3,982 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2019
  2. Jun 2019
    1. He would provide all of the upfront capital. He’d do the digital marketing and hire course designers and produce the videos of lectures and the software that allowed students and faculty to interact live online, with worldwide 24/7 support. In return, the colleges had to give him 60 percent of the tuition. This was still a good deal for them, since 40 percent of something was better than 100 percent of the nothing they had before.

      The original OPM model.

  3. May 2019
    1. (optional) Using the LTI Outcomes service, the tool can also return a piece of plain text, a basic URL, or even an LTI Launch URL. This will be attached to a student submission object in Canvas, and it’ll be visible on the student submission page and in Speedgrader

      This is key: to deliver the artifact of the annotation to Speedgrader.

    1. totransform the system of scholarly communication from one that remains closedand unaffordable,to one that is more open, fair, transparent, and sustainable

      A noble goal indeed.

      Curious to see what overlap there is with the "system of education technology". Would love to draft a "Declaration of Rights" for that space...

  4. Apr 2019
    1. An algorithm grades the “thoughtfulness” of their annotations and compares their reading habits to behaviors that predict classroom success.

      I've always found this a problematic part of the Perusall platform.

    2. “The main idea in a text is not on the page,”

      Isn't it? Or shouldn't it be? Yes, the rearticulation of that main idea requires some independent critical thinking, but it should be somewhere on the page that you can point to. And that's part of teaching reading or learning to read.

    1. Example (Before) A direct link to an article in Project Muse before the proxy URL has been added: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/demography/v047/47.4.groen.pdf Example (After) A direct link to an article in Project Muse after the proxy URL has been added: http://eztncc.vccs.edu:2048/login?url=https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/demography/v047/47.4.groen.pdf 

      How will their proxy interfere with ours? Or h more generally?

    1. While there may be good reason to upload articles to the LMS, it is important to consider that doing so may mean that your students do not have the most recent version of the article. It is not unusual for publishers to make corrections or changes, such as adding supplementary material, to articles after initial publication.

      Argument for permalinks v downloads.

  5. Mar 2019
    1. annotations give the instructor “a sense of what students found interesting or confusing in the assigned texts ahead of the classroom discussions.”

      This is so important. As an English instructor I always felt like this was a bit of a black box: student annotations were private, contained in their own copies of their books. Now teachers can see this work and intervene and inspire as needed.

    1. themission of UC

      The reminder that these principles (and open access generally) are in line with the mission of the public university is critical. The same can be said about UC's eventual decision not to contract with Elsevier. In short, the model of scholarly communication perpetuated by E contradicts the mission of most public research universities.

    1. The history department, for example, added a digital tool that helped students visualize historical events and then surveyed them on their experiences using it.

      Another lasting example of this was the CRIT tool from English. There was an accompanying SMOC that attempted to broaden the audience/participation by broadcasting a seminar style discussion with real students and including online means of participation. Not saying that's a perfect or even good model, but it was interesting.

    2. Individual departments from journalism to French and Italian were making and assessing changes to their curricula, aided by Project 2021 money and staff.

      Despite critiques of this not being a teaching-focused project, here's a concrete grassroots change that happened.

    3. the challenges of focusing a public research university on undergraduate reform — the research budget and research agenda are top priorities. 

      So the focus on teaching was actually the problem!

    1. You were beginning to gather that there were other symbols mixed with the words that might be part of a sentence, and that the different parts of what made a full-thought statement (your feeling about what a sentence is) were not just laid out end to end as you expected.

      This suggests that Joe is doing something almost completely unrecognizable--with language at least. I guess my assumption is that I would know what Joe was doing he'd just be doing it so quickly I wouldn't be able to follow. And he'd complete the task--a task I recognize--far more quickly than I possibly could using comparable analog technologies. Perhaps this is me saying, I buy Englebart's augmentation idea on the level of efficiency but remain skeptical or at least have yet to realize it's transformative effect on intellect itself.

    2. He also mentioned a recently developed computer process that could go back over a record of the human actions involved in establishing a given argument structure and do a creditable job of picking out the steps which contributed the most to the final picture—and also some of those that contributed least.

      ArgumentChecker®?

    3. have given to me a power to participate in more sophisticated processes that capitalize more fully upon the computer's capability

      I have to admit that I haven't taken away from Engelbart so far a solid understanding of how computer augmentation helps with the more sophisticated mental processes. I have gathered and very much appreciate some of the more mundane processes that can (and have) become automated to allow more time for human devotion to more complex intellectual work.

    4. Now, as part of my regular practice, I spend about five minutes out of each hour exercising with this package. This almost always reveals things to me that change at least the slant of my approach during the next hour, and often stimulates a relatively significant change in my short-range plans.

      Also starting to think about health/exercise monitoring software here.

    5. Then we added more features to the program, in which the computer occasionally interrupts the human's activity and displays some questions to be answered.

      Personalized learning?

    6. With the human contributing to a process, we find more and more as the process becomes complex that the value of the human's contribution depends upon how much freedom he is given to be disorderly in his course of action.

      I love this line. And along with description below it offers a wondrous balance of human and computer working together. I may not have gotten Engelbart until this passage! I can't say though that I've ever heard of a computer program as open and accommodating as this.

    7. we provide him as much help as possible in making a plan of action. Then we give him as much help as we can in carrying it out. But we also have to allow him to change his mind at almost any point, and to want to modify his plans.

      I'm thinking about the role of AI tutors/advisors here. How often do they operate in the kind of flexible way described here. I wonder if they can without actual human intervention.

    8. formal and precise

      What about languages and behaviors that exceed these structures? I'm a little stuck on the mechanization of argumentation here and how so much human communication doesn't follow easily quantifiable rules.

    9. You can see there that these skills are easy to learn in the context of what the human has to learn anyway about using the tools, and that they provide for much greater flexibility in finding convenient ways to use the tools to help shape materials.

      I think knowing the limits of tools is as important as their mastery.

    10. There was a slight pause while Joe apparently was reflecting upon something. He started to speak, thought differently of it, and turned to flash something on a screen.

      One thing we get from this narrative is the persistence of humanity/humanities. Joe is not a robot!

    11. We have developed quite a few concepts and methods for using the computer system to help us plan and supervise sophisticated courses of action, to monitor and evaluate what we do, and to use this information as direct feedback for modifying our planning techniques in the future.

      This reminds me of "personalized learning."

    12. where precise use of special terms really pays off, where the human just couldn't be that precise by depending upon his unaided memory for definitions and 'standards,' and where using dictionary and reference-book lookup in the normal fashion would be so distracting and time-consuming that the task execution would break down.

      I wonder about the assumptions here. What really is the capacity of the individual for such memory. Clearly many people before the computer age had prodigious individual vocabularies to draw from. And "Thesaurus" can backfire, right?--giving the user a technical synonym that's connotations don't make sense in context. I also wonder about the haptic and other benefits of the more burdensome research process of reaching for a dictionary and flipping through the pages.

  6. Feb 2019
    1. Does overall time spent reading correlate with assessment scores? Are particular viewing patterns/habits predictive of student success? What are the average viewing patterns of students? Do they differ between courses, course sections, instructors, or student demographics?

      Can H itself capture some of this data? Through the LMS?

    1. Well, when you ever get handy at roaming over the type of symbol structure which we have been showing here, and you turn for this purpose to another person's work that is structured in this way, you will find a terrific difference there in the ease of gaining comprehension as to what he has done and why he has done it, and of isolating what you want to use and making sure of the conditions under which you can use it.

      Like picking up a book that has been highlighted or annotated by someone else?

    2. You are quite elated by this freedom to juggle the record of your thoughts, and by the way this freedom allows you to work them into shape

      It can be exciting.

    3. Your ideas begin to take shape, and you can continually re-work the existing set of statements to keep representing the state of your "concept structure."

      It's clear that this process becomes easier than its paper and pen analog. But is it better? That is, in terms of ordering our thoughts, is one means of achieving process better at producing a convincing argument. Again, I'm very interested in the history/position of composition studies on this topic.

    4. The text would all still look as neat as if freshly retyped

      This is of course desirable in terms of product. But losing that process is also problematic. Of course modern word-processing systems save and can display these histories in powerful and sophisticated ways. I especially Google Docs love this project from a former colleague.

    5. He showed you how he could single out a group of words (called the "object symbol string," or simply "object string") and define an abbreviation term, composed of any string of symbols he might choose, that became associated with the object string in computer storage. At any later time (until he chose to discard that particular abbreviation from his working vocabulary) the typing of the abbreviation term would call forth automatically the "printing" on the display of the entire object string.

      Keyboard shortcuts? Or autocorrect? Again, these seem (appreciated) conveniences of speed rather than evolutions in intellect. But is part of the point my brain is saved for other tasks?

    6. He showed you how he could call up the dictionary definition to any word he had typed in, with but a few quick flicks on the keyset. Synonyms or antonyms could just as easily be brought forth.

      So crazy how prescient this is. Though I suppose folks at IBM and Microsoft probably read Englebart.

    7. For example, select a given capability, at any level in the hierarchy, and ask yourself if it can be usefully changed by any means that can be given consideration in the augmentation research contemplated. If it can, then it is not basic but it can be decomposed into an eventual set of basic capabilities.

      It would be interesting to do this exercise with the various learning outcomes one might have for a course. Which can be aided by augmentation/technological intervention? Which can't?

    8. If it were so very easy to look things up,

      Despite the "brick pencil" prolepsis above, I still don't feel like the (simultaneous) potential for de-evolution is sufficiently addressed here.

      Yesterday I attended a parent-teacher conference at my daughter's elementary school. One spelling exercise she did strikes me as relevant here. She would be shown a card by a teacher with a word spelled out and have to spell it out orally in front of there (this was accompanied by a kind of patty cake hand work.) Then she would cross the room and spell the word out on paper. The goal was obviously to drive home the spelling in some deeper way and used only basic human motor and brain functions.

      Meanwhile, there are words I routinely misspell: accommodate, guarantee, for example. I basically don't know how to spell them. But I am able to rely on autocorrect/spellcheck--spelling augmentation software--to get by. Is that augmented intellect or handicapped intellect?

      There's no doubt that being able to look things up easily helps me function. But something is lost as well, no?

    9. Where a complex machine represents the principal artifact with which a human being cooperates, the term "man-machine interface" has been used for some years to represent the boundary across which energy is exchanged between the two domains. However, the "man-artifact interface" has existed for centuries, ever since humans began using artifacts and executing composite processes.

      This is an important point I think in current debates about "technology" and "social media." Not to exculpate the builders of our more modern tools and their responsibility for abuse on their platforms--important work still needs to be done there--but the abuse of such tools has deeper underlying human and social causes that need to be addressed as well.

    10. Even so apparently minor an advance could yield total changes in an individual's repertoire hierarchy that would represent a great increase in over-all effectiveness

      I'm starting to wonder about the difference between augmenting intellect and increasing efficiency...

    11. You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record.

      Perhaps. I often long for the linearity of the hand-written word. I feel that sometimes my digital composition processes allow for too many tangents, not enough focus.

    12. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs.

      Fascinating. Is the suggestion here that digital composition allows for more complexity because, essentially, I'm not limited by the linearity of the page, either in thought or writing?

    13. This writing machine would permit you to use a new process of composing text.

      Though I lived through the change from writing out essays for school to typing them out on a computer, I haven't really thought about how the processes and products for those different forms of composition are. I'd be interested to research this issue, especially across literary history, and how, say, the novel, changed as it means of production shifted.

    1. "Guess what? All that up-and-down with the cylinders, all firing at exactly the right millisecond, and then the gears and contraptions to turn the up-and-down into round-and-round? Gone. Oil changes? Gone. You have a battery, you have electric motors directly attached to wheels, you have absurd amounts of torque, and very few moving parts to wear out. The power goes straight to the wheels. All that internal combustion stuff did a great job for the last 100 years, but we can propel our wheeled vehicles with more efficiency and less complexity now."

      This is a description/advocation of electric cars?

    2. If you want to get a lot of money from VCs, it helps a lot to look like a platform company (although I get the sense that's beginning to change in the education investment space).

      Very interesting. Hypothesis will never be a platform I don't think.

    3. This value proposition is a far cry from robot tutors in the sky that can semi-read your mind. It's less sexy, more grounded, and more strategic.

      Still curious how it effects on the ground labor, though...

    4. I never got the sense that there were many True Believers in adaptive learning as a magic bullet.

      At ELI 2019, the 2019 Horizon Report was released. It was observed that "adaptive" was no longer on the roadmap.

    1. We are not seeing the same level of investment in the professional development of faculty as teachers and course designers. And yet, skilled teachers seem to be a critical success factor for personalized learning.

      Grrr.

    2. But as we learned from a great Disney movie, a magic wand wielded by a sorcerer’s apprentice generally does not produce the intended results.

      This is a little elitist, no? But I guess so is Fantasia.

    3. Even great software is not magic. If you want magic in the classroom, you need a great teacher. At its best, the software gives the magician a wand to work with.

      Great lines.

    4. prolonged interaction between the instructor and the students

      I'm always a little proud when I say that Hypothesis will not make things easier/more efficient for teachers. If anything, it helps widen and deepen this "prolonged interaction between the instructor and students," which takes even more time!

    1. I think that this dimension is especially interesting, as evaluation is a fundamental part of any traditional education system. At this point, I simply want to emphasise that the availability of this kind of data will definitely be noticed, especially considering that social reading and online annotations have made their move into the learning and teaching sector.

      Absolutely.

    2. The graph in figure 2 is cropped at day 1, as there was a tiny fraction of comments created after the day of the class. Out of the 1286 comments only 6 were created after the day of the lecture.

      This is a super interesting data point to think more about in terms of how annotation activity is set up in a course. Not sure how this would be graded, but one ideal scenario for me as a teacher is that students are returning to a reading AFTER it's been completed for assignment and discussed in class. How can we encourage this? Clearly it can be measure--and assessed if desired.

  7. Jan 2019
    1.     Like any of us

      Oliver is always reminding us of our kinship with the animal world. The image below is a familiar one of someone moving around to get comfortable and warm in a bed.

    1. Select Supports deep linking to allow instructors and course builders to launch the LTI tool and add content from the tool provider, rather than adding content through the Blackboard Learn interface. If the tool provider is configured so that the instructor can select multiple pieces of content in a single import, this tool can save time and simplify the workflow.

      I'm guessing that this should not be selected when installing the Hypothesis app. Current workflow moves through the Learn interface.

    2. Non-student tools are available for instructors and course builders. These tools appear in the Course Management section of an Original course and in the Books & Tools menu of an Ultra course.

      Hypothesis is definitely not a student tool as defined by BB.

      It is a "content type" tool that should be available to instructors and course designers.

  8. Dec 2018
    1. In my work, I have strayed far from a background that includes a MA in English Literature and teaching K-12 students written composition. I’ve focused on teaching or analyzing written communication or networked online discourse in the higher education, especially at the graduate level, for the past 16 years or so. But this work, annotating in the open not just for an individual, the teacher who grades the assignment, hits close to my heart in teaching K-CEO learners to write for an audience.
  9. Nov 2018
    1. it is the oppressive and symbolically violent use of the essentials of our discipline—words, rhetoric, and modes of communica-tion—that sticks to us most in the ongoing aftermath of the election

      This is a powerful point and one that, as I mentioned above, was part of what made me want to go back to the classroom after the election.

      One of the scary things to me about Trump's campaign and presidency has been not just the dehumanizing language/policies, which of course are terrible. But it's the denigration of the most fundamental skills and practices of an English classroom: close reading, critical thinking, empathy, arguing from evidence, arguing without fallacy, and on and on. Trump really represents a direct challenge to the humanities itself!

    1. that an instructor familiar with the platform might guide or encourage use of the question and answer feature.

      Again, this seems obvious and makes me wonder how this data is clouded by the expectations set by the research and the technology itself.

      As an analogy, I didn't naturally use the glosses in Folger editions of Shakespeare plays I read in high school. I had to be taught the value and learn how to leverage that tool of literacy.

    2. In a typical semester, students read more in the first four weeks and less in later weeks

      Somewhat matches patterns we see in student annotation over course of semester.

  10. Oct 2018
    1. Fact-checkers in Brazil complained this month ahead of the election that most voters trust what their friends and family send them on WhatsApp over what they see on TV or in newspapers.

      Terrifying. Clearly this is the case with the anger against "fake news" CNN in the US.

    2. Which means all of this — the trolls, the abuse, the fake news, the conspiracy videos, the data leaks, the propaganda — will eventually stop being a problem for people who can afford it.

      Seems to me this was never the problem to begin with. Weren't the privileged already above this noise?

    3. aided by algorithms recommending content that increases user watch time.

      What I want to see is more of a breakdown of this kind of thing: what exactly about the social media algorithms and distribution of content creates bubbles/polarization/etc. that lead to the politically radicalization/instability we're talking about.

    1. At all-boys’ schools, when students stand shoulder to shoulder with their classmates and hear that they are called to greatness, they also internalize the absence of women from their position of privilege and power. Women are not part of the club. They are separate. They are for conquest; they are for dating; they are for marriage. Women are not peers. Some boys graduate and go on to unpack and unlearn these lessons. Others find new clubs with guarded access. They join fraternities. They go on to business schools and law firms and seek out institutions with disproportionately more men than women. Look at the gender breakdown of boardrooms everywhere. Look at the Supreme Court.

      Damning.

  11. Sep 2018
    1. The real internet is structured by myriad people with different aesthetics and different needs. Online course design decisions should reflect the instructor’s individuality in the same way that everyone else’s webpages do.

      Love this. Though it can be a pain to navigate that idiosyncrasy.

    2. At that point, the well-trained online educators of the future will never accept the limitations of designing their courses entirely inside an LMS.

      Well, I'm not convinced by the argument but I certainly hope so. Perhaps it's not so much being well-trained in online education as well trained in some of the more traditional aspects of humanistic study.

    3. My graduate program did not prepare me to teach online, but graduate education will reflect reality when enough programs recognize the fact that online education is here to stay.

      Did it prepare you to teach? Most grad programs aren't focused on f2f education. The idea that they would be savvy enough to focus on online teaching and some particularly innovative form of it seems unlikely.

    4. the LMS will eventually wither and die, because the alternatives are only going to get cheaper (if they aren’t free already), better and easier to use.

      I'm not convinced.

    1. We still see a two-horse race for new implementations (LMS product switches) in higher education, largely shared between Canvas and D2L, but the second horse that is looking better than it used to still needs to make further adjustments and run faster.

      Annotation as a core, multi-use feature could be a difference maker.

    1. Moodle and Sakai both lost market share of just under 1%, not enough to show up in the rounded numbers in the table but enough to show up in our underlying data.

      Small number but loyal users?

    2. The difference in Moodle's market share by institutions at 25% and by enrollments at 12% really shows how concentrated their usage is for smaller schools.

      Interesting. Because of smaller budgets?

    3. the market continues to be a two-horse race recently with Canvas by Instructure and Brightspace by D2L as the only two solutions with material gains in market share.

      So Blackboard is not growing. Only Canvas and D2L are and the former more substantially.

    1. While each tool has differing ways in which it can be used in the classroom and with various Learning Management Systems (LMSs),

      What's the relationship between the LMS and OER or perhaps more specifically "open educational practices"?

    2. This, coupled with the fact that the market is not set up for students to purchase used e-texts, means that the annotation tools that are native to publisher platforms are often not a realistic option for the community college population.

      Not to mention they are not ideal from a scholarly/academic perspective. How are my notes in one publisher platform connected to another?

    3. Annotation tools provide an alternative to the image of the solitary student sitting in the library reading a text.

      Not sure it needs to be alternative. The library itself if of course a deeply networked space--not only because of the databases available, but because of the abundance of interconnected paper texts.

    4. Current technology takes this a step further as modern annotation tools combine, in one platform, both the social sharing/dialogue and the ability to engage in ways beyond the text.

      Yes, moving the conversation from Facebook or the LMS discussion forum back to the margin of the text itself.

  12. Aug 2018
    1. we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating

      A valuable reminder for those of us in the business of "innovation."

    1. (Anne-Mette Nortvig and René B. Christiansen, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, September 2017)

      Anyone know what's up with these links (couldn't highlight the links themselves but they all begin "educau.se/")? They're not internal EDUCAUSE links. Is EDUCAUSE providing access to this research? Or getting credit for sending people to it?

    1. Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. "I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally," he said, "like learning how to swim by falling off the end of a dock."

      Wow! This is a recurring sentiment on the Right echoed in the mocking of Barack Obama as a "community activist."

    1. a university’s making its own values clear.

      I wonder if it's fair to apply this to a social media platform like Facebook (or Hypothesis) for that matter.

    2. odious presidency

      This isn't really enough--I hated Bush. It's the explanation that follows that makes clear what lines have been crossed that make this presidency different.

    1. motto of Britain’s Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific institution — nullius in verba, Latin for "take no one’s word for it."

      I didn't know this and love it!

    2. "It’s not that I ever did him anything wrong. I just think he was fishing around for some way to make him a more notable figure," Zimbardo said of Blum in an interview. "And he hit on this." It was 1971. Philip G. Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, had just earned tenure, and he had completed a study he wanted the world to know about.

      Um...

    1. Iwillhighlighthowrecentadvancesinadaptivelearning,learninganalytics,andsomepedagogiesclaimingtoempowerlearnerssometimesdotheopposite,orfallshortofachievingtheirobjective.

      I'd be interested in the positive version of this. What technologies out there are working for student empowerment.

  13. Jul 2018
    1. auto-provision them into, e.g. private groups allocated for use by courses or sections.

      But this is a different handshake then the one's described above, no?

    2. whether we can configure the hypothesis plugin for WordPress to implement a ‘third-party account’ using the reference implementation at https://github.com/hypothesis/publisher-account-test-site. If we’re successful with this, this may perhaps allow us to automatically create Hypothesis accounts when new Pressbooks accounts are created?

      This is the heart of it, I think.

      Is there some kind of necessarily user table in a given WP/PB instance?

    3. We’re running an instance of Pressbooks with the hypothesis plugin installed and networked activated. We want to have the option of giving users one login to gain access to both Pressbooks and Hypothesis (when the hypothesis plugin is installed and activated for a book).

      Should this be considered separately or firstly before adding the complexity of the LMS/LTI? That is thinking first of how PB users can have h accounts just on the web?

      Particularly in the edu context, how are accounts created for students using PB at other schools, not necessarily in the LMS?

  14. Jun 2018
    1. [edit] The choice tag is used to represent sections of text which might be encoded or tagged in more than one possible way. In the following example, based on one in the standard, choice is used twice, once to indicate an original and a corrected year and once to indicate an original and regularised spelling.[10]

      I love that this exists!

    1. Player A's role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while player B attempts to assist the interrogator in making the right one.

      Why are these roles gendered, the man always dissembling, the woman assisting?