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.

Again, this is rarely how the tool was used by Educators.

Really the whole Education movement at Genius was a kind of non-technical hack. From the start when I played around with it in my classroom, I had to manipulate the existing features to make it work for my learning goals. Because we couldn't always get the resources devoted to developments we wanted, the Educator community often manipulated the system in order to make it work for them.

Not actually true. All annotations are visible once created on the site. They are simply marked as unreviewed. Many teachers left their students' annotations as such.

I really can't believe the author didn't catch their own snobby tone in reading this piece. There are some reasonable arguments here but this attitude really undercuts them.

In fact, at the time of this writing, Genius had already begun to allow what they called "personal annotations" alongside of the more encyclopedic ones Mike describes here.

The language of "imposition" and tone of Genius as some kind of monolithic force in the world also ignores a basic way that emergent technology...well...emerges. Many of the issues Mike raises were often discussed at Genius throughout its evolution from a rap lyric website.

Though an acquaintance of mine (while I worked at Genius), Mike didn't bother to talk to anyone at the company for these essays.

This isn't that scary to me, honestly. I think it's great for a young person to encounter such a text alongside their peers. And for them to learn how to navigate both the problems (bias, ignorance) and possibilities (conversation, engagement) therein.

Really? Can't an annotation, just like a Wikipedia entry share a number of possible interpretations?

"...futuristic and magical" and insane! (Full disclosure: I'm a Prime Member.)

Not an old lumbering company as I first read it. I was like, "That's a career shift!"

This seems sensible. But I don't know how many companies go by the motto: "Don't debate ideas, just figure out a way for everyone to be right. Yeah!"

I really thought the Dash campaign was a metaphor for Amazon's convenience more broadly until today.

Okay, that is "peculiar," though I might use a different adjective.

How "peculiar"?!

Honestly, none of this stuff sounds that unconventional to me. Strange how "Think different" has become think the same for much of Silicon Valley.

Dunno that I've ever seen a gif for a photo at the Times before

Not to defend the endless curation/commercialization of self promoted by social media (read: Facebook), but this article is clearly biased toward the writer v. reader. I'm not sure that the billions of people on Facebook and Gawker are "thoughtless" though the thinking is certainly different than what it takes to read/write a longform article.

At this point, I'm losing track of the argument. Seems like a lot of what is identified as the current state of affairs is quite different from the world of "old media." The death of longform attention span. The rise of the reader curator? Isn't is the opposite?

Are these two groups really aligned? They don't even same to be aligned later in this very article...

Has this really stopped the drive of print publishers to translate text to mobile, though?

Awesome image!

But within Facebook I'm more likely to click on a Gawker link than a less known, respected brand.

Oh, god, it's true. I'm so ashamed.

Note, it's not "Call me, Ishmael."

Is it though? And especially given the corny as heck images used below to illustrate the principles.

Want to play this message I received the other day from some guy at USA Pool Supply after I clicked to report a "defective product" up receipt of a Squiddy:

Message was like a minute long and he explained in detail how to fix the broken Squiddy--guess it happens a lot. He was right. And they still issued a refund.

even simpler to build than the traditional ones

plans sold for DIY playscapes

Seems like a good local option versus the big box stores.

possible ideas here for converting chicken coop into something playable

Because they're personalized? I'd rather someone call out my name and say "Jeremy, this is something you actually care about based on evidence," rather than "Hey you, you should buy this, it's cool generally speaking to your demographic we think."

Totally on board with the broad rational here, but for argument's sake, is it really "handing data over"? It may not be worth as much as my personal data (and certainly not as much as the cumulative data of all FB's users), but we are getting something in exchange, aren't we? There is a service there, right? And it is worth something, isn't it?

Free really does make us behave irrationally.

As such, it is (or will be) the greatest bait and switch in history. Truly an amazing feet of marketeering that the majority of people on FB do not (yet) see it this way.

I've tried to contact customer service, though, and never got a response. They're clearly not set up for that, unlike, say, how an airline is.

In the NYTimes, annotated here.

The retrospective tone of this article reminds me of Ethan Zuckerman's "The Internet's Original Sin from the Atlantic.

And the whole "caught in the net" thing of course reminds me of:

I want to hear more about how this part of the assignment was articulated for students. I love the idea of breaking down the line between criticism and creation. I simply want to know what the prompt was for "how to annotate."

Really? There weren't public and collaborative forms of meaning-making before the web?

Collaborative online annotation is an easy way out of this false binary: as an age-old learning practice it can't really be questioned.

Again, part of what is unique about annotation in comparison to other forms of textual response is that it is inline and inextricably linked to the text itself.

But who exactly is that? It's still a limited, if expanded group, right?

I really like the idea that this is not just for class use for one semester, but framed as part of a contribution to a community, whether that be the students of LaGuardia over the years or a broader public.

Annotation powerfully enacts this by not only encouraging close, active reading, but--particularly as set up by this assignment--respecting students as scholars themselves with some knowledge to share with the world.

How exactly? No associated email? Limited visibility?

2 things of import here:

1.) teachers need to be able to create student account easily.

doing so by listing a bunch of email addresses seems a first step.

being able to sync with lists of students in school/LMS databases would be another feature down the road.

2.) signing students up without email addresses would cover some concerns about privacy of student data schools have.

Article dated 8/12 but I believe the actual premiere is the 16th.

I'm intrigued here (and above) by this notion of "mastery" or "figuring it out" that seems to important to Simon. I wonder if that really should be the goal. I wonder, even, if that was the effect or point of "The Wire": the city and its machinations remained elusive throughout that series.

Wow! I'd like to hear more about that story...

Best piece I've read/heard on his topic of late.

Probably because he was now breaking the law by selling a house to a black family. That's how messed up the FHA system was.

A not so subtle reference to Obama's famous "A More Perfect Union" speech), one the most famous of his career given during the 2008 election.

interesting time marker

@judell is now director of product at hypothes.is!

Again, who is actually advocating for automation as an end in and of itself?

LOL. Lots to be done here with labor, gender, etc.

This piece of the equation does scare me.

I found Iglesias's argument compelling in this piece and would like a more formidable response. (Here's an annotatable version.)

I guess it's this over simplified dichotomy that I take issue with. Again, consider Thompson's answer to the question in relation to IBM/Watson, "Which is smarter at chess—humans or computers?"

Neither. It’s the two together, working side by side.

I'm not sure why I'm feeling so reactive to this talk, but again, who's suggesting a complete "offloading"?

And is a complete offloading even possible? Just as we should remember that capitalist human beings fund many educational technologies, shouldn't we also remember the many other human beings who labor to build these technologies.

This argument "against robots" seems to replace technology with robots, erasing the human labor that goes into producing and supporting any technology.

Is the claim really automation? Or something more like facilitation or cooperation as Clive Thompson envisions in this excerpt from Smarter Than You Think? I'm not really sure who is claiming to fully replace teachers...

!

Full text here, annotatable.

This is fascinating because I always thought that "robotic" as used for human labor was a metaphor.

Who actually says this? And isn't a more subtle position on the relationship between technology and educational labor that is needed?

I don't doubt that "efficiency" is a major strand in the rhetoric of educational reform, but is it really the dominant one? Certainly it is not the only one.

Seems like inclusion would be more important one. I think the real danger is when things like inclusion or engagement are conflated with efficiency.

frowny face emoticon

A jarring, but deeply felt equivalence on the part of this reader, former Genius current hypothes.izer (?).

I love me Foucault (acknowledged in the bibliography below), but I'd rather not completely do away with the socializing value of education. Isn't it also important to follow some rules, learn some things that are mandated?

I think introducing student-centered learning, indeed making it central, can be done alongside some more traditional forms of education. (Not suggesting that Davidson is a complete anarchist!)

Think of the word count (not to mention critical sophistication) a student could accumulate/achieve via blogging or microblogging or even annotation...

Super interested in more on this. I think it's particularly scary for teachers and sometimes treacherous bureaucratically.

Really neat idea to try to tie this pedagogical argument to Coates's social critique.

I love love love this, but does the mandate for student privacy (i.e. FERPA) ever get in the way of actually doing this? My impression is that at both the secondary and tertiary levels, the paranoia about privacy is only becoming more intense.

This point rings true for me from my experience. When students are responsible for their knowledge as part of their personhood, rather than following someone else's expectations, then they will truly "get it." It's like the difference between writing a paper for a teacher versus writing it for yourself (and/or a broader audience) because you are excited about the ideas/words.

Is this term too rooted in disciplinary education to retain in discussions of student-centered learning?

Why not add these layers of annotation/discussion right here using an app like hypothes.is?

Great line. #pullquote

The new regulation?

the first version of hypothes.is groups seems like it will be similar to the middle option in the video here.

All due respect to Storify/Twitter, but with hypothes.is this conversation could take place at The Washington Post itself. Imagine sharing the digital margin of the Sunday paper with colleagues and collaborators across space and time! Surely, the teacher-in-us-all loves the practice of keeping these discussions grounded in the text!!

LA "riots" of 1992?

Annotatable version here.

Online writing assignments can particularly lend themselves to this kind of collaboration: students working on a wiki may contribute research, design, and synthesis skills individually.

Lived here for four years of my life. It's the perfect location for the story.

More here.

Like, for example, One Shot.

But what if you could bring this action, these actions to every page on the Internet. Natively. What if you could kill the social media giants by giving their functionality, their proliferating communities, to the publishers themselves. What if you could...hypothes.ize the Internet.

I.e. the platforms.

Interesting distinction. But from the users point of view, might not the sub-community of readers (my friends and I) be more organic than say "reader of the New York Times).

Can. Not. Wait.

In the still developing planned community of Mueller:

Here's a clip, check it out. think about class.

http://www.americanyawp.com/

I'm curious why/how Soto is invoking this tradition, perhaps most famously authored by Archibald MacLeish in the pages of this same magazine, especially given that it usually focused overtly on the aesthetics of poetry as an art form and here is far more narratively driven.

Interestingly, African American female poet Rita Dove has also rewritten the "Ars Poetica" tradition in similar narrative style in Poetry Magazine. The narrative take seems to reject MacLeish's call for the poem to be "palpable and mute."

test

Great quote. I don't know why more people who critique social media and various online technologies don't get to this reasonable position more quickly.

Not a little bit?

I love that aspect of the Internet. But perhaps if I wrote for the New Yorker I might be less excited about publishing online through social media.

Why must this commentary need to be cancerous?

A reference to the phrase."It's turtles all the way down," popularized by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. The phrase is used to express the paradox of the "unmoved mover": the earth is flat and rests upon the back of a turtle sitting on another turtle sitting on another turtle and so on to infinity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWx6csgGkg4

Once took a cross country road trip in a friend's parents mini-van. We managed to get in trouble in spite of the "mild" mode of transport.

Feel it's more catching moving train than entering highway:

This is a worthy intervention--emphasis on the "attitude" idea--but why can't is both/and?

Why isn't everyone directly connected?

"Noninvasive," but you're still blowing my mind!

Is it just about "abundance"? Seems like it is also about precision.

For example, I'm not sure that I experience books as a "scarcity." I couldn't possibly read all the books in my local university library. There may be more books online, but what's revolutionary is my ability to search through those books more easily...

Wikipedians, this should be a top priority to get an entry on.

I love this. but unfortunately, the other Michelle Thorne is, not surprisingly, winning the SEO game at Google. Mozilla Michelle Thorne didn't even come up in the top ten.

test 1-2-3

so crazy: our cells are fluctuating?!

So the Internet isn’t the first archive that was fallible…

From DIckens’s David Copperfield (1850). His tagline was “something will turn up.”

Had to look up “pedimented.” It just means gable over entablature over columns. The logo’s got it all!

I can’t get over the poetic justice of this choice of HQ for this company:

Here’s the full quote from the 1965 Libraries of the Future:

One must be prepared to reject not only the schema of the physical library, which is essentially a response to books and their proliferation, but the schema of the book itself, and even that of the printed page as a long term storage device, if one is to discover the kinds of procognitive systems needed in the future.

Procognitive drugs reduce confusion or disorientation. Without having read LOTF, I’m guessing Licklider is imagining systems of information visualization that more pro-actively guide thinkers or allow them to more nimbly explore their own lines of inquiry by opening new pathways beyond the turn of a page.

Oh, I get it now!

A nebulous term these days, no?

What exactly are the implications here?

This assumes the old “turn the page” method of research. Perhaps there’s something serious in Adams’s satire: computers can give us complicated answers far more quickly than our own minds and methods of information and knowledge gathering. #bigdata

Perhaps I’m being naive—and I’m not well read on the history of the Google Books project and its legal outcomes—but what does “public” mean here exactly? Does it refer to organization structure or project scope? If the goal is to, as the mission of the DPLA states below, make information and culture “freely available to the world” then how does Google Books not do that? Because they are a for-profit company? I can access Google Books far easier than my public university library.

Here's a YouTube link. (Wish it embedded here.)

Google image search broke when I tried to search this—great writing just can’t be matched.

And it’s likely more people have cited a URL than ever wrote a footnote (in the entire history of footnotes!). So epistemology in the current era has become more “pernicious,” it has also become “ubiquitous.” What does that say about the overall state of knowledge production?

After The Puffy Chair came out, I once ran into Mark at Polvo's in South Austin. He was eating dinner with his girlfriend/co-star. They were very gracious as I interrupted them and geeked out about how much I liked the movie.

Come on, is that really "former athlete"? Anyone who played a high school sport?! Seems like that would include a lot of barely athletic people.

This image is super powerful. The details throughout the paragraph are almost novelistic.

So crazy. I love this aside. It tells you a lot about the hard and often dangerous work of reporting, usually not foregrounded in articles.

Such a powerful understanding of what "the streets" or "the ghetto" means in American culture underwrites this sentence. Much more could be said about it, but TNC says so much in this short phrase.

Like the "sheets of rain" above, again TNC compares racial oppression to a natural force beyond human control. This seems more a description of the experience of race rather than a statement about the futility of fighting against it.

Like a natural force...

A whole dissertation could be (likely has been) written on this idea of "urban" black style as a kind of "armor against the world."

It seems incredibly valuable for young people to acknowledge (and be acknowledged for) the cultural power of style.

There's a really interesting Fresh Air episode about the construction of ghettos in America that helps contextualize how this suburban American dream excluded blacks from the start.

I'm just finding this emphasis on the believe in whiteness to be so powerful! Not whiteness itself, but the (false) belief in whiteness.

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

I have a hard time believing that this language is accurate. How many is many? And it is certainly not just blacks who view the flag this way.

Nice alliteration! Catches the reader.

Interoperability for OER content valued.

It will be key to emphasize hypothes.is's alignment in this belief.

Ok, so this is how these guys work.

Interesting!

Possible partner?

http://elschools.org/about-us

Understanding of importance of standards across various platforms/providers, albeit in a slightly different circumstance.

Interesting. Could h be the "value-add" here that OERs need to compete with mainstream publishers?

possible partner

possible partner

How is this currently being evaluated within OER ecosystems? Could annotation play a role?

possible partner

possible partners

Indeed.

and equal right to create knowledge

What kind of standards are we talking about here?

Annotation could nicely surface the palimpsest of this process. Rather than re-writing a text, a reacher could comment on it, thus demonstrating their concerns about it as a pedagogical moment.

The lockbox suggests a problem of access--we need free, open resources to break in. But lockbox also signals the static nature of knowledge in the traditional textbook format. Annotation could bring open engagement to these open resources.

I'm curious why this term/concept need to be invoked to value informal student writing?

Powerful statement!

This bias against transience, while not unfounded, seems problematic.

I was literally just wondering about this after staying in such a "haven for...human misery."

This is a pretty noble goal, I think. Humanities graduate training would be well served to cultivate such a critical perspective.

Namely Nicholas Carr, who wrote an oft-cited Atlantic article entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" to which the author answers "yes," concluding:

...As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

What does this mean?

While one component of this revise and remix piece is editing and linking actual texts, another might be in annotating texts.

Annotation is a form of revision that preserves both original content and the new vision. And annotation similarly might be seen as a kind of remixing by adding layers of further information and knowledge on top of existing content.

Interesting. Aside from the ability to remix resources, how are OER providers/platforms allowing "participation and co-creation"? Seems like annotation could be a major part of that process, especially as regards student interaction with teachers/course content.

In other words, the Internet.

In other words, the Internet.

In other words, the Internet.

What's more "evidence-based" than annotation?

But what does that mean?

So the Web could be the text. And Web annotation the means of reading socially.

The use of rhyme here is interesting.

This is terrifying but also fascinating. Imagine the data for MFA programs on the content/style whatever on the last page readers thumbed before stopping the turning!

Also, couldn't this system be easily gamed: creating bots to "peruse" texts at the right pace repeatedly?

Seems like this will destroy the book review industry and entrench the reality of the struggling literary genius: an author like David Foster Wallace would inevitably fail in such a market, no?

We could probably claim we have (had) this many student users over time.

Then again, with the right kind of added infrastructure (tagging of annotations aligned with standards) and extraction of that data for visualization, I don't see why h couldn't fit this category. (At least we would have to say we are MVP stage for this level, though.)

hypothes.is would seem to fit best within this scope.

We cannot make these users work for it. Features needs to be built-in.

Responses to student annotations could be seen as micro-lessons in writing.