That composition made it seem a little like the JSTOR team had their thumb on the scale–especially as they told us they anticipated a lot of similarities in the second round of brainstorming.
We invited lots of UT folks, but this was who actually came. The JSTOR team definitely didn't want to outnumber other participants--they'd already been through the exercise themselves. But it's true the composition was not ideal.
illuminated vacancy signs
Jim here is riffing on the central theoretical concept of "hospitality" (from Derrida) that underlies his criticism in the book.
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii
would love to go there!
His teachers did not see the value Garth found in exploring, building, and connecting online.
But MacArthur has. See their Connected Learning Research Hub.
Garth created and maintains his thriving YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/user/garmar2000/ ) where his interests, opin-ions, and creations come to life.
So cool!
a significant amount of his students’ online learning would occur on Google Docs (https://www.google.com/docs/about) as a space for writing and editing.
Is anybody looking into the longterm consequences of the Googlization of education? Of course, learning technologies (books, for example) have always been proprietary, but I'm not sure we've thought through what it means for us to sign all our students up for Google accounts? We own our books after buying them for the most part. Do we own our Google Docs?
littering the landscape with charred half-truths.
Nice extended metaphor.
What do you think about when you think about psychology?
My mother?...
Playground Mulch $44.92/cy
seems high...
Saturday 10% OFF Soil and Mulch P/Cu.Yd
mulch sale
To convert your figures to cubic yards, multiply the length, width and depth figures, then divide the result by 324.
measuring cubic yards
Kiddie Kushion $4.75 2.0cf bag $35.50
but one of the affordances of web annotation is the potential for massively open online reading.
So the distinction is perhaps private versus public note taking? I do still print things out to mark them up for myself. But of course, I can't share that in any effective way with Chris. Online, using a tool like hypothes.is I can. In this sense, web annotation is not replacing analog annotation, it's replacing previous forms of online dialogue: discussion forums and comment sections.
you then have a choice of making that comment public or private.
And very very soon you'll have the ability to share that annotation with a group you are a member of. So, if I'm a student of Mr. Sloan's and he invites me to his "English 12 Fall 2015" group, then I could just share me annotation with my teacher and classmates.
when it comes to close reading, students still prefer printing a PDF and annotating it with a pencil in hand.
Me too!
computers as reading-writing machines.
I suppose most people do. I was never into computer games really, but it was because of word-processing that my dad forced me to learn how to first navigate a screen.
I have noticed that the computer-as-gaming-platform has featured prominently in my continued interest in computers. I have always been more oriented to the humanities than to science and technology,
Gaming as the humanities of computer science?
the OCRed version
Note that you will see Krystyna Michael's class at NYU's Gallatin School annotating here since it's the same PDF as the one I shared with her. Even though it's hosted at a different URL--here's her WordPress page for the text--the annotations sync!
free or partially free web-hosted converters
Here's the version of the PDF I created using FineReader. I don't think the quality is as good as the Adobe Acrobat Pro one, but it's viable. You don't have unlimited conversion powers with this program, though.
The key revelation for me was how easy it is to OCR a text.
I should have said in text here that it was a conversation with Scott Robison, Director of Learning Technologies and Online Learning at Plymouth State, that inspired me to finally act on trying out some PDF converters.
Course packet binding options
I usually went with "comb"--I think it was probably cheaper. But, man, when those things come apart, it's over. The ideal for me, not surprisingly, was the "perfect" binding--with writing on the spine, you can't beat that.
(Some copiers and scanners in libraries have OCR built in, so steps two and three may be combined.)
One day you'll be able to just publish to your website directly from the Xerox machine. O Brave New World!
like editing my very own textbook or anthology!
Here's an assignment that outlines this kind of class project explicitly. And here are a couple of great examples of this kind of project in action:
I spent a long time curating these tomes
I think one year my course packet materials were so exhaustive that they had to bind it in two volumes. I took a certain perverse pride in this until I realized how much it would cost students and then I dialed it back.
It is advisable to spend a lesson introducing the idea of digital writing to students with particular attention to the use of images,
The New York Times Learning Network feature, "What's Going on in this Picture?" is a great place to start students thinking about the culture of images. For college level teachers, I recommend UT-Austin's Digital Writing and Research Lab's viz blog.
but I cannot lay m y finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.
The geographic then returns here with heightened, but elusive physicality.
The technology
Agh! Technology!
culturally significant landmark."
mark is the "significant landmark"
Austin is losing what makes it weird
I want to write a dissertation on this repeated refrain over the years. No doubt it's partially true, but the same claim is made every year in some op-ed article in some local newspaper or magazine. Austin has been becoming less weird since it first became weird.
the Dog and Duck Pub
They paved over paradise And put up a parking lot.
the deaths
Having just explained to my three-year-old daughter the difference between buildings dying and people dying, I'm sensitive to how strong this word choice/description is here.
prolific
wc? ethos?
This amount of drooling should come with a year’s supply of bibs.
Literally infantilizing the opposition.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.
References the subtitle of the classic Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.
The distinction between man and machine is under siege.
a reckless infatuation that ended with the eruption and crash of the Hindenburg in 1937.
Author does not mention it but he's the author of a book on the Hindenburg. Presumably this gives him the credentials to warn against modern-day zeppelllns.
My own salary and research are heavily supplemented by a generous gift from Tim Robertson, son of Christian Broadcasting Network mogul the Reverend Pat Robertson.
LOL
vapid “deliverables”
Is social change a "vapid deliverable"?
How do we square the tendency of left-learning academics, especially in the humanities, of making their work pseudo-policy-driven? (Asking as a former one such scholar myself.)
Much of that, including the research that sparked nanotechnology and personalized cancer treatment, ultimately yielded practical uses.
So then what is "disinterested knowledge" and is it really desirable?
deep wastewater
test
Communicative vs hermeneutic models
test
Berkeley, Calif.
Reich teaches at Berkeley.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive.
I actually feel like this sentence could be about hyopthes.is!
Anxiety of Obsolescence:
Just realized @kfitz is likely referencing Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973) here.
Governments of the Industrial World,
Strange to read this post-Prism program. But I wonder--even after the overreach of NSA surveillance--if it's not the Corporate Giants of the Post-Industrial World that we should be most wary/weary of.
by John Perry Barlow
Pretty legendary figure in American 20th/21st century culture, really: a cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and cyber rights activist. This is my favorite line from his Wikipedia page:
In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead, and also recruit many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as counterculture.
This is his cat:
John Perry Barlow
Pretty legendary figure in American 20th/21st century culture, really: a cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and cyber rights activist. This is my favorite line from his Wikipedia page:
In the meantime, Barlow was still able to play an active role in the Grateful Dead, and also recruit many unconventional part-time ranch hands from the mainstream as well as counterculture.
This is his cat:
It is not until the very last moment of the film that we see an undeniable miracle—bells ringing in the sky
For me--and I'm sure I'm not alone--one of the most intense cinematic moments in my film-going experience.
In this final shot we are actually POV of God which certainly adds dimension to the "joke" between character and audience.
After all, when I've graded and commented on papers, those comments are not public. I don't post them on the walls of my classroom.
Fair enough, but you've probably shared a graded paper with name crossed out with classes before, right, and that's clearly helpful for students to see. What's effective writing? What's not? How do we talk about writing?
So, if you are making (wc?) students write in public, why not ask them to take the full responsibility of that publishing? It's the scariest, but realist thing for any writer and I know that I personally only became a good writer when I knew my work was going to be read and responded to outside of a 5-page print-out with red ink on it.
At most, a few "exemplary" papers may be posted, but I don't think I've heard of all the feedback on every paper in a class being published, every time.
The papers are public to begin with here, right? It's the comments that aren't.
I would definitely consider my comments on a student blog in public different from those on a private student paper. It's a different genre that needs to be sensitive to your very valid concerns here. And they wouldn't sound like formal assessments. They would sound like open discussion of the process.
If' I'm promoting writing for an audience, should I also have all commenting and feedback public?
Yes, I think so. I think it's part of the deal, part of what it means, scary as that may be, to write publicly, to publish.
critiqued
Maybe it's this term that gives us pause. If we think about it as commentary, then perhaps it's okay--you'd respond to s student's comment in class, possibly critically, right?
Despite the insistence that digital technologies are “the future” and as such must be incorporated somehow into the classroom, “the future” remains an unknown.
Isn't this the case with any "the future" statement? Of course someone has to do something with it.
Part of the rhetoric of "the future" statements is simplicity, the one word of it all. But even Mr. McGuire tells Benjamin Braddock to "think about it."
situate themselves within the "map" of the controversy
Presumably this will require some citation of textual evidence from other stakeholders and to that extent I think it could be valuable to root this advocacy in annotation of primary sources.
At the very least, my annotations from Units 1 and 2 would likely prove incredibly helpful at this point in the term, as they could be the groundwork for my more argumentative approach to my chosen controversy.
In this unit, students will analyze a specific position within their chosen controversy.
Imagine this paper first as a detailed close reading/rhetorical analysis of a primary source document, an op-ed article, for example, with all the rhetorical strategies and patterns highlighted and described/analyzed...
The major assignment for this unit requires analysis and description, not evaluation or argumentation.
This "analysis and description" of primary source documents related to the topic could be done through direct annotation of the texts--and probably already is, though on paper and individually. Doing so on the texts themselves, at least in preparation for an essay--might help prevent any slippage toward "evaluation and argumentation." Annotations could be checked/assessed for their attention to the difference.
Barack Obama
Obama cites Moynihan's report favorably in his chapter on "Race" in The Audacity of Hope.
Paul Ryan.
Alludes to the House Budget Committee Report on "The Was on Poverty: 50 Years Later" which focuses on the "breakdown of the family" as the central problem leading to poverty.
these plans seem solid. very basic. but they make hardware and accessories easy by including.
good simple modern option
It also explains why Facebook will never install a Dislike button.
And then they did.
Valley Girls.
Lexically different form of the word, no?
But why “Like”? Why not “Love,” or “I agree,” or “This is awesome”?
What's the difference here? "This is awesome" just sounds like better branding.
netowrk
typo
The carceral state has, in effect, become a credentialing institution as significant as the military, public schools, or universities—but the credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative.
I once heard a speaker refer to prisons as "universities of violence."
him
Now male?
the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner.
Curious to use such impersonal language here.
No Frills Prison Act,
!
The Gray Wastes differ in both size and mission from the penal systems of earlier eras.
Others--and I'll dig for the references--have argued that the current prison system is a continuation of a long history of incarcerating and enslaving black people in the US.
Employment and poverty statistics traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers.
Honestly this is insane. I don't understand what logic could allow this to be the policy.
Moynihan.
At this point, I'm not sure what Moynihan really has to do with this article/argument.
a 1992 Justice Department report read. “The truth, however, is to the contrary; we are incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.”
Yikes!
Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.
To be clear, I am 100% on board with the overall argument here. But. Doesn't this graph suggest that indeed for much of that time, incarceration rates correlate to crime rates? There does indeed seem to be a moment at which this became very untrue, but not until the 90s, well after Moynihan.
It was the method by which we chose to address the problems that preoccupied Moynihan, problems resulting from “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment.”
Assuming the logic of this claim will be taken up below...
But America had an app for that.
Slightly cringe worthy line, IMO. If only because this is the hinge on which the logic of the article to this point rests. Something stronger (less cute) needs to hold together this transition to the "Age of Mass Incarceration."
Moynihan was, by then, embittered by the attacks launched against him
These are really just functioning as end/footnotes. As such, I'd rather them be that, at the end. Here they actually disrupt the flow of a sentence. Either way, that's bad placement.
William Ryan, the psychologist who first articulated the concept of “blaming the victim,” accused Moynihan’s report of doing just that.
And in taking as its focus the pathology "Negro family"--even contextualized historically--it really did.
People who read the newspapers but were not able to read the report could—and did—conclude that Johnson was conceding that no government effort could match the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan had said beset the black family.
This is really interesting. Not that Moynihan's "Report" is free of racial bias, but it's almost as if the news coverage or just general racial sentiment just heard what it wanted to hear.
Despite its alarming predictions, “The Negro Family” was a curious government report in that it advocated no specific policies to address the crisis it described.
Looking back at the section above, I'm thinking how cool it would be to read Moynihan's report annotated by TNC.
This is just a temporary annotation. :)
a tangle
A term with particular resonance here. Moynihan's most quoted chapter is his "The Tangle of Pathology."
product of a broken home and a pathological family
Terms typically associated with African Americans thanks to the rhetorical-political tradition in which Moynihan's "Report" was a seminal work.
Moynihan as a human.
Seems a valuable exercise.
it's time to reclaim his original intent.
Given how history has looked at Moynihan's doc--and the paragraph previously acknowledges it's "tragic" role in US history--this is a bold claim.
The child should make them his own,
Had been thinking of Whitman and Emerson much in the reading thus far and am finally able to make the connection. From "Song of Myself":
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
<br>
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Corruptio optimi, pessima.
"The corruption of the best is the worst of all" according to MW.
"inert ideas" -- that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Love this! Great argument for active/project-based learning.
most useless
Really, more so than the uninformed "man"?
teem
Plentitude so important in the beginning but later (in the scripture/in history) so many moments of scarcity.
subdue it.
Does this include the "wild" animals mentioned above?
“Let us make mankind in our image,
The way this is phrase it seems like "mankind" has been thought of/even discussed before. There's an assumed understanding that man was going to be created; "he" needs no introduction.
the livestock,
Curious about this word in the original. Seems like the concept of "livestock" is dependent on the existence of "man."
good,
What does "good" even mean here? Morally "good"? Architecturally "sound"?
God called the light “day,”
I've always loved that the act of naming, of linking words to things, was so important in the Old Testament.
God saw that the light was good,
Makes God sound like a real artist, experimenting with color, etc.
een greased and dusted with flour, and bake in a cool oven. As soon as baked turn cakes out on a sieve and dust while hot liberally with vanilla sugar.
test
TABLEAU
test 3
Gwendolen
test 2
Algernon
test
when New York began for me,
Interesting that the geographic is dealt with as the temporal here.
Mindfully
I like this Buddhist language.
Twenty-five years ago
I was 12 then.
(i.e. 140-character updates and pictures)
Or should we adopt this format of writing--and it is writing--as a form of literate expression?
Discuss the pros and cons in using images or video to tell a story versus text--what is better expressed in each form and what are the drawbacks?
Because of course students writing online will have to make these decisions as well, deploying images strategically in their own web compositions.
we can teach how to decode digital media
I think the NYTimes Learning Network's "What's Going on in this Picture" feature does a great job of getting kids to start thinking about images specifically.
We must be digitally literate, too.
So many definitions for this phrase at this point. What does it mean?
Anyone have a good definition or able to point to one?
Perhaps I should mention that my colleague is from Japan.
Powerful rhetorical move here.
and having control over your web presence.
I wonder if we are at a tipping point where more and more folks are caring about this issue. Hypothes.is certainly does and has structured our service accordingly.
FIRST DAY
test 2
test
nvites comparison
test
connect in- and out-of-school learning
break down divide between intellectual work of school and organic inquiry of students
Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.
The platform offers a wide variety of attractive style templates.
And you can automatically embed the hypothes.is annotation application within the book if you want. See it in action here.
an anthology of student writing
Or an anthology of public realm literature annotated by students using hypothes.is!
but one problem I have with it is that you have a choice of your annotations and highlights being public or private – you can’t have a private group, so far as I can tell.
As is pointed out above, we will be launching just such a feature in a matter of weeks: the ability to create a closed group that can annotate privately anywhere on the Internet.
this project doesn’t rely on monetizing user data (what Shoshana Zuboff recently called “surveillance capitalism”)
Really pleased that Fister brought up this point. Many are, but I think more teachers need to be thinking about the politics of the tools they use, particularly because it's not just them that's signing up, but often their students too.
magical venture capital dust
It's a dangerous sort of magic indeed:
Michael Xenos | University of Wisconsin-Madison | Department of Communication Arts
Reach out here...
This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part.
It kind of blows me mind that the end of WWII is the context for these early dreams of the Internet. Is it the hope experienced in patriotic collaboration toward technological innovation? That's what Bush seems to acknowledge explicitly. It's a techno-militaristic union that haunts us to this day (#prism). But I wonder too if it's the precarious of knowledge, or perhaps the destructiveness of knowledge, that also inspires Bush...
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
It's the blazing of these "associative trails" that for me is the great potential of hypothes.is. But the cairns need to be better discoverable. If it weren't for Twitter I would never have returned to this document today. Hypothesis needs to have its own amplification systems. #letmefollowthispage
the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped
So #meta!
This is the point in the syllabus where Professor DeRosa drops the mic. Nicely played, @actualham!!
due to digital communications tools, social media and the Internet
And no tool digital communication tool fosters this more than collaborative annotation, which engages citizens with the primary sources of politics and directly with each other.
activities through which people share their opinions
This page and all the links are critical resources for this project.
What is the relationship between young people's online activities and their political participation?
Teaching that there is such a connection should be a priority for digital pedagogues.
reshaping the manner in which young people participate in public life?
Well, simply put, they are. When else in history would this have been possible for a farm boy. Seriously, though, young people have public personas today like they never have before.
How can policy makers, educators and software designer promote frequent, equitable and meaningful political engagement among youth through the use of digital media?
Two words: open annotation.
what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century for a new generation of Americans.
the prospect that new media can become a bridge to young people's involvement with politics and other democratic institutions.
Quote this somewhere...
Joseph Kahne
Maybe have Dan reach out here--in Bay Area.
HASTAC,
Potential partner?
interdisciplinary research networks—one on youth and participatory politics and another on connected learning
Get involved here...
MacArthur is supporting the Mozilla Foundation to develop the technical infrastructure to make Open Badges possible.
Interesting.
Connected learning also uses the tools of our connected age to link learning in school, home, and the community so lessons are reinforced and supported in multiple settings.
Can't get over how perfect hypothes.is could be for this kind of pedagogy. The only thing I think we're lacking is a more robust social experience to annotation:
positioning them as the makers and producers they will need to become to be successful in work and in life.
knowledge producers/cultural, political participants
and the learner to inspiring peers and mentors
As on Twitter, a student using hypothes.is could connect with classmates and others on topics of interest
A new approach called “con-nected learning” has emerged from this work to become an important framework for rethinking and supporting learning for the 21st centur y
learning that is relevant
How is relevant defined? By student-centered inquiry?...
how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.
Yup!
Go on a campus tour
I like this one. I also think it's great to learn about campus institutional history and incorporate that stuff into curriculum where appropriate.
Try starting each class by acknowledging that your subject is difficult
And that you (the professor) are by no means an expert, or at least not the only expert, and not always right/certain.
generational finger-pointing concerning students’ behaviors.
Facebook has become an unfortunate forum for such complaints among some of my academic "friends."
begin developing a professional presence.
Yes!
open the door for others outside the walls of the course to contribute their knowledge to the discussion.
Not to mention opening the door for our student to share their knowledge/learning/expertise with the world.
due August 1
Blerg.
ASNE
American Society of News Editors=possible partner/funder
news literacy curriculum
I like this idea a lot. Annotation seems as though it could play a major role here.
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.
Funders of this theme.
active, informed, responsible, and effective citizens.
Note adjectives here:
young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to be informed and to vote.
Emphasis on peer to peer learning, open, free software...
civic education
...and civic appreciation and civic enthusiasm...
COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION
Great words through which to think about cvic engagement of youth as an end in itself and a practice of important learning skills.
journalism's role in an evolving information landscape.
This is where hypothes.is becomes part of the picture...
with particular attention to the use of images,
A couple of my favorite blogs for thinking deeply about images are Viz from University of Texas at Austin's Department of Rhetoric and Writing (for colleges students) and "What's Going on with this Image?" from the New York Times Learning Network (for secondary).
Digital Inspiration: The Best Tools for Annotating Web Pages,
Pretty cool to see how much things have changed in the last 4-5 years. Not just the tools but the very meaning of what it might mean to annotate the web has changed.
Before class, copy the text of the article your class just read as an HTML document into a publishing tool such as Dreamweaver or a Wikispace. One strategy for republishing the article with its HTML tags is to view the document in the link above, select View and Page Source in your browser, then copy and paste the source document into your Web publishing tool.
Or just use a web annotation tool like hypothes.is and annotate on the nytimes.com!
fancy features such as videos and interactive games are more of a distraction than a valued tool.
What about distinctly non-fancy features like annotation?
Piping down
As in "Pipe down, back there"?
we also need a good simple text editor to create our pages. You cannot use a rich text editor or a word processor.
I feel like this is the first step in moving beyond the prefabricated tools most people are used to navigating the web with.
Acided Acid.
test
The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she;
test
Teachers implementing the Common Core State Standards for reading
I'm really excited to connect with educators implementing the CCSS for reading and experiment together with how hypothes.is might be helpful to their students. Let me know if that's you!
to comment on student writing published online.
And, of course, there's the peer review use case as well, having students comment on each other's writing online. Maybe I should have made this "20 Ways to Annotate with Students"!
2. Annotation as Gloss
This encyclopedic voice is the primary vocal register used by users of (Rap) Genius. See their guidelines here.
(Users can create unanchored annotations for this purpose using the annotation icon on the sidebar without selecting any particular text within a document.)
Thanks to feedback from our users and would-be-users, we've come to recognize how important document-level annotations are. Expect improvements to the creation workflow and UX in the future. (Look out, Diigo, here we come!)
is a great example of students creatively responding to a text through annotation.
This video is one example of his students' creative work and was attached to particular passage in Lear. (Yes, I know, hypothes.is needs to allow for video embedding in annotation. Do me a favor, email support@hypothes.is demanding so.)
(and online writing in general)
Who will (or has) written the Strunk & White for the digital age?
(This is how the rhetoric department at UT-Austin, where I taught while getting my PhD., structures their freshman composition courses.)
They divide their First Year Writing course into three units: Describing a controversy and mapping the various positions within it; Analyzing a position within a controversy; and, Advocating a position within a controversy. More detail here..
Billy Collins’ poem “Marginalia”
The poem opens:
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,<br><br> skirmishes against the author<br><br> raging along the borders of every page<br><br> in tiny black script.<br><br> If I could just get my hands on you,<br><br> Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,<br><br> they seem to say,<br><br> I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Annotated by myself and others here on Lit Genius.
but in conversations with educators of late I’ve come to realize that we often mean different things by the word “annotate.” Annotation connotes something distinct in specific subject areas, at different grade and skill levels, and within certain teaching philosophies.
One group I've been in conversation with lately that has troubled my idea of what it means to annotate is the National Writing Project community.
One particular conversation with those folks took place as part of an Educator Innovator webinar that you can watch here.
Thanks, Erick Gordon, Adele Bruni, Nathan Blom, and Louis Lafair!
but in conversations with educators of late I’ve come to realize that we often mean different things by the word “annotate.”
In particular, a recent NWP webinar with professors, teachers, and students about web annotation influenced some of my thinking here. Thanks to Erick Gordon, Adele Bruni, Nathan Blom, and Louis Lafair!
At the same time, as Dennis Tenen has recently reminded us,25 we should not wait for readers to visit specific platforms to peruse (for example) famous and complex texts of world literature. Much better than trying to carry readers to specific sites of annotations will be to carry the annotations to the readers, i.e. to whatever version of the text (print, online) they happen to have in front of them. Ideas of how to do so are currently being hatched.
This is particularly exciting and interesting. It seems such a system would have to be built on open annotation standards.
a text that virtually speaks for itself (with just a little help from outside)
Is there any such text? Doesn't accessibility depend on who the reader is? And aren't there an infinite number of potential readers/classrooms (different skill levels/contexts) to the point that no text truly speaks for itself?
Dinerstein explores the idea of technology as a kind of secular American religion, focusing primarily on the exclusionary practices of such a posthuman theology.
discoverable if I can simply remember any word from the highlight.
Need a tagging feature.
"a decent digital commonplace book system."
Great tagline.
least useful ways possible
What's missing, do tell?...
My library goes from being inaccessible to being a sprawling digital memory.
Well said. Could be a tagline for hypothes.is...
The Kindle's highlights and notes are invaluable to me:
But so much is missing from that library, no?
The Problems with Genius,
Genius ends up being a strawman for this advertisement for Lacuna Stories. Ultimately, it's pretty easy to compare a small university-based education product favorably with a large, venture capital project with multiple audiences.
If Education Genius falls short of Mike's aspirations for annotation in the classroom (and he does make some solid points), it's not because it was conceived of as such.
believes in making everything public, all the time;
Except when a page is private, a feature Mike actually outlines in the previous blog in this series.
I don’t think it’s nearly enough to make it something I would rely on for teaching.
[insert link to Lacuna Stories]
the platform enforces this specific dynamic.
Overstatement. Again, rarely was the platform used in this way. And platforms generally, especially Genius, can be hacked for teachers to get what they want out of them.
I prefer to facilitate discussion, not to lecture.
Except here apparently, which reads like a lecture and was researched without discussion with the principles involved at Genius.
This role also allows instructors to have their annotations marked as by a "Verified Educator"
Again, this was how the Educator role was hacked together. It's actually rather boring, but in order to allows teachers to create their own annotation-free copies of texts, we had to make them "artists"/"authors" of these texts which made them "verified"--Genius's term for a user annotating their own work.
it actually puts the instructor in the role filled by Genius editors: gatekeeper. In this scenario, the instructor is the person who allows students to see each other’s annotations and who combines suggestions from the class into a coherent, single annotation of a passage. Until an annotation is "accepted," it will be marked in red. Once accepted, it is no longer editable by the student who created it.
Again, Mike made no effort to speak to me about this article or understand the complicated history of these feature developments.
I was in charge of Education Genius at the time, trying to carve out the space for the kind of work I know Mike also wants to get done in classrooms through his own annotation service, Lacuna Stories.
That the Educator role was forked from that of the Editor was for expedience--I had a lot of trouble getting education-specific features added to the site for my project and this was one of the compromises.
Rarely did Educators ever actually make use of these editorial privileges.