3,982 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2015
    1. to use writing as a tool for learning, communicating, and facilitating their understanding of the complex texts

      Annotation is not just note-taking (though it can be). If annotation has always been the beginning of critical analyses in literary study, then in its online, public form, it becomes a more advanced stage of the writing process. For one, annotation online has an audience. While we can think of annotation as the start of the ideas developed in a formal essay, we might also imagine how annotations themselves can be essays!

    2. Providing digital content aligned to teacher - delivered content to r einforce or help students to apply new concepts

      ability to create a set of prefabricated tags for a group, so students can label annotations with concepts, etc. that they are applying (or standards that they are fulfilling).

      differentiated view for instructor?

    3. described a vision for technology - supported learning that consists of rich, dynamic learning experiences both onli ne and off, and technology that enables teachers to engage deeply with their students one - on - one or in small groups.

      from teachers...

    4. The iterative, multi - step, and reflective practice of writing is well suited to digital supports and tools, which generate digital artifacts that can be exchanged and also analyzed to reveal a student’s thinking and skil l development (National Research Council , 2001)

      See this study.

    1. It could be a conversation. It wasn’t about reporting; it was about connecting.

      And maybe it's not just about reporting and connecting, but reporting and connecting through something specific, some artifact of the online world: annotation.

      There's already a segment of the Twitterati doing this via highlighted screenshots of text attached to Tweets as photos ("screenshorts" they are called).

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      There's even an app to do this now: OneShot.

    2. share their current locations with a note attached.

      share their current readings with a note attached; geo-location v location within an intellectual/textual world

    3. a steady stream of conversation percolating online.

      While Twitter has certainly become just this, it strikes me at how bad Twitter actually is at "conversation." It's actually quite difficult to sustain a focused back and forth on Twitter. IMO.

    1. Google acts as the service provider and provides services such as Gmail and Start Pages. Google partners act as identity providers and control usernames, passwords and other information used to identify, authenticate and authorize users for web applications that Google hosts.

      What about the reverse? Is Google ever "identity provider" for a third party?

    1. University of Washington ( $610,819 ) The purpose of this award is to develop tools and resources to support school and district leaders in th e implementation of the Common Core State Standards.

      Curious to see more about what they are up to, but can't find any web presence for the project.

    2. use of massively online open courses (MOOCs) as a part of the post - secondary education process.

      interesting that MOOCs here conceived as part of undergraduate ed rather than as continuing ed...

    3. If there’s one word to explain how technology can transform edu cation, it’s personalization.

      What is "personalization"? Choose your own adventure style? Or self-directed: choosing content that interests you?...

    4. The Foundation is now investing i n develop ment of next - generation instructional tools for teachers and students that will help states and school districts implement the new standards .

      BINGO!

    5. “Higher , ” focuses on the ability of learners to both apply their new - found knowledge and to transfer the knowle dge to different situations.

      Trackable and assessable annotation of the web seems perfect for this "higher," application ideal.

    6. teacher feedback systems that allow for both measurement of effectiveness, coupled with development of feedback avenues to support professional development.

      can student feedback systems loop into teacher feedback ones? in other words, doesn'T measuring student progress eventually double as evaluation of teachers.

    7. cannot be viewed as individual steps but rathe r as a continuous progression

      need a scaffolable product that can be used in one way at an early stage and becomes more sophisticated as students develop

    8. Digital media, technology, and out - of - classroom learning opportunities

      what does out-of-classroom mean exactly? digital learning tools? or tools so compelling that a student might use them outside of class on their own initiative?

    1. Integrate traditional schooling with after-school, out-of-school, and anytime/anywhere learning opportunities

      Apply Common Core skills like close reading to other content: mainstream media, politics/legislation, etc.

      This is kind of obvious with Rap Genius: students were using traditional humanities skills to analyze lyrics.

    1. “the process through which a person becomes capable of taking what was learned in one situation and applying it to new situations; in other words, learning for ‘transfer . ’”

      What better way to do this than taking a skill- or content-based lesson and applying it to the web as a practice through annotation.

    1. North Carolina is one of thirty states that have permissive “open carry” laws, which means that you do not need a license to walk around with a gun in plain sight. The law makes an exception when firearms are displayed to terrorize people, but in Hicks’s case nobody tested that prohibition.

      Isn't the very meaning of a fun, terror?

    1. But in the oft-cited lines of the American poet Walt Whitman we find as good an organizing principle as any other:

      I really love this idea as the "yawp" as an organizing principle for a collaborative, open textbook. Given his own obsessively iterative composition of Leaves of Grass Whitman really is a great analogy for this project.

    1. John Muir, a naturalist, writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the “God of the Mountains” in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition.

      The "Gods of the mountains" line was a piece of Muir's larger metaphor for the holiness of natural places that figured those who would develop them as "temple destroyers." Here's the full quote from Muir's defense of the Hetch Hetchy in his book The Yosemite.:

      These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

      Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

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    1. Altamont revealed a darker side of American culture, one in which drugs and music were associated not with peace and love but with violence, anger, and death.

      How does this mess, though, relate directly to the "unraveling" of American promise signified by the late 60s. Was Hunter killed because he was black? Or because he was high? Or because the Angels were drunk?

    1. The tools are designed to be simple, flexible, and allow teachers to maintain creative license in how and what they teach.

      Web annotation technology is about as "flexible" as one can get with a tool. It can be used independently by students, by teachers and students, and integrated into LMS and CMS systems.

    2. helping teachers bring the Common Core to life.

      Two ways I see this happening with annotation:

      1) Making the text social. It's like Facebook!

      2) Making it multimedia. Allowing students to annotate with images and video add dimension to the text.

      3) Visualizing the annotation process through text selection and commentary really drives home the idea of close reading.

    3. Consistent standards allow teachers to create a community where they can connect with each other, learn from each other, share with each other, and improve their practice with each other.

      Should there be a teacher layer to curriculum that allows teachers to collaborate with each other in designing curriculum?!

    1. customized pathways to achievement,

      Annotating the open web is a natural way to allow students to "customize" their learning. They choose the content they read and engage with, and directed by teacher guidelines, engage with that content to demonstrate learning.

    2. Ninety-five percent of 12- to 17-year-olds already go online on a regular basis. They use social networks, and create and contribute to websites. Our work is focused on taking full advantage of the kinds of tools and technologies that have transformed every other aspect of life to power up and accelerate students’ learning. We need to do things differently, not just better.

      hypothes.is/collaborative annotation meets students where they are: online, giving them a tool to interact more critically with the texts and ideas they encounter on the web

    3. game-based learning that generates rich data about students’ progress

      need feedback system at the very least: likes/upvotes, email notifications...also possibly a dashboard, for students and teachers, that shows recent work, top annotator, etc. (by volume, by like)...DO WE NEED GAMIFICATION?

    1. Nearly three out of four postsecondary students today are not enrolled in a full-time, four-year degree program. They are balancing jobs, family, and other priorities as they work to finish their studies.

      Importance of asynchronous learning opportunities.

      Providing platform for engagement with course content but also feedback to student work (whether peer or instructor).

    1. By calling attention to itself as a textual presence (rather than a vehicle of linguistic reference), the typography turns the lines back into themselves, leading one to identify the “black riders” with their immediate typographical unfolding.

      Just because they are bolded?

    1. , an OpenStax College resource. This textbook has been created with several goals in mind: accessibility, customization,

      Of course, the concept of the "frontier" remained an important idea in American history, motivating other forms of expansion and empire.

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    1. semico m- mons — a resource that is owned and managed as private pro p- erty at one l evel but as a commons at a n other, and in which “both common and private uses are important and impact si g- nificantly on each other.” 42

      Yes, this acknowledgement of the largely private space of the online world is far too often overlooked in utopian views of the Internet as a "commons."

    2. r when a comm u- nity is tor n between participants with incompatible goals (e.g. , amateur and professional photogr a phers).

      Are expert and amateur always incompatible in this way? I'm thinking here of how to at once allow for anyone to have a conversation on a page using annotation, but also to surface for discovery expert voices...

    3. Similarly, partic i- pants on a discu s sion forum may shoulder some of the work of 24 See Brad Stone

      So this is obviously annoying in annotating PDFs: I want the target to continue on to next page and ignore the footnotes. Can't imagine a technical solution. Maybe just campaign for "Endnotes only!"

    4. moderation by flagg ing unwanted posts for deletion because they enjoy being part of a thriving communit

      Motivating users to take ownership seems key. A simple flag feature could make an active user all the more involved.

    5. Thus, even though it is not pa r- ticularly helpful to talk about Google as a c ommunity in its own rig ht, 21 it and other search engines play an important role in the overall mo d eration of the Web . 22

      Indeed, Google search organizes communities from their inception: which entry points are immediately discoverable and which are not.

    6. norms versus architectu

      From "pathetic dot" theory, popularized Larry Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

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      "Architecture" refers to the technical infrastructures that regulate individual behavior. In this case, I suppose that would be the design of online communities?

    7. d. When they do their job right, they cr e- ate the conditions under which cooperation is possib

      This is an obvious point, but one that I think is not necessarily emphasized in discussion of the problem of moderation: it's not just about deleting bad content, it's about enabling good content creation.

    8. : vandals overran it with crude pr o- fanity and graphic pornography

      I know this is not the point, but the topic itself has its own illicit history.

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      I wonder if controversial topics are more prone to trolling than others.

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    Annotators

    1. called on designers and social scientists to ethically embrace their role as the web's “civil servants,”

      Got to read this article itself, but civil servants are civil servants because they are employed by the government, not because they think of themselves that way. I love the idea, but I guess I'm worried that without something more official in place, this ethos cannot be institutionalized or even broadly applied.

    2. dependent on those who use them and on the subjective judgments of the people who provide mutual aid.

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      As in "real-life," what do we do about the George Zimmermans of the world, rogue "moderators" claiming a kind of "mutual aid" in their neighborhood watch, but deeply problematic in their views and actions.

    3. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.

      I really like the argument of this article. But I have some issues with the analogy between the online world and what are mostly public physical spaces.

      Unlike, rives and sidewalks, online space has little to no regulation, whether from the government or NGOs.

      Also, most of our public interactions online take place in private spaces, that is, places owned and operated by private corporations.

    1. So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor.

      Truly had assumed that this work was done automatically.

    1. You touch a button on your phone and something happens in the world.

      This is profound, but it's also obvious. Obvious as in it makes this basic aspect of technology readily apparent to the end user.

      Actually, when we press most buttons, lots of things happen in the world. One click on Amazon begins a complex process of labor and energy consumption, but this is conveniently hidden from the end user.

    1. happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did not track me,

      How much would it actually cost though to buy into Facebook if we take away its monetization power? My guess is that it would be a lot more then 20 cents, though I might still be willing to pay.

    2. He knows privacy is worth paying for. So he should let us pay a few dollars to protect ours.

      Zing!

      Yeah, Zuck is notoriously protective of his persona life. This irony has to be one of the greatest of the Internet Age.

    3. Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish. Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post.

      This is the crucial point for me: we are not really "connecting" through Facebook if the connection is not on our own terms, so the very concept that underlies the service is problematic.

      The same can be said of Google: our search for information is not authentic if the search results are taking into consideration ad-partners, etc.

      I'm personally much more concerned about this paradox in the latter case as it pertains to knowledge production.

    4. a proprietary, ever-changing algorithm that decides what we see.

      Are all algorithm's evil, though? Is there such a thing as a benevolent algorithm?

      Isn't the real problem that FB mixes in things it thinks I would like to buy alongside the things I "like"?

    5. FACEBOOK. Instagram. Google. Twitter.

      Don't want to take away from a VERY important opinion article here, but what exactly does the NYTimes style guide say here? Why are Facebook and Google--of all sites!--linked but not Twitter?

  2. May 2015
    1. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

      Digital annotation is particularly suited to this type of everyday writing practice.

      In a sense, it's more like posting to Facebook or Twitter than writing an essay. But because it is grounded in text, it encourages more thoughtfulness.

      At the same time, if students are regularly annotating using an application like hypothes.is, then they will surely exceed the word count usually required in a five page essay. Annotation projects might be seen as pre-writing--a collaborative drafting space for ideas and language to be developed later in formal papers--or it might be seen as an end in itself.

    1. The focus on "decoding" should send shivers down the spine of every English teacher who has ever had a student demand they just tell them what the poem means.

      I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":

      But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

      They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

    1. An underlined

      This style of highlighting requires a number 2 pencil to be whittled down at a slant to allow for a 2 mm thick line to be drawn under text. It needs to be straight. It needs to hug the lettering just so.

    2. Among other texts, my students and I added selections from The Great Gatsby to the platform and some of those excerpts are among the most highly trafficked pages on what has now become Lit Genius,

      And many of my students remain top scholars on the text:

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    3. I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation

      Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.

    4. it slows the reader down,

      It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.

    1. Read closely

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      Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:

      Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.

      Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.

      Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...