grouped the quotes into 16 problem fields discussed in the previous chapter that I see the Hypothesis tool helping us tackle. I quote many of the contributors in detail to convey how much of a difference this one tool makes to their teaching practice. This is not utopia; this is real and deserves to be known.

01. Asynchronous Communication

The timeframe within which students can discuss a certain topic or text in class is usually limited and narrow. If you miss that narrow window and don’t ‘show up’ in class, you cannot be part of the discussion.

‘Not showing up’ is not only when you literally miss the discussion in class but also when you are not prepared enough to have an opinion to share or feel not brave enough to express your view and feel like your voice doesn’t fit into the already expressed views and therefore keep it to yourself.

Social annotation through Hypothesis, on the other hand, widens the timeframe of participation significantly and allows for asynchronous cooperation, by anchoring contributions around the same text while allowing for contributions to flow in before the synchronous meeting as well as after students have met in person.

“Even if you don’t have all students in one place at the same time — which really isn’t going to happen in this new phase of Hybrid or Blended or HyFlex-, the annotation can be that anchoring point where [the participants] take and process what they have learned over time. [Jenae Cohn, https://youtu.be/yShF-bCcbEo?t=1916, 31:56]

You can thus choose your own favorite spot to think about the text and come up with something you have to say about it, at your very own level of understanding.

You can also wait for others to add their annotations and develop your position against their views, at your own pace, and are not limited anymore to say the ‘right thing’ at the right time in class to have your voice being heard.

Thus the very discussion of a text itself is broadened, to include multiple layers of interactions, multiple layers of understanding not being in each other’s way and not taking away from each other’s space and still not being chaotic but grounded in the text.

“You are having those rich discussions in class [and you can] have your students also revisit the Hypothesis document and then add more annotations on top of that, after they’ve met live, whether that be remotely or HyFlex. That could be a great way to have this living breathing document that is no longer passive. You’ve interacted with it before class, you are talking about it during class and then after class you are adding more rich discussion points into that document. [David Serna, https://youtu.be/yShF-bCcbEo?t=1800, 30:00]

All of this allows for asynchronous engagement with others around a shared topic. You don’t have to be in the same room or meet at the very same time to still be engaged with the same topic.

02. Integrity of Perspectives

Social annotation is grounded in the assumption that you have something to say, that your perspective matters. That even if your perspective might not be something the actual discourse on a topic might literally quote as authoritative or the final word, it still can serve your professors as an indicator of what you make of a text, your peers as a guiding point and, at the very least, yourself as a starting point into a different and more inclusive next perspective.

“[Students often tend to say] ‘well, I don’t have anything to say, I don’t have anything to contribute. And that is maybe a common experience. And something about certain courses, certain educational contexts may not nurture that sense of belonging or that sense of ‘I have something to say’. And there is something fundamental about social annotation when you tell students ‘part of your job here is to say something’. That is the basic expectation here […] that you do have something to say. It flips that idea that everybody has something to say — in fact, everybody may be required to say something in an annotation. And the fundamental assumption of [annotation] is that we all have something to say, and that is why we are here. It is not just to listen to the authors that we read, not just to listen to the teacher, but also to share ourselves. And that is a fundamental aspect of when you take notes and you are taking notes that are shared is that we want to hear from you; you have something to say. [Jeremy Dean, https://youtu.be/RNP0wV3ChuQ?t=1177, 19:37]

If one never starts out with a truthful first draft of a perspective, one can never get at a truthful perspective at all, particularly not if one simply copies what others, i.e. authorities, say on a topic. And a perspective lacking truthfulness is by definition ‘bullshit’, something the authors themselves don’t really understand.

Social annotation begins with the assumption, that perspectives, no matter their complexity, are legitimate starting points for more depth. There is no way around expressing a view, however biased and imperfect it might be. There is no way around dialogue to get into a more complete and refined view. If we were Kantians, we might say it is our duty to speak up and make our voices heard.

Furthermore, learners oftentimes feel anxiety to speak up in the embodied presence of others. Feeling your peers looking at you while you speak can be intimidating and create a sense of judgment that might not be there but is still felt.

“I love face-to-face instruction, but face-to-face instruction also sometimes puts you on the spot and you have to deliver a response perhaps when you haven’t had enough time to digest what others have said and what it is you wish to say. But [with Hypothesis and annotation] we allow more comfort, we allow greater ease of experience where scholars can read each other’s comments and read the paper and think about the paper and let it marinate and then develop some kind of input that they’d like to share or a reaction that they think is appropriate. [Annotation] does create that kind of environment that otherwise in my opinion may not exist in a face- to-face classroom.” [Nima Kianfar, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=1952, 32:32]

Many students who have difficulties speaking up in class have a much easier time expressing themselves through text, where they don’t feel immediately put on the spot and can instead think at their very own pace and in their very own style.

“My students really like the fact that they can read […] at their own pace. And I can put in my comments, and it is really nice to be able to sit there with the text and think for a moment. And you don’t feel like you are missing out on the conversation, where someone says something and 10 minutes later you are like ‘oh, that’s right, I had something I wanted to say about that.’ Or the teacher gets around you and you are like ‘I don’t remember what I was going to say, you can pass me.’ This allows them to respond in real-time with both their own thoughts and respond to each other. So they really enjoy that process of ‘wait, I can say whatever I want, and no one is going to interrupt me, and it can be as long as I want it to be, or as short as I want it to be, and I can do it at home, I can finish it for homework, I am not on the spot, no one is looking at me.’ This changed things drastically for my students because the kids who won’t raise their hand and speak are okay with people reading their words. Because you don’t know when someone is reading your comment. When you are in class, everyone sees you, and they look at you and they are like ‘what is Joe saying’? But when Joe types it, he doesn’t know if the person next to him is laughing at his comment or someone else’s comment or the article itself. So it really opens that for them. It is a lot ‘less personal’ in a way, but also ‘more personal’ because they get to be their authentic selves, but they don’t have that necessary fear of immediate judgment. [Morgan Jackson, https://youtu.be/c01LOwk0jnw?t=566, 9:26]

Social annotation creates a private space to express one’s mind in its integrity, as a referential totality, which can also be partly public and shared with a specific group of people. Annotation invites students who are more introverted and shy to engage in the discourse.

“I noticed that some of my shyer students are writing more in the annotations and thus they’re participating more in class. They are having more of a discussion experience and getting their voices in sooner in the process because they’re a lot more comfortable with the annotation format. They start out with a summary if they’re feeling shaky. And then gradually they are seeing the other students’ reactions; they’re seeing models of other types of annotations. So I think they’re more likely to try those out or to respond to other students who are making personal connections or connections to other texts or asking questions or answering back or getting mad. So I think it encourages the students who are nervous about those kinds of ways of speaking back to try.” [Anna Mills, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=2120, 35:20]

Social annotation creates a space for every individual mind to express itself unobstructedly. To express its own individual standpoint. To express its own growth and individuation. This is a space which, once entered, is about your position on something and not a generic — quasi ‘objective’ — view of reality. This space is explicitly about your very own subjectivity on something, but a subjectivity that has grown on friction with the subjectivity of others.

And that’s precisely what students tend to use social annotation for. Not to just copy what others say, as many teachers fear, but to find their very own take and arguable position on an issue through the friction with others.

“I used to worry that having them all [the students] annotate together before class they would all just pile onto certain ideas. And I have experimented with that. I have had them keep their annotations private at first and then share them in some way. But the more I teach them and the more I talk to them about what it is they are doing — that they want to try to contribute something and not just jump on and say ‘I agree’ or push them to say ‘I agree but with a difference’ or ‘I disagree in this way’ -, all of that drives toward them developing claims that are arguable. ” [Mary Isbell, https:// youtu.be/ravRW5Ixb6s?t=2231, 37:11]

03. Jumping Board

Oftentimes, it is a challenge to motivate students to do the reading. With the help of social annotation though, they are not left alone with the text. They can centre their exchanges around the text and the passages with which they can relate.

“In my first semester teaching, I used reading quizzes to get students to do the reading. Which was not ‘it’, it felt really flat. […] I felt like I was missing the point of getting them to read and analyze the sources by distilling them into these multiple- choice questions. Folks would either not do well or they would not take the quizzes at all, and so I decided to scrap it. […] When I started using Hypothesis, it was revolutionary because I had folks reading and talking to each other about the text, whereas before I could barely get them to do the reading. Like I was trying to ‘force’ them to do the reading by giving them a quiz and punish them if they got things wrong. That is really not what I want. That is not how I wanted to teach history at all. So Hypothesis was a really great tool, and I have been using it ever since then, and it has been consistently one of my favorite aspects of the class, and I have gotten really good responses from students as well who really like to see their classmates’ opinions and their analysis alongside the text too when they are reading.” [Mary Klann, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=346, 5:46]

Using Hypothesis’ anchors the text then serves as a jumping board from which to develop your own position and interesting discussions that can inform the entire class and even the teachers. Social annotation helps us to develop our own ideas as a response to something that we read and respectively inspires us.

“We’re not just coming up with our ideas out of a vacuum. We’re forming our ideas in response to other texts and in response to what other people have said. And we need kind of a free space to do that where we don’t have the pressure of coming up with a finished product. An annotation is that. [I.e.] the pressure is off. There are a lot of different ways to respond. There are a lot of different styles of annotation. But they’re all about a voice finding some words in response to another text. And that’s the kind of writing that I think that we mainly teach. There is always some sense of ‘we’re responding to other texts we’re responding to a conversation in process.’” [Anna Mills, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=638, 10:38 ]

And actually, some of our most important thinking and some of our best ideas happen around other texts and in annotations. Social annotation just makes the early beginnings of an idea, the very spark, visible to all. ‘Genius’ is not something that comes out of nothing but from engagements with others.

“People, in general, are taught to think about writing that it’s some solitary activity. [But] it has become even more clear how much something that you write is an interplay of lots of different voices and lots of different feedback. And I think that showing students that and [dissuading them from?] the notion that you sit alone at some device and ‘genius pops out’ is a good idea.” [Chris Gilliard, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=800, 13:20]

Hypothesis gets the best of low-stakes writing or first-draft thinking, the kind of writing where you experiment with ideas in the context of discovery and don’t have to fully back up every claim and solidly defend it. Our ideas don’t spring forth as already- made logical deductions; they come into the light as vague intuitions and glimpses, as a sense that something is off, or as a sense that there might be something hidden behind that rock.

Hypothesis ritualises this process. It Makes it seen. Makes it social. The context of discovery is thus explicitly made an integral part of the overall process of learning. Not as something to be ashamed of, but as something that inadvertently is part of any solid and potentially salient argument.

“Annotation is first-draft thinking. […] [M]arginalia is usually stuff that is going on in my head and it is a conversation you have with yourself and the text. Whereas [with Hypothesis] you get to bounce those ‘am I reading this right’-questions that you have to yourself with other people. […] So there is this collective effervescence that comes from using [Hypothesis] that I find is the most enriching part. [Arun Jacob, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=712, 11:52]

Or, as Alicia Maggard describes, low-stakes writing is an integral part of social annotation:

“I wonder if other historians have loved response papers as much as I am. That kind of weekly low-stakes writing assignment that students would do after they have done the reading but before they would come to class. For me the annotation got the best elements of those response papers in that it asked students to read at a deeper level. It allowed them to practice low-stakes writing.” [Alicia Maggard, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=466, 7:46]

Mutual engagement with and discourse around the text is then more likely to occur because, since all annotations are hooked to a specific passage in the text, it is easy to immediately spot other students’ reactions to a passage that fires you up right now as you read.

And while you are still in the flow of reading, you can jump to the discussion of the passage and expand on it. If, on the other hand, you have to wait for one more week to maybe then ask your question, you will most likely be out of the zone of engagement by that time.

“[Hypothesis was my] non-anthology way of gathering readings. And it worked really well. I always wanted students to read and respond. My goal in the writing classroom, at least, is to have students engage on the level that they want to engage — what surprises you, shocks you, any reaction you have. My goal is to teach them how to take that and use it to develop an original, arguable claim and to recognize that the thing they think can develop into something exciting to say and not just wait to figure out what everyone says in class to figure out what the right answer is.” [Mary
Isbell, https://youtu.be/ravRW5Ixb6s?t=1129, 18:49]

These discussions and annotations can then serve as a starting point for a paper on a topic that matters to the learner. The paper is then the summary of all the actual experienced moments of engagement with others and passages in texts.

“Having students respond initially and then helping them recognize that what they first were thinking as they were reading can be the beginning of essentially a question that then they answer and that becomes their argument for their paper.” [Mary Isbell, https://youtu.be/ravRW5Ixb6s?t=2361, 39:21]

The paper is then something that is alive, that resulted out of one’s struggle to make sense and out of real concerns. And teachers can comment on one’s first drafts from the start and treat you as a scholar.

“I use Hypothesis to do ‘ungrading’. […] Our students have their own URLs where they are doing a lot of their own work. I comment on their stuff just the way I would comment on any academic’s blog posts. […] That’s what I did with my students. I would give them some private feedback but most of my stuff was public. With Hypothesis […] I felt like that was just an automatic way of ‘ungrading’. It really changed the model from grading to feedback just by thinking about their stuff as public and sharing stuff publicly the way I would with any scholar that I engage with online. So I just love the way the dialogue of scholarly conversation can change a little bit your relationship with your students, it can move them I think into a community of scholars rather than just a community of students.” [Robin DeRosa, https:// youtu.be/XMNSOvW3H3c?t=1940, 32:20]

04. Spaces for Orientational Knowledge

One of the core features of social annotation is to provide orientation — for all involved parties. Students can have a look at the positions of their peers and consciously get a sense of where they stand, since Hypothesis makes the understanding of students visible.

“Because Hypothesis and social annotation can make reading visible, you can see if students are doing the reading. You know you can see how they’re interacting with the text and if they just don’t get it or if they’re misinterpreting.” [Kat King, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=435, 7:15]

And the reading experience itself can come with high-level specificity. I.e. the very highlights within a text can serve a certain purpose to express which passages mattered most to the reader, which passages they found most difficult to understand, which passages they disagreed with most, which passages they could relate to.

Sometimes teachers assign very specific interactions with a text, like making connections:

“I ask students to — as they read — make connections to it. That could be connecting what they read to their lives; it can be connecting it to other books, articles, movies, or songs, events. As you’re reading, think of what this reminds you of.” [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1018, 16:58]

Or to ask questions:

“Another strategy is to ask questions because good readers ask questions before, during, and after their reading so that they can get a better understanding.” [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1060, 17:40]

Or to infer from what you have read:

“More strategies are to infer. This is teaching students how to read between the lines and draw conclusions based on what you’re reading.” [Maritez Apigo, https:// youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1070, 17:50]

Or to determine importance:

“Another one is determining importance, teaching students how to pull out the big ideas. Especially when students are asked to summarize something that they read, they are having to determine what is important, ‘how can I sift out all of the unnecessary details’.” [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1080, 18:00]

Building on these one can then also ask students to create their own ideas:

“Synthesize. How do you use what you have read to start creating your own ideas and form new ideas and interpretations. [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm- KvpygL8Q?t=1100, 18:20]

And all of these structured interactions with the text are visible to others. They can serve as a guide for one’s reading-experience for others. These others might be other students. But they could also be the teachers.

Students can use these ‘maps’ to spot the many possible ways into and the dangers of the territory and its most likely ‘top-spots’ to visit. Very much like a guide it can be used to keep them motivated, knowing that the possibly most interesting passage is only two more pages away and keep reading up. Or it can motivate them to see that others are struggling to make sense of something as well. Including the teachers.

“[I] think [Hypothesis is] just absolutely wonderful for demonstrating to students that it is totally normal to sit down with something, to sit down with a scientific paper, and to have that discomfort of ‘I have no idea what this is about’. That discomfort is normal and and that is how it is supposed to be when you are reading a new paper. Otherwise there would not be a reason to read it if you already knew everything. And so I love being able to use the collaborative annotation process as a way of making that confusion visible but then also using it as a way to collectively work through that confusion. But it is okay to have that discomfort and here is how we can work through it. Here is how we can get stuck on something and not understand a concept and and that process of working through it and making sense of it is normally very invisible and very solitary. I love how this sort of allows us to to do that collaboratively or collectively.” [Alison Koleszar, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=235, 3:55]

Teachers on the other hand can get an orientation about where students struggle. In seeing their actual reading-process they can help them adapt their reading- strategies. They can also react and chose different texts to fill gaps or meet reading- interests.

“One of the things that I add is meta-textual information about what is actually being done in the paper at the different points. Sometimes when you read a paper in science it can be practically unintelligible. And it seems like there may not be a method to the madness. So I am trying to call out to students ‘okay, you know this is what they are doing here, they are trying to set the stage’ or ‘they are trying to highlight gaps in knowledge information’. I also use Hypothesis to provide encouragement along the way because there are some parts of the paper where you read through it and you think ‘oh my gosh, that was horrible, that made no sense whatsoever’. I will seed annotations like ‘I know this is confusing, skim this, keep going […] you know, or read for the big picture here and keep going’ because I think there are some students who get to those really tough places and they do one of two things. They either double down and they spend 45 minutes reading two paragraphs — which is not helping them — or they get to that spot and they think ‘oh my gosh, this is horrible, I am done’, and neither one of those is helping us to practice the process of science. So just [try to encourage] them to get through the tough places.” [Jennifer Blake-Mahmud, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=440, 7:20]

Social annotation thus provides you with a sense of where the center of gravity of the class discourse is at, for all parties involved. It gives you a sense of which areas of the territory have been covered and visited by others, and what they have taken from that journey, what they can relate to and what not.

05. Focused Constructive Interactions

Social annotation works well with the concept of the flipped classroom, where students are given learning material, videos and texts to prepare in advance, and the actual synchronous meeting is then used to practice what one has learned, to ask questions, and to make use of the teachers to comment on confusing passages and critique.

“Hypothesis allows me to flip the classroom in some interesting ways. So instead of working with giving a lecture we can already have built an understanding of the text outside of the classroom and when we show up in class we can work on project-based application of that material and start to really build and grow in some very creative ways.” [Brandon Marshall, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1748, 29:08]

Using the annotations before class teachers can get a sense for where most readers are at and then prepare much better for the actual synchronous class-meeting to be about the biggest challenges that came up in the annotations. The synchronous meeting can then serve more constructive and focused interactions.

“[Hypothesis] really makes a better foundation for writing as a conversation and it makes a better link to the reading process because I’m able to skim [the students’] annotations ahead of time before the discussion so I’m not wasting class time on checking that off. And I can get a much better sense — like I can pause and read it and see what their reactions are, where they’re confused — and I can use that to feed into the discussion. [Anna Mills, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=406, 6:46]

Students on the other hand can use the annotations to already engage with the text together and figure it mostly all out by themselves. Oftentimes teachers say that students do the whole work and all they have to do is provide mere hints and guide discussions in certain directions to avoid dead-ends.

With the students having already slept over the newly acquired knowledge and also having pondered it in silence and with their peers, the discussions in class can then be much more focused on what remains to be made sense of.

06. Modelling

It should not surprise us that entering a territory that is entirely new to you will often induce fear. Fear to think. Fear to speak. Fear to act. This is what happens when students are thrown into academic thinking and analysis. It induces fear. And it should not be surprising that their every second question is ‘do I do this the proper way’?

Students are oftentimes insecure about what a ‘proper’ answer looks like and telling them to be ‘themselves’, ‘creative’ and that ‘anything goes’ oftentimes will not do the job and do away with that insecurity. They oftentimes don’t even know what the proper questions are, that they could raise when reading a text.

“A novice actually has a hard time asking questions. They don’t know what is the right question and so if we just tell the students to go post four questions and answer four then it is hard for them to ask ‘good’ questions. They might not know the right level to ask. And I think we can help by modelling what questions to ask. 48 hours before [annotations are due] my annotations will be there [and students] can start by looking at what I comment on […] So I would suggest we offer strategies and I think if we do a more proactive type of questioning it helps.” [Emily Chan, https:// youtu.be/dMmGKWiVy10?t=2556, 42:37]

One strategy to foster students’ self-esteem and confidence is thus to simply turn on the lights and show them the territory. Or at least to show them the territory as seen from the perspective of those who supposedly are authority figures. To make them as acquainted with the new territory and its reception as possible, so that they feel they know it well enough to know what ‘goes’ and what doesn’t.

One way of providing that is by using social annotation to model different reading strategies, discursive strategies, ways of thinking, possible perspectives, and making them see the major arguments and facts that make up a discourse.

“I went to undergrad at the University of Texas where there were 50 000 other students. I think one of the things that I struggled with particularly in my classes that had 300–400 students was finding what my voice was and realising ‘wow, I do have something that I bring to the table, I can critique this really famous historian which is really, really scary’. I think when I was told originally as an undergrad student that professors wanted to hear my thoughts I thought […] ‘what am I supposed to say, this is a person who has been researching this their entire life’? So I didn’t even know how to behave in such a way, as weird as that sounds. So I think Hypothesis is really great because you are able to model that in a way. You are able to show what annotations look like and students are able to jump in and kind of figure things out as they go.” [Danielle Sanchez, https://youtu.be/gin3n1Sae04?t=1784, 29:44]

Teachers can make their own reading-process visible and thus model the scientific way of thinking itself. They can show how they read. What questions they ask. What they look out for in a text. How they skim and browse for information. How they interrogate a text. And how they find additional information or conquer passages that seem to make no sense. They can even express when they themselves don’t understand something. Or when they misunderstood something. They can show they are human and learners as well.

“[W]e actually debate things all the time in science. […] So in higher level courses I talk about this explicitly, that we have this conversation between what has happened historically, what are the different ideas about why something happens or how it happens. And you have this view that says ‘it works like this’ and another view came along and we said ‘no, no it works this other way’ and this back and forth is really integral to the process of how we do science. So I think talking more about that is important in the classroom because I think that a lot of people do have this idea that ‘it just is’, ‘science just is’, but it really is this long conversation over time. It is truly a process. I think it was Carl Sagan who said that science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. So trying to model that thinking in the margins I think is an important thing for our students.” [Jennifer Blake-Mahmud, https:// youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=1786, 29:46]

Such modelling can go further and show how a respectful, cooperative, successful and productive exchange over a topic might look like integrating different reading- strategies and different perspectives and creating a sense of community.

“One thing that is wonderful about [annotation] is that students can see different models for how to interact with a text. I loved that I had — we all have — experiences of students who are stronger at e.g. historical analysis and close reading […] and getting them to model those skills. Other students could see how they had looked at a passage and how they had moved on to an argument from it. But [I also loved about annotation] that people were having responses to a text as a reader — like logging their emotional response — in a way that — especially as we were managing a remote classroom — really could build some community and some camaraderie. I had students who — I thought of them as my researchers who go down every wikipedia rabbit hole or every additional primary source they found — could show it to the other students. [Alicia Maggard, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=850, 14:10]

Once students feel they know the conventions and how things are usually done, many have the necessary self-confidence to experiment with new ways of looking at things, with new ideas and adding their own creativity to the text.

And instead of just talking about how writing is a conversation and (supposedly) social in nature, social annotation immediately demonstrates to students that it really can be.

“We’re always sort of saying that writing is a conversation and it starts with reading. And there’s a big connection we’re always kind of preaching. But I think that the more that we can demonstrate that in kind of an active process the more that actually means something to students.” [Anna Mills, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=690, 11:30]

07. Layering

What students take from texts often differs significantly from what the author intended. We approach texts with our own biases and knowledge interests, and depending on those, we will pick out different things that matter to us. Social annotation allows students to bring their own subjectivity to the text and share it with others.

“Particularly in the classroom […] every student is an absolute expert on their own lived experiences. And they are bringing that into their reading of a text. Having the opportunity to read that alongside them and hear their different perspectives, their different takeaways, what is objectively important to them, what points they are having challenges with, I think that is huge, and it brings so much depth and range to the reading of a text and the understanding of a text. […] I think that is changing the way that we read.” [Andy Petersen, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=1312, 21:52]

Social annotation digitizes the process of taking out something that matters to you from a text and building on that, adding layers upon layers of interactions and annotations.

“You are having those rich discussions in class [and you can] have your students also revisit that Hypothesis document and then add more annotations on top of that, after they’ve met live, whether that be remotely or HyFlex. That could be a great way to have this living breathing document that is no longer passive. You’ve interacted with it before class, you are talking about it during class and then after class you are adding more rich discussion points into that document.” [David Serna, https://youtu.be/yShF-bCcbEo?t=1800, 30:00]

Everyone makes a text their own in a different way. Everyone takes out and contextualizes ideas differently so that they are relevant within their own horizon of experience. Students bring their own universe to the text. If you don’t address that, you won’t be able to change their mind.

“Because I knew of some of the advantages of [the] kind of close intimate work with material I have always been trying to get back to high-touch kinds of activities. I really strongly believe that. There was a wonderful set of research studies […]. Basically they say that students don’t come to us as empty vessels waiting to be filled. They come with their own set of ideas, their own mental models for how the world works. And if you never directly talk to them about how they think, about the material you are showing them, or the processes that you are trying to explain, then you really aren’t able to do much in terms of changing their mind because what the research shows is that they will conform to what you are asking them to do for a while but it doesn’t create lasting impressions. One of the things that I would like to think is that if you go through a class with me is that it doesn’t just end at the end of those 14 or 15 weeks.” [Silvia Muller, https://youtu.be/xEwdgVs-q9I?t=177, 2:57]

Once that subjectivity of the learner is embraced and connected with the subjectivity of other learners, lasting and memorable experiences are generated. The propositional outcome, i.e. the paper, at the end of such an engagement refers to actual discussions, to actual discourse-experiences.

“Maybe this is my personal experience but something that you learn in a social way you learn more deeply because you can connect it to people, a time and a place. And remembering that you really disagreed with somebody in the class about one instance, or maybe you felt really validated when five people responded to your comment in the margin with ’did he really say that?’, makes that real to you in a way that trying to get through your history reading when you are tired at night and you don’t know anyone in the class maybe doesn’t make it as memorable and as enriching.” [Alicia Maggard, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=971, 16:11]

Going through that process of friction and inspiration with the text results in students holding defensible and arguable positions instead of simply repeating what the textbooks or their teachers say.

In embracing that students have the right to their own perspective and fostering that they develop it, they then end up with knowledge that truly matters to them. And they also take responsibility for what they have read.

“There is an aspect to social annotation which is accountability. In the sense that if you have been assigned a reading, you have to come with the receipts. Everybody else can see what you have done in terms of reading and what your thoughts are. You can’t ‘weasel’ your way out of it. […] I don’t want it to use it as a ‘cop technology,’ but it allows you to see who got stuff and who didn’t get stuff.” [Arun Jacob, https:// youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=1378, 22:58]

And returning back to the initial annotations, the initial first-draft thoughts, students can see how their understanding has grown and changed during the semester.

“[I] wanted to do something very different for the final exam. I like the idea of a finale rather than a final. So I had [the students] return to their annotations, to each annotated article, for their final exam and find an annotation and respond to it in such a way to demonstrate how their understanding of something has evolved over the course of the semester. In that case, they were returning to the annotations at the end of the semester and going through all of them that way.” [Alison Koleszar, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=1582, 25:23]

08. Making Bias Conscious

One often hears that bias is supposedly bad. Following this assumption, Hypothesis is often facing the opinion from teachers that using it would make the students just more biased in merely copying what others say.

Yet, is bias really always problematic? Can’t we think of situations where bias is something productive?

In trusting suggestions from friends or colleagues about what to pay attention to, we basically default to the bias that something is worth having a look at without requiring any further proof or explanation.

This is productive bias. We mostly revert to such bias, even in science, to be able to ask meaningful new questions. Assuming that bias is a ‘bad’ thing would mean that whenever someone shows us something, we couldn’t pay attention to it because this would make us ‘biased’ and ruin the content for us. This seems obviously not right.

“Imagine if I’m on Twitter or if I email you and said, ‘hey, this article is really interesting, and you should pay attention to this part where the author says this.’ If you email me back and said, ‘you know, well, now that you told me that, I really can’t read this. You spoiled it for me’.” [Chris Gilliard, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=1332, 22:12]

Instead of trying to avoid bias, we can also go in the opposite direction: make it conscious and visible. Make the assumptions that we as a community make approaching a text as explicit as possible.

Conscious bias is disarmed bias. Its harmful potential is limited simply because we see it as one possible frame among many. We know we can frame an issue differently and know the many ways in which we could be wrong and our bias limiting.

Once all dominant options are on the table through social annotation, we can get down to inspecting them more closely and pondering which strategies are best apt for which actual challenges.

We do away with bias, in other words, not by denying it and simply claiming objectivity, but by making it conscious and visible to see for all. Where it comes from, what it consists of, wherein it fails.

Seeing other people’s reactions to text through annotations can then serve as an inspiration for our thinking and help us expand our bias instead of making us more biased.

“Other people’s perspectives are not set in stone. Other people’s perspectives are, in fact, invitations for your perspective. They open up the conversation. It’s like a conversation, and people are sharing their ideas. That doesn’t necessarily mean that those ideas restrict you from sharing your ideas. Your ideas could add more to the conversation. So if we begin to view [bias] in that sense, the more there is on the page, the more marvellous the experience can be. Because now we’re no longer living in black and white or grayscale. We’re actually living in a multifarious environment that is just seeping with colors and perspectives. And we can find certain angles or certain connections or certain branches with which we identify completely, not so completely, or just partially. Or we don’t identify at all, we’re like ‘what are you talking about? I’ve never heard this before, could you expand on this?’” [Nima Kianfar, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=1210, 20:10]

09. Bottom-up Information Flow

Social annotation creates channels for information flow between individuals, groups and spaces. By getting their very own channel students can thus speak to and interact with their own audience.

“I am kind of frustrated when I am the only audience for students’ response papers. Hypothesis allowed them to practice writing to an audience of their peers. I found it to be hugely motivating for students who would want to see how other students had reacted. I thought that it allowed them to process some of the information of reading through conversation and then also the way that they could make it more multimedia. So the fact that I was getting YouTube links, YouTube videos, Wikipedia links, pictures in the margins just allowed students to bring that material to life in ways that they were not always feeling welcome to do in response papers.” [Alicia Maggard, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=523, 8:43]

In creating channels for information flow from the students to the teachers Hypothesis can de-center the classroom. It can include students in the research process itself, make them feel recognised and needed and motivate them to read and ask for more reading.

“One of the things I have really realized is that the value of Hypothesis is it allows me to de-center authority within the classroom. I realize that with our educational system in the really kind of ‘top-down’ lecture format, students are not reading because they generally don’t have to. Because they will show up in a classroom, the teacher will say everything that the teacher wants to say, and that authority is they’re kind of gripping onto that authority. With Hypothesis, I set a culture up almost immediately in the classroom that there are no right or wrong answers. I’m not after an end game of making sure that ‘you get it right’. What I do is I set up a reader apprenticeship very early on, and then I encourage them to comment to one another, and I take a step back. It really allows me to go into the background and act as a cheerleader, and so I’m able to practice appreciative response and really highlight when students are saying amazing things. I think this de-centering is crucial to getting our students to start to read.” [Brandon Marshall, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1583, 26:23]

This de-centering changes the power-structure within the classroom, making teachers more human and less scary. While students become an integral part of the learning process, explicitly learning from each other and adding to the discourse.

“[Hypothesis] breaks down that power structure — just a little bit, not fully — between the instructor and the student. [When] you are engaging in these things like Twitter, where they can respond, and you are reading alongside them, I think you are more human to them. You are picking up on the jokes, you are confused at the same time as them, you are looking up things, linking in new ideas. So I think that kind of destabilizing the power dynamic also makes learning a little bit less scary — maybe more accessible.” [Hayley Stefan, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=1181, 19:41]

Once information flow in these channels is set up properly through assigning meaningful tasks — like to model what type of annotations they can make, to invite to create abstracts, contextualizations, ask questions and so on — students tend to figure things out for themselves and bring something to the table.

“I think one of the really transformative aspects of [social annotation] is that students actually bring something to the classroom. That it is not all just coming from you and it’s not like they are empty. We are giving them all the information, they bring a lot to our classrooms and with Hypothesis I am in there jumping in once in a while to kind of steer the conversation but it is really centered around them and them helping one another out.” [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=2840, 47:20]

This changes the relationship to what is happening within the classroom for students. They become active co-creators of knowledge and see how their own efforts at meaning-making can be picked up and end up as publications, as something visible for others.

“The power of social annotation is to change how we think about publishing. For so long we give students curated texts and they might note on them, they might write on them in the margins but they are not able to make that public and so there is no public and collaborative component. It is just really cool to see students be able to highlight what they value, call into question text, and then of course make these really cool connections that we haven’t seen before. What we try to do […] is to really encourage everyone to be a part of the publishing process so that it is not this ‘one- way’ street, your students come in the class, get the information and leave, it is more collaborative in both ways.” [Monica Brown, https://youtu.be/XMNSOvW3H3c?t=943, 15:43]

And sometimes the teachers learn more from the students than the other way around.

“One thing that I like about social annotation is that […] our students come with their own life experiences and that impacts how they view the material. [Social annotation] gives students multiple means of engagement, of interaction, of expression. [We sometimes] actually learn more from the students than we are teaching to them. It also puts the students in the driver’s seat so the students instead of becoming passive receptacles for the knowledge they become the creators of the knowledge and the learning with social annotation.” [Rachel Derr, https://youtu.be/xEwdgVs-q9I?t=470, 7:50]

Roles can still remain distinct and teachers can have different responsibilities, like making sure that learning-goals are met, making sure that conflicts are faced, picking out ideas and questions that are most relevant for the discourse.

“[I] give [students] examples and then in class, if we meet face to face, then I will pull out questions or points of confusion or really good observations that were made in the margins and then talk about that in the class. If you are all online, then I try to come back after the fact and make some comments about things that students have written. But I do try to wait a little bit on that, so I will often precede an annotation, but then I will let the conversation kind of evolve. Because I don’t want it to be ‘here are these interesting things that people have said’ and then I, as the professor, come in ‘oh yeah, great, here look at this check this out’. I want the students to actually be having that conversation amongst themselves. So I will give them sometimes a couple of days, sometimes over a week, before I come back in to kind of ‘mop up’ and resolve any issues that might still be lingering there.” [Jennifer Blake-Mahmud, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=1373, 22:53]

But nonetheless, the students are given a voice as well and something constructive to do. The very structure of the exchanges, anchored in the original text and guided by concrete questions and connections, results in something like a civic tool that can organize meaning making and counter disinformation.

“We address the challenges of the ‘post-truth’ moment in the conclusion of our book. And we talk a bit about how annotation can be leveraged for social good. I don’t want to suggest in any way that annotation is a ‘silver bullet’. But I think that there are a number of initiatives — now particularly in civic media spaces — that are beginning to identify some useful strategies around fact-checking, around the ways in which people can engage productively in conversation and have also in some cases actually engaged in things like crowd-sourced legislation, developing ways to actually have civic conversations together and then inform actual civic change. And we articulate a few of those examples in our book. I don’t in any way — particularly because so much of what can occur in the social media space is, of course, actually quite dangerous and misinformation and disinformation are rather rife — suggest that somehow social annotation is going to create a more robust democracy. I do want to suggest though that the social annotation practices in certain contexts can contribute and may be useful as a kind of broader toolkit in finding ways of perhaps making more viable socially useful conversations. That might come from media fact-checking. [E.g.] Many large speeches or event-transcripts of comments from politicians are often annotated as a form of fact-checking, which is for me one example of the way in which there is some promise around social annotation contributing to a more informed and productive public discourse.” [Remi Kalir, https://youtu.be/J--RVqcNoGo?t=2268, 37:48]

10. Publish While You Research

What I found very frustrating as a student was that I was not given the chance to contribute to the discourse. It felt like working hard without making a difference. I have often had conversations with peers on how nobody reads their dissertations, and how frustrating it is not to see a visible outcome of all the effort one has put into research.

Social annotation, on the other hand, allows students to make contributions to the discourse. From day one, they are creators themselves, adding references and links to other texts, asking questions, summarizing ideas, and evaluating claims.

“What I have wanted to do with all of my classes for years now is [to avoid] disposable assignments. I don’t like marking something up with a red pen and giving it back. [I want students to] think about who their audience is, write for each other, and comment on each other’s comments. [The idea is to] talk to your parents, talk to your roommates, talk to the broader world, rather than to me.” [John Stuart, https:// youtu.be/ravRW5Ixb6s?t=782, 13:02]

The first audience of such learning endeavours through social annotation is the students’ own peers. Students often learn more from each other than they learn from their teachers. But without a (social) technology to cultivate that act, it remains a coincidence, not something that is an official part of class, but something that happens in non-formal discussions between classes.

“I am starting to realize that [using Hypothesis to gather student-reactions] can be the first step toward collaboratively creating an addition with my students for future students. [The] idea of ‘I don’t want disposable assignments, I want the writing that my students wind up somewhere’ is coming together with annotation. I am pursuing a project where students will write initial annotations in Hypothesis, revise them in Hypothesis, and then submit a formal assignment. And then during the summer or the winter break, I will incorporate that into an addition that moves forward. And it will not be in Hypothesis, it will be in the actual text.” [Mary Isbell, https://youtu.be/ravRW5Ixb6s?t=1180, 19:40]

With social annotation, students can raise topics and papers to become part of the class.

“I certainly have tracked down references that my students have linked to and brought them into the classroom. It would just be one step further, a little work for me, but I could upload those as another assignment, and students could then be annotating a related piece that was found by another student.” [Addie Clark, https://youtu.be/XMNSOvW3H3c?t=1503, 25:03]

And this can go even beyond punctual contributions. Social annotations can be systematised to form entire living and changing Open Educational Resources, making texts more accessible and easier to contextualize for the novice or layperson, even covering entire fields for which no textbooks have been written yet.

“[I] have been assigning them (the students) parts of other OERs and having them go through and tell me what they think is important to then build the OER from tags. […] So I have been doing that in my environmental chemistry course this year. I am teaching a new and different general chemistry course, and I am building the OER again, and instead of it being a reading quiz, the students’ assignment is to go through and tag the open chemistry sections that we are covering to help me build the next general chemistry OER for the course.” [Emily Ragan, https://youtu.be/XMNSOvW3H3c?t=784, 13:04]

Such public-facing work is an essential part of not only students developing self- esteem but also feeling appreciated, seen, and getting motivated.

“We have done some great stuff with our interdisciplinary studies ‘textbook’, which again I really think of as a ‘community’. It has got a lot of peer-reviewed open-source articles from various places. But it also has a bunch of student writing that current students in the program annotate. And a lot of those students, when they go on and graduate, they are still there, but people are annotating their essays. And we end up with this really wonderful thing where students are seeing their peers as people who can participate in a scholarly conversation and contribute scholarly content. It really keeps our alumni hooked into the community because they get pinged on these various annotations as they are coming in. So they are always excited about seeing that we are still teaching their work a couple of years after they leave and graduate.” [Robin DeRosa, https://youtu.be/XMNSOvW3H3c?t=1868, 31:08]

But thought even further, public-facing work is also an essential part of civil society, where our educational institutions don’t do whatever they do in isolation, as bubbles, wherein students speak only to their peers and their teachers but open themselves up to the public at large and offer public-facing work as an orientational guide for ‘outsiders’ to get a grasp on what a specific knowledge community is engaged with.

As a stepping-stone or gateway for others to have an access point into educational institutions and take up a learning path as well.

11. Fluid Encounters Around Shared Concerns

Annotation is not something new; we have been annotating for ages.

“One could suggest that some flavors of social annotation have existed in print books. In Victorian England, people would write in books and then pass them along to their neighbors as a way of sharing their thoughts with each other, and that was, of course, happening hundreds of years ago.” [Remi Kalir, https://youtu.be/J--RVqcNoGo?t=1804, 30:05]

But how is a group of students annotating each other’s works ‘social’? How is annotating something in a book and passing it along ‘social’?

I think the potentially social part is that seeing your peers’ annotations is a unique opportunity to find relevant others. When in a group of 400 students, the chances of picking the one person that you will have an engaging discourse with are almost nil.

But flip this around. What if we center around a piece of text, and the text becomes like a place to meet? What are the chances of having an engaging discourse if you pick out only those people who also commented on the same piece of text as you did?

“My colleague Jeremy [Dean] often talks about how we can think of the reading as a place to meet, more like a place, instead of a book or a thing.” [Nate Angel, https://youtu.be/84UJ7I_IpDE?t=311, 5:11]

Just like real places that can bring people together by being about something that people share as a concern, so can annotations bring people together. They can then find each other in the margins of a text. They can meet around something very specific, be it an idea or quote.

“If you are a student in a course and you don’t know all the other students yet or if you want to dive into annotation as part of an organized experience on the web […] you are very vulnerable to add a comment in the margin of a text and you don’t really know who the people are who are going to see, to read your comment. And so at first, you have to get over that hump of fear [of] ‘how are the readers of this text going to think about my annotation, about my comment’. But I have found […] when people start replying to your comment, it all is really invigorating and exciting that something that came to mind at this point in the reading also resonated with something similar for someone else. Then I feel like that starts to build connections and links between a group of people who find themselves in the margin of a text. If you can leverage that, I think that can help build community around shared interests.” [Christine Moskell, https://youtu.be/xr9RGK27DuU?t=1772, 29:32]

Social annotation is not only about commenting on a text. It is about talking to each other while commenting on a text. The text becomes the link between otherwise disparate individuals.

“I think what is great about Hypothesis is that thinking becomes public or public to our group and you are not just talking to the text, you are talking to the text and talking to your classmates at the same time.” [Caitie Cotton, https://youtu.be/YZbemy1pQVs?t=459, 7:39]

The moment you find a passage that is relevant to you and inspires you, you can expand the margins and look out for others who have commented on that same passage.

This is a unique way of meeting new people when the first thing you notice about them is not their hair color or what they wear but what they have to say on something that you care about. Once one gets one’s perspective on a text out there, this can lead to some of the most interesting conversations.

“It is definitely great when somebody you know will put a question on something that they don’t understand — maybe it is a reference or maybe it is just a move in a scholarly argument that they are not following — and to get to watch their classmates respond to it. […] It is really rewarding when they are discussing analysis like ‘I’m not sure how they are making this point or what the broader significance is’, that is when you get to the best conversations, when a student is brave enough to put that question out there. Those are some of my favourite annotations, they often lead to the best kind of notes in the margin for our collective notes.” [Alicia Maggard, https://youtu.be/iLBLFXEy2Qs?t=2493, 41:33]

This conversation can also happen in a protected space, where one can feel safe to speak about sensitive topics.

“Social annotation creates a safe space. [In] nursing we talk about sensitive topics. And you will ask a question in class and the room is silent. But when you put it into social annotation by giving them (the students) an article to look at they feel safer because it is an online environment where they feel safer to say what they are thinking.” [Rachel Derr, https://youtu.be/xEwdgVs-q9I?t=600, 10:00]

And the text, being an anchor between perspectives, can bring together individuals with very different knowledge and experiences, bridging even disciplinary boundaries.

“I teach molecular biology classes […] in a biotechnology program that has undergraduate students and graduate students in the same class. […] Some of the papers that we look at are really dense. And while we may have grad students […] on the other side of the divide I have undergraduates […] who may not feel comfortable in person talking to the grad student because they are intimidated. On Hypothesis, when we annotate papers together […] what I have seen is there are more interactions between grad students and undergrads.” [Carlos Goller, https://youtu.be/O38H-5udUo4?t=852, 14:12]

Instead of circling the conversation with a stranger from the outside in, from trivia and small talk to what you care about, you jump right into the juicy stuff. This is how social annotation prepares for fluid encounters around shared concerns.

You thus have more exchanges with more different people, but these are much more goal-oriented and centered around common interests and problems.

12. Differentiation

Every annotation is anchored in a concrete text passage. With every annotation one is responding to very specific and concrete ideas.

“I have always felt one of the most powerful things about social annotation is that it takes what could be that same conversation that is usually happening somewhere else anyway — on Twitter or in the discussion forum — but it anchors it literally on top of discrete passages of the text itself. And I feel that is one of the most powerful things about it, that the conversation and the text are just right on top of each other, which makes it more connected and less disassociated. Right from that, you go off to write a reflection piece.” [Nate Angel, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=2388, 39:48]

We are thus layering ideas onto others and making these connections between ideas visible and permanent, in the margins. In being visible they become conscious.

“The way I have always thought about social annotation is having conversations about a text on a text. So really, grounding those discussions in textual moments as students respond to the text. And I always encourage them to respond to one another as well. That was something that I felt very strongly about. So that they could make those connections with one another and with their own experiences and on the text itself. I often find that when students will read something they will make those connections but not be aware of those connections. So those moments where they can trace ideas that are valuable to them. I think we all overestimate what we are going to remember or what the significance was. But interrupting the reading to take those moments of reflection can be valuable as well. So I think that for me the conversations about the text on the text is key.” [Chris Kervina, https://youtu.be/ZcGc4tTSmTA?t=1022, 17:02]

With social annotation, contrary to discussion boards, where the resolution of the raised topics is basically open, every statement that you post is hooked to a passage in the original text it belongs to. A well-chosen primary text can thus be embellished with layers and layers of conversation.

“I have really loved with Hypothesis that we have been able to have some of those preliminary conversations flesh things out and discuss things. […] I have been a part of groups before where we have just had twitter chats and those can be great. But oftentimes you are only really getting at that first level. Using Hypothesis we are really able to get to that first level and then take it to the next level in our twitter chat and then sometimes we will even bring it back and folks will go back after the twitter chat and make more annotations, put links in, do different things. So we really get a lot of depth that I am not sure that we would get otherwise.” [Andy Petersen, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=730, 12:10]

Social annotation thus grounds discussions in concrete and very specific ideas and claims. This fosters differentiation rather than generalization. The small details matter here more than totalizing claims. And instead of a resounding generalizing ‘I like’ vs. ‘I dislike’, reactions through social annotation can show the readers a range of different takes on the very same passage.

“I love the idea of using Hypothesis like a peer review. We have instructors that are using Hypothesis in place of a discussion board because you can layer the conversation with students, the author of the text, and the instructor on the place where the conversation would naturally be happening — around the text. I like the fact that students see their names in the margins right next to a published author’s name.” [Kat King, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=2075, 34:35]

You can have ten different reactions to different passages in a text, and they might be across the entire spectrum of knowledge emotions. But at no point do you treat the text as one single blob to either love or hate. Your reactions instead are line-specific and about something very concrete.

If layers upon layers of differentiation are added to the text in a structured and orderly way, an entire community can come up with a map and evaluation of all major ways in which to interpret the text and where to go from there. Which then shows all the possible ways in which a passage can become relevant to others.

Reflexivity and construct-awareness are built right into the margins, for all — even the novice — to see. Constructs become visible as constructs. You thus see how differentiation and self-contextualisation of one’s perspective is done even before knowing about it (this is self-contextualisation) as a concept.

13. Wormholes

When reading a text, we create a web of horizontal connections to our own experiences and personal biases. We comprehend what we read when the text can align with our pre-understanding and conceptual framework. This act of horizontally connecting to one’s own experiences and pre-understanding can be used as a conscious reading strategy. And the margins are the perfect place for it. Here, pre-understanding can be made visible without being obstructive.

“I ask students to make connections to [the text]. That could be connecting what they read to their lives; it can be connecting it to other books, articles, movies, songs, or events. As you’re reading, think of what this reminds you of.” [Maritez Apigo, https://youtu.be/Qm-KvpygL8Q?t=1018, 16:58]

With social annotation, we move from an invisible web of privately shared connections (in private conversations, letters, diaries, or notes, scribbles, and annotations) or an unordered mess of visible fragments (social media) to becoming an ordered, visible, and searchable web of such connections attached right there to the text that they belong to. Attached by coordinated communities of learners and not isolated individuals.

“[G]oing forward, [I want to] ask my students, as one of their three annotations for every text, to make a connection either to another text we have read, or a class discussion we have had, or to the real world, or to another one of their classes. I think there is some research around this being like a place where a lot of learning happens for students, where they start making connections between their classes. […] I am hoping that will help students get in the mode of thinking about how these learning experiences can go from being these discrete modular things to being these more interconnected cumulative things.” [Alex Penn, https://youtu.be/3jFd9UYdjlE?t=2194, 36:34]

These private connections become visible as possible connections to others with social annotation. What might seem like an obvious and easy connection to you might be an important hint to others. And this is not something new. We have been doing this forever. Such connections have been communicated through paratext, text that is specifically about other text, forever. Such paratexts are everywhere.

Think of how we watch a movie. We don’t just consume it out of the blue. Full stop. First, we hear about it from somebody else — a paratext. We see the title popping up here and there — a paratext. We read a review about it — a paratext. Only then do we get to experience it. And after we have watched it, then again, we return to engaging with paratext about it and expanding our connections.

“We don’t just watch a TV show. You have to have the build-up to the TV show, and then you have to go find out what was spoken about it. And so in that way, we don’t just consume text in isolation anymore. It is the recognition as educators that these texts come with paratexts that the reader is consuming. So social annotations are a way to recognize that and fold it into teaching practice, which was happening in other spaces anyway. And if that is incorporated into it, that could change the way that teachers are thinking about reading. If every bit of literature that you assign comes with other ‘fan texts’ associated with it, then let’s fold that in. And in annotations, it is like, ‘oh, these students are going to generate x number of words along with this’ as well. And account for that and then count that as reading material as well.” [Arun Jacob, https://youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw?t=2081, 34:41]

And once such paratexts are visible and structured in an orderly fashion, some of the many connections made can stand out. Instead of being mere horizontal connections to commonly shared concepts from the lifeworld, some of the connections can stand out as being ‘vertical,’ i.e., linking up to entire other frames of thinking and reasoning. One way of inviting these vertical connections is by crossing disciplinary boundaries and making connections across disciplines visible.

“If you are consuming […] the Hamilton musical. If you had to annotate that or if you are reading that, it is like not only are you learning the history of it, then you get a little history of rap lesson there as well, and then you get to find out all the other details. There is so much of different streams of information from different domains of information that are coming together and being braided in here for you to understand [through social annotations]. So rather than being a learner of a subject in isolation here, that interdisciplinary nature and multidisciplinary nature of work that can be done is more explicit and out in the open so it lets all of us think about how to pivot to thinking in multi and cross-disciplinary fashion.” [Arun Jacob, https:// youtu.be/oTsGpqWOOIw, 37:40]

This verticality works against the compartmentalization of knowledge practices, traditions, and even academic fields. We can use the wormhole metaphor for it. Where one piece of text might move you through the help of others into an entirely different coherent universe.

“I just really love the idea — as we are reading through things — of going down wormholes. Frankly, I really encourage students to do that in their annotations. I think that there is this tendency to compartmentalize Science […] and not see the applications of it. And so I really love it when students use annotations not just with text but with multimedia to really find these different connections and find these different ‘wormholes’.” [Alison Koleszar, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=937, 15:37]

Social annotation also allows us to gather connections as a community, in all directions. Not only horizontal connections within a discipline or frame of thought, but also vertical wormholes into entirely different ways of sense-making.

“The students in my class often come from a lot of different majors. Some of them are gender studies majors, but gender studies a lot of times is not a primary major. We have a lot of minors or double majors. So for me, the gender studies class really overlaps with so many other disciplines. And the social annotation allows the students to bring their experience from these other disciplines into the class. So students have talked about what they have learned in their anthropology classes. I think an annotation this week had a criminal justice major talking about what she has learned in criminal justice applies to the gender and technology things we were discussing — with algorithms and facial recognition. [Social annotation is a good way] to let those overlaps with other subjects creep in in a more natural way.” [Christie DeCarolis, https://youtu.be/xEwdgVs-q9I?t=735, 12:15]

This can break the natural tendency of students to fall into compartmentalization and learning solely for the test.

“It does fall to the instructor to facilitate connections and to encourage the transfer of thinking and knowledge because students are so used to compartmentalizing not only their courses but the coursework within their courses. In a test-based culture, students are learning, learning, learning, taking the test, forgetting to make room for more, learning, learning, learning for another test. Something that brought me into writing studies was the practice of mindfulness and encouraging students to be actively aware of the thoughts that are coming in that might seem unrelated but are actually tangential to and connected with the core text that is being studied. So encouraging students to follow the distractions and think about where they are taking them and not discouraging somebody who is reading Foucault in their 131 class from thinking about how that applies to their psych 101 course that they are also taking. So really keeping it open-ended and saying ‘yeah, that is a really interesting question, even if you don’t answer the question like Alex was saying’, letting students respond to students is a really valuable way to continue the conversation.” [Laura Rosche, https://youtu.be/ 3jFd9UYdjlE?t=2246, 37:26]

Social annotation thus mimics associative and transformative learning as a strategy, by design. Associative and transformative learning combined have no disciplinary boundaries; they treat reality as a whole to be experienced and known. This reverts the trend of compartmentalization that has become even more dominant in times of online education, where knowledge exists as relative to distinct modules and spaces unrelated to each other.

Students can thus collectively make connections between disciplines, between different courses they take, between paradigms, and between the lifeworld and specialized academic discourse. Opening a text, you see these connections right there in the margins. You see how an idea presented in the text is reacted to in other academic disciplines. You see how the findings in other academic disciplines have an impact on the topic at hand.

You see both the connections your peers and teachers make and the connections existing between ideas and disciplines. In other words, you see the ‘depth’ of the world right there in front of you.

14. Empowerment

“[Hypothesis is] empowering to them [the students] because I’m annotating not just, you know, ‘this is what you should be thinking about, student,’ but I’m annotating where I’m confused or where I’m questioning the meaning or where I’m having reactions. Sometimes I don’t want to shape their response too much, but I’m showing them my process as a reader, so hopefully, that’s empowering.” [Anna Mills, https://youtu.be/nIWjYTHK4nM?t=456, 7:36]

It is empowering because it shows students that a change of mind and uncertainty, ‘imperfections’, are a necessary part of development. It, to some extent, takes away their intrinsic fear of not living up to the normative expectations of “perfection” and “knowledge”. It makes visible all the doubts and possible crossroads involved in all sense-making. None of which usually make it to the final publications, though.

“For me, it has been a situation where I think that students often feel like they are the only one who is having some issues with understanding what is going on. And they are a little afraid to question or to speculate. But once it becomes a more social activity, they seem to be more inclined to take a little bit more of a risk in their reading and to be a little bit more open.” [Chris Kervina, https://youtu.be/ZcGc4tTSmTA?t=555, 9:15]

And social annotation, beyond embracing uncertainty and dirty subjectivity, allows students to have a meaningful impact on the world around them with their very own learning effort and voice.

Having moved from a relatively broken country to one of the most equitable societies in human history, with pretty much any domain of human concern being taken care of by either institutions or specialists who care about it — everything from Landschaftsarchitektur to environmental protection and specialized knowledge — I still felt one basic human need remained unaddressed, though, or even worse, was taken care of by others.

The human need to make a difference. To have a voice. The better a society does, the more areas are taken care of by specialized communities and institutions, the less you can, as an individual, make a difference, the less there is left for you to ‘fix’, since all you can do, these specialized communities can do better and at scale.

We can, as a species, continue the cycle of endless destruction upon every turn, of which we then again feel the need to rebuild everything. Or we can attempt to make people feel needed by their voices actually being necessary and important.

The way social media approaches this today, though, is to pretend that your voice is needed, while it is not. It is needed to generate content and traffic. But it, in fact, isn’t needed for the matters at hand. We can turn this upside down. We can make voices heard where they are indeed needed. This is regarding something very specific. In very specific resolutions. With very specific validity. While silencing totalizing voices. Voices that attempt to own and dominate the entire discourse. Unconditionally.

By having their voices heard in the margins, students can have an influence on the direction a lecture will take. But they can also influence the discourse of the class and even the understanding of other classes to come in the future.

“I have [students] annotate their syllabus on the first assignment with Hypothesis. And I have them think about what that means. So I give them some scaffolded instructions like ‘one thing you like, one thing that is unclear, and then one thing that you could change’ because I am trying to get them to have some ownership and agency in their own learning. And the idea that they might be able to change something in a syllabus is oftentimes really foreign to them. It is new, and then that leads to a really interesting conversation about what their learning should look like and could be in our class for the year. And we typically spend a lot of time in the second or third class talking about that because they have never really been asked that question before.” [Justin Cerenzia, https://youtu.be/YZbemy1pQVs?t=1693, 28:13]

This is empowering in many ways. It makes visible your own bias and shows you the alternative routes that you can take. It makes thinking a matter of choice and less so a matter of unconscious driving forces that determine your position in advance.

But it also gives you the sense that with focused meaningful engagements, with transparent thought processes, you can have an influence on the thoughts and will of others.

15. Perspectives as distinct lenses

Social annotation is a process where everybody has a voice and can add their perspective in its integrity to a text. Social annotation thus brings a plurality of perspectives or lenses to a text, all of which have the same chance of being heard.

“The thing that, in my opinion, my math majors were missing the most is I didn’t see them engaging with the text — both writing but also reading. And not being able to be there present while my students were trying to read about a math concept, I was missing out on a lot of the formative thought process, that ‘wrestling match’ that we have with a new text, that my students were going through. Or maybe they were not, maybe they were just blowing it off because I think what we find a lot in math is the way that students use and interact with text is very different than the way that folks in the humanities do. […] But I was not there, there was not really a way for me to know how they were interacting with the text unless we could create a social annotation context around it. So when I saw that there were tools like Hypothesis, allowing one to do this with open resources […] that was one of those ‘aha’ moments for me that we could kind of have that experience in a virtual space of all gathering around a text.” [Matt Salomone, https://youtu.be/CfHy3WN1XGE?t=883, 14:43]

Annotation can not only add perspectives to an original perspective, but it also allows us to retain perspectival unity. Sometimes what we are interested in is not what a group of people say on a topic, but what a very specific person says on a topic.

This is expert annotation. Sometimes an expert, who has studied a field for decades, can say things about a text that a community of novices would not be able to come up with, even if you made that community to be a million voices.

“I think that we have seen some really useful examples of annotation. And this perhaps is where there is a useful distinction between ‘expert annotation,’ how people can markup the web and have access to that, as opposed to ‘social annotation,’ where maybe everybody is invited to jump into the conversation. You are seeing media outlets — in my assessment, reputable news organizations — who annotate transcripts, documents, legislation, where multiple experts are sharing the evidence that backs up a claim. They are sharing related legislation or resources, and they are fact-checking by pulling in other quotes or statements. They are making available through their expert opinion that information. And this is where reading expert annotation actually is very productive for learning. It may also be productive in a civic space, but there is an important difference between someone participating in social annotation and someone who has access to expert annotation of a text. Both can aid people’s learning, and both can really be useful. And so I think we are seeing now in domains beyond formal schooling experts who are making their annotations available to help inform the public. That is a great example of using digital resources, annotating them on the web, and having access to that information compared to social annotation, where maybe anybody can join.” [Remi Kalir, https://youtu.be/J--RVqcNoGo?t=2430, 40:30]

And there are many examples of Hypothesis aiding expert annotation:

“We could point to, for example, a project like ‘climate feedback,’ which is a group of volunteer scientists from around the world who essentially peer-review the news. When journalism is published concerning climate change, these scientists will go in, and they will publicly annotate — using social annotation tools like Hypothesis — specifically these news and media reports and then essentially provide that reporting with an evaluation of how scientifically valid the reporting is. There have been some really interesting outcomes from their work, and so I think that is a great example of seeing social annotation as enabling more scientifically accurate journalism — which of course we might say is a broad kind of social good. I should also mention that there is a new related effort right now coming out around COVID-19 research and reporting. With scientists also publicly annotating — for more informed civic and public discourse — research about COVID-19 and our current pandemic. I have always been really curious about social annotation because it can afford so many of these kinds of practices, a whole host of domains. I see it as maybe primary because of my work in education and as an educational researcher and as somebody who wants to design for and research learning, but maybe a climate scientist volunteer who peer-reviews the news would say that the primary purpose of social annotation is to hold journalists accountable to a high standard of journalism in order to make reporting about climate change more informed and effective. So maybe it depends upon your role and your professional responsibilities [what you take out of social annotation].” [Remi Kalir, https://youtu.be/J--RVqcNoGo?t=3500, 58:20]

Keeping these perspectives distinct allows us to filter out noise by perspective. Instead of applying the one “objective” filter to our data, we can approach our data with multiple lenses and exchange them.

And yet these perspectives are distinct but not isolated. You can see how they would interact; you can consciously browse to see what an expert thinks about a paragraph or idea since you can choose the voices to amplify and the voices to silence. You can see what individuals have to say on a specific issue, but you can also see what a community thinks about said issue. You can even see what someone who wrote a text retrospectively says about it:

“I really like this question. It is about visiting annotators. So do you ever have anyone — say the author of an article — come in and annotate their own article — or that could be an article that you wrote as well?” [Franny French, https://youtu.be/LCzyoGCCkn0?t=2081, 34:45]

This is how you gain a combination of both the elitism that is so typical of all academic fields, where hierarchy matters, while at the same time having all perspectives available. This serves as orientational feedback for both opinion leaders who are in actual power positions over the discourse and those who are just about to form an opinion on an issue.

16. Distributing Curation

One of the major tenets of modernity is the division of labor. We have learned to distribute large tasks and can thus achieve great things with many little efforts being put together. It is only consequential for us to also try to distribute intelligence, to have many little ‘thoughts’ add up into big thoughts that are complex enough to guide entire societies. In this vein, reading a text as a collective should be much more enriching than just facing it as an individual.

“When I think about notions of ‘distributed cognition,’ of cognition that is stretched across multiple texts, multiple people, and that really exists beyond the mind of myself, my thinking limited to my head is really rather insufficient when compared to the thinking that exists when I am having a conversation with others. […] Our thinking together has far more potential to be consequential, particularly in a teaching and learning context, and social annotation makes that distributed cognition viable and pliable. It allows us to work with one another and our texts in very consequential ways. That is one of the really exciting things about social annotation for me.” [Remi Kalir, https://youtu.be/J--RVqcNoGo?t=2625, 43:45]

Yet it is very difficult to distribute thinking. It resembles the attempt to distribute language. We cannot distribute language by making every individual an expert on only one word. Putting a million individuals who know only one word together would not result in a shared rich language of a million words. It would result in a million languages of one word. Just as with a language, where we need everybody to be able to speak “the whole” of it, before they can add and expand on it in creative ways, so with thinking, we need to see the whole Kósmos, before we can add on it and expand on it with particular ideas.

That is the big challenge of distributing intelligence. We cannot simply distribute thoughts and hope that putting a million people with a million different thoughts together would result in a shared intelligence with the depth of a million nodes. Rather, we would have a million separated nodes doing their own relatively simple single thing and being blind to the complexity of their environment.

What we can distribute, though, is curation. We can distribute the conquering of topics and texts as collectives because these can be separated into single tasks that can then be re-integrated into a whole. For this to be possible, reading assignments need very specific goals and roles.

For example, one specific goal would be to summarize, whether a paragraph, chapter, or an entire book and oeuvre. Another specific goal would be to criticize. Yet another would be to create connections. If every student provides a summary for one paragraph of a text, these can be put together ex post to summarize the entire text. If every student expresses what matters most to them about a text, this can then easily be re-integrated to see a heat map of what matters most to a community of readers in a text. And further such goals are possible, going beyond micro-tasks into integrative roles, bridging different perspectives.

“A student would be assigned the role of ‘facilitator.’ The students were all collectively reading over the weekend, preparing for Tuesday’s class. The facilitator’s job was to jump in and encourage the conversation, make some connections, point out who is agreeing and who is disagreeing to further the conversation. […] The next role was the ‘synthesizer.’ The synthesizer for Tuesday’s class jump-starts our class conversation by synthesizing the conversation that we had about the annotations from Tuesday. They bring up the ideas, they bring up disagreements. But they are really pulling these ideas together and asking questions for us to think about for the Thursday class. And then the ‘summarizer’ would turn in a summary of the week’s findings, discourse arguments, tensions, questions that we developed and create a summary.” [Cindy Garcia, https://youtu.be/ut25Dm4eNhk?t=1470, 24:30]

All of these micro-goals and roles, with their respective responsibilities, can be coordinated to “add up.” This is one of the big potentials of social annotation; it can help us reduce complexity by breaking complex issues down into separable distinct parts that can then be re-integrated.

Thus, students can add layers to a text, explaining what the author meant without jargon, pointing to evidence, criticizing ideas, adding their own ideas on top. Every annotation can have its very own specific goal, style, and be of its own type of annotation.

And despite the increasing complexity of available text thus created, our very locus of attention need not get lost. On the opposite, the point of curation is precisely that: to order complexity along different lines and make it more accessible. The goal is not to spend more time online. The opposite: to spend less time more efficiently with the things that actually concern us and make us think.

What is thus achieved is not ‘objectivity.’ None of these summaries is the objectively ‘right’ summary. All of these syntheses are not the objectively ‘right’ way of contextualizing a text. Yet, they are an expression of collective subjective concerns. And that is what we started our journey with: the search for ways to make subjectivity visible and thus navigable.

All these activities, if properly planned and set out, can be re-integrated into covering entire domains of knowledge and making them more accessible. Not as piles of objective facts to memorize, but as visible concerns, units of meaning that matter to somebody and thus possibly, given the right situational context, to us.

[IV. Where Would we go From Here?]