3,982 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2017
    1. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

      Gardner, is this "insight"?

    2. halting

      Acceleration is a key trope for Bush. It's largely about speed. When I think of some of the same technologies that he is imagining, however, its more about direction--to keep in in the realm of physics...

  2. Jan 2017
    1. Although the terms social reading and social annotation point to a genuinely new affordance of digital text, it’s important to note that the affordance isn’t sociality itself but, as noted above, the speed and scale at which it can be practiced. Failure to register this fact obscures one of the most important opportunities that the Web offers us as teachers: to explore with our students how thoroughly social the activities of reading and writing have always been.

      The level of access--I guess that's scale--seem quite different.

    1. Digital technology, rather than destroying the tradition of marginalia, could actually help us return it to its gloriously social 18th-century roots.

      Admittedly, I do want to highlight this note in a distinct way so that it jumps out for me and for others from the rest of the page and its marginalia.

    2. The digital book — scentless, pulp-free, antiseptic — seems like a poor home for the humid lushness of old-fashioned marginalia

      Disagree. We can bring the analog practice to the digital environment and add tools that Anderson would find incredibly valuable, like search for example.

    1. Even more critical, though, is how sociable readers really want to be. Conversation in the digital margins makes a lot of sense as a way to draw students into reading assignments. Will scholars and other booklovers embrace the idea?

      I think English class is only the most obvious and deliberate manifestation of something that comes naturally from any experience of culture. We want to talk about it others.

    2. Copyright creates a barrier to social reading's catching on in a big way. Mr. Duncombe had a public-domain text to build on, but many readers want recent material. So far publishers haven't rushed to provide copyrighted works to gather around online.

      So this was written before the advent of browser plugins like Hypothes.is which don't quite solve this problem, but especially with PDF and (soon) ePub integration, do allow you to bring this toolkit to texts rather than the other way around.

    1. the school shall not be mere practical devices or modes of routine employment, the gaining of better technical skill as cooks, sempstresses, or carpenters, but active centers of scientific insight into natural materials and processes, points of departure whence children shall be led out into a realization of the historic development of man.

      So not just vocational education but innovative education.

    2. But if the end in view is the development of a spirit of social coöperation and community life,

      What a radical way to imagine curriculum or even an entire school!

    3. first-hand contact with actualities.

      Now hearing Whitman:

      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.

    4. We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this: training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world.

      Hard not to think of Dewey's contemporaries in literature like Thoreau and Emerson with lines like this.

    1. Our audience inhabits a complex, polluted information environment; our role is to help them navigate it — not to pretend it doesn’t exist. The need to show our work and earn trust has never been more important, since once reliable official sources are peddling “alternative facts” — as the White House press secretary did Saturday.

      The first half of this statement could be reworked as a pedagogical call for digital literacy.

    1. Consider that 59 percent of links shared on social media have never been clicked; this means that the majority of users are sharing articles they have never actually read.

      This is an astounding fact.

    1. On a practical level, this means that we wanted to devise ways of presenting monographs that could be accomplished with only the most basic digital version of a book: a full-text PDF file.

      Is it? Why not the Web?

    2. Users are arguably ‘locked in’ to a linear, continuous reading experience, without the ease offlipping back and forth between chapters and the index as one can with a print volume

      Not to mention another book on another platform entirely.

    3. There was hope that digitizing monographs would be the answer to these troubling indicators of low usage of print monographs, and that the greater availability of digital monographs would help to grow the usage and impact of monographs in the same way that digitization efforts arguably helped to revitalize the usage and citation impact of backfile journals.2

      Interesting.

    4. “The annotations,” one participant said, “have to be able to escape the book file.”

      This really does seem key. That would add another answer to the why digital annotation question. It's social,it's multimedia, but it's also searcheable and exportable, which would make it really useful as the raw material of other kinds of scholarly work, rather than an end it and of itself.

    5. The relative paucity of existing options for annotating digital scholarly books emerged as a particular frustration,

      "Paucity" of what exactly? Not clients for annotating surely? I can name a few. There are actually choices? Features that support the full analog, idiosyncratic process as described below?

    6. omments or suggestions on the paper submitted

      Link is to a Google form. Not saying it has to be h, but surely there is a better way to engage readers for comment.

    1. “Open” means that anyone can publish or invent online without asking for permission,

      This conception of openness is actually core to our principles at Hypothes.is, the open-source, standards based annotation application embedded here for discussion.

      We believe that not only should anyone anywhere be able to create annotations like this on Web content, but that they should be able to build their own client to do so and that annotation clients should be based on open-standards so that they can communicate with each other, while remaining autonomous.

    1. The relation of syntax to meter is absolutely crucial. And so, it can’t go “in singing not to sing” as the intoning of the paradox seems to demand, but rather “that he knows in singing not to sing," i.e., not to be claimed by allegorizing human intention as music, but instead as speculative discourse.

      This is an especially mind-blowing close reading.

    2. fracturing spring from fall, promise from conditional fulfillment, because they were both there in Milton’s Paradise.

      And brought death into the world, no? And that's what those leaves are, dead.

    1. The standard NMC format avoids the use of first person pronouns (“I will…” “We talk about…”), referring instead to “the presenters” or “this session.” 

      This is really odd rule to impose.

    1. It’s why GIs gave their lives at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima; Iraq and Afghanistan — and why men and women from Selma to Stonewall were prepared to give theirs as well.

      An interesting an powerful alignment of American military campaigns and the civil rights movement.

    1. An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like.

      Really this should be all out jobs. Everyday.

    1. An important distinction, however, must be made. Whereas now the social nature of reading is enhanced through ubiquity and accessibility, reading during the Middle Ages was social because of scarcity and inaccessibility.

      Fascinating distinction!

    2. While there are multiple implications for this vulnerability and transparency within the context of open access, a key one is the relevance of open annotation practices for innovations in peer review.

      Boom!

    3. While all of these practices have continued to exist in various forms throughout the high age of print, they have achieved a prominence today that they have not experienced since the Middle Ages.

      What other differentiators? Scale? Inclusiveness?

  3. Dec 2016
    1. (For example, an extremely high quality, high fidelity, interactive chemistry lab simulation is the “wrong” content if students are supposed to be learning world history.)

      Hmmm. This seems an uncontroversial statement.

    2. many institutions with CBE programs treat their competencies like a secret family recipe, hoarding them away and keeping them fully copyrighted (apparently without experiencing any cognitive dissonance while they promote the use of OER among their students). This behavior has seriously stymied growth and innovation in CBE in my view.

      So open educational standards?

    3. Not everyone has the time, resources, talent, or inclination to completely recreate competency maps, textbooks, assessments, and credentialing models for every course they teach. Similarly on the technology side, not everyone has the time or inclination to code up a new blogging platform from scratch every time they want to post an article online. It simply makes things faster, easier, cheaper, and better for everyone when their is high quality, openly available infrastructure already deployed that we can remix and build upon.

      There are a lot of slippery slopes here. I always pause when I hear the "not everyone has the time" argument. Here, it especially gives me pause because we're talking about what to prioritize in ed-tech and ultimately the classroom. I'm not sure I would automatically value "competency maps" above "coding up."

    4. competencies or learning outcomes, educational resources that support the achievement of those outcomes, assessments by which learners can demonstrate their achievement of those outcomes, and credentials that certify their mastery of those outcomes to third parties.

      These all feel very product driven from my perspective. Perhaps it's a necessarily administrative position. Of course, David himself has written about this elsewhere, but what about the process, what about pedagogy?

    5. the assignment is impossible without the permissions granted by open licenses.

      To me, this is a limited definition of "open." What exactly are we opening? Just the resource itself? Just the price or access to the resource? What about it's composition? Does opening the composition or interpretation of a close resource count as open pedagogy?

    6. disposable assignments.”

      I've been think lately about an idea I'll now call "disposable tools": tools introduced in formal education that aren't really used outside the classroom.

      It's true that the skills gained by using such education technology can be carried out of the classroom. And it's true that we need the safety of the walled garden some such platforms provide in some learning contexts. But what if professors and administrators started thinking about what tech to use in the classroom based on the sustainability of those tools? Asking, will this be useful to students beyond graduation?

    7. How can we extend, revise, and remix our pedagogy based on these additional capabilities?

      To me, and I may be short on imagination here, the bulk of the work is in connecting teaching and learning with bullets 3 and 4.

    1. my own teaching content is not so much infrastructure as the residue of the learning happening as a result of the course.

      So content is secondary to process?

    2. not designed around pre-determined content, often packaged as textbooks (so much of the open education movement is still premised on this idea of the authoritative text), but rather on an open educational experience.

      Fascinating tensions here. Yeah, fuck textbooks, even if they are adaptable/adaptive. It's really more about the process of learning in which content is just one aspect of the experience, like isolating just the sounds of a beautiful meadow and not taking in the other

    1. freeing up time for teachers to give students more individualized attention and to focus on more complex tasks.

      H definitely shifts the way time is spent in a class. Basics are taken care of in the reading, allowing for more sophisticated tasks to be dealt with face-to-face.

    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 nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

    3. to strengthen the connection between teacher and student.

      Hypothes.is empowers this through annotation: students asking teachers questions, teachers responding; teachers guiding students through texts; teachers intervening to help students develop comprehension and analytic skills...

    1. Yet tracking contributions and navigational pathways was clunky.

      This is in part why, before the release of this great Activity Pages feature, we build in "homework submission" to our Canvas app. The response was controversial, though. When exactly does this tracking pathways become something dangerous in terms of data collection?

    1. What if my book is set to private? Can anyone see the public comments? If your book is set to private, any public comments in Hypothesis will only be visible to people with access to your book (or any chapter(s) within it). This means that if you aren’t publicising your webbook, you don’t have to worry about setting up a group for your editors and/or pre-publication readers, as all comments will be hidden from view by default.

      I don't think this is actually true. Public annotations would be visible via hypothes.is/stream. But the links there would ask for a log in.

    1. The scribbles and highlights made by students reading digital textbooks should allow them to sharpen their learning curve,

      Worth noting that one thing that distinguishes this project from H is that these annotations are private and then mined by textbook publishers. While students can annotate privately using Hypothes.is, these annotations are truly theirs and cannot be seen by anyone, even staff!

    1. Don’t settle for instrumental uses of technology. Don’t stop with informal logic and historical fallacies. Help awaken your students to these new practices of digital deception, and help them face them effectively. If they are going to be transformative agents of change in the world, they need this knowledge.

      Again, I think this is the call for a critical shift in disciplinary thinking that needs amplification. Or perhaps these calls for more sophisticated understandings of digital media have just never seemed so urgent as they do today.

    2. Ad hominem attacks, reductio ad absurdum, the intentional fallacy — these pale in comparison to coordinated digital deception, powered by sock-puppet Twitter accounts, SEO expertise, and a Facebook algorithm that privileges fake news.

      Digital rhetoricians need to attend to this proposed turn as well.

    1. by inserting comments in the audio recordings they’d submit to me (as opposed to worrying about whether or not it was ok to correct their French in class in front of their peers… something I had always been hesitant to do in spite of – or perhaps because of – what had been done to me!) or by recording an audio walkthrough of suggestions and corrections to the first drafts of their compositions (instead of handing back a blood-red “fixed” version of a composition in class).

      Premium on teacher feedback.

    2. Most of the exercises in the text are laid out in such a way that it’s meant to be written on: I’m sure you can understand that with a $350 text, students would be reluctant to write in their textbooks in order to benefit from a high resale value; however, here, with a no-cost (or low-cost) text, putting pen to textbook paper was a natural and regular practice.

      Costly textbooks inhibit annotation.

    1. which is a much broader process of opening up universities.

      I'm really interested in what this work entails. I do feel the focus on "resources," while hugely important, is limiting on the important work to be done to open education up more broadly.

    1. We can know all the history of innovation in education and technology, even have all the tools and code that they used and some of the things that they made, but it isn’t the same stuff as the knowledge that is used to run the world.

      The style of negation deployed in this essay never really points us in the right direction. Not a fault per se, but I'm fascinated in practical solutions to respond to this problem...

    2. Of course, no person of that age could ever afford (or be permitted) to attend college now, and the “career break” crowd would never have the time or the inclination to even look at a textbook.

      So the entire focus of the OER movement is way off base, then?

    3. Two weeks on the transatlantic steamer have given me the time and the space to put myself back into the mindset of the “Uber Age,”

      The conceit of this essay is pretty amazing (and terrifying).

    4. Maybe what we knew wasn’t as important to the world as we thought. You hear that England voted to leave the Atlantic Ocean last month?

      This statement could be applied in so many different contexts...

    5. It was just learning by staring at a screen, and having some computer record everything you did so it could pretend that it knew you. Which was pretty much like regular university education, actually.

      MOOCs as traditional university education? MOOCification of university education?

    1. more modular content that can be placed into different delivery systems which can interoperate.

      This seems an editorial as well as a technical problem. Publishers should rethink the shape of the textbook. And content should be shipped in a that allows for revision and remix.

    1. copyright law regulates our exercise of all these newfound capabilities – so that what is technically possible is also legally forbidden.

      I keep coming back to this question: does web annotation open up copyrighted texts?

      Let's set aside whether it's ultimately legal for me to annotate a document and share that annotated document--or "republish" a portion of targeted content from a copyrighted source through an annotation service.

      Web annotation does allow me to "open" copyrighted content to critique, commentary, and a certain kind of remixing. Quoting and critiquing/commentating is the oldest remix tool in the humanities scholar playbook.

    1. Hypothes.is as bettering Twitter

      There’s also a growing culture of people on Twitter hacking the microblogging platform as an annotation tool. They call them Screenshorts, Tweets that use screenshots of highlighted text to ground commentary. To me it’s just web annotation 1.0. But they’re just trying to be good English students, right?

      From a pedagogical and rhetorical perspective, at least, an annotated Trump speech is more effective than a random comment out there in the ether of the net. Similarly, a close read of the Clinton emails I believe would reveal there’s not much of a story there. But as a culture, we are not engaging with politics in that way, and we would be better off if we did.

    1. By providing lower-cost pathways to graduation that feature open pedagogical practices designed to enhance student engagement, the institution removes more barriers to successful education and career attainment

      So there are twin pieces to the movement: resources and pedagogy.

    1. Learning, in both formal and informal settings, will be deepened, peer-based and collaborative, and extend to broader networks. The evolution of these new cultural norms

      How do we push the evolution of these "social norms"? For starters, are there OER conferences for teachers? To spread the word, train, etc. OpenEd was this to an extent, but I'd imagine an everyday teacher feeling a little overwhelmed at least by many of the sessions.

    2. With technological advances, the continuous loop of Open Educational Resources used in context for learning, with immediate assessment and feedback data on learning outcomes, will be realized. Rapidly, useless content and assessments will be reworked and improved. Pedagogical data gathered, stripped of individual identifying information, will be openly available to accelerate the next stage of innovation.

      What technological advances?

      Hypothes.is could play a role in user feedback for sure.

    3. the vast majority of humanity will engage in learning through what we now call supplemental resources,

      Informal learning spaces...need "informal" (?) learning tools. Do we already have the platforms to support this?

    1. In the case of Minecraft,

      The case of Minecraft, an established product, already well-integrated into the classroom, seems quite different than an emergent tool or platform.

    2. Any school technology purchaser will agree that there are thousands of options when it comes to learning tools out there. Every which way you look, there’s a new technology claiming “pedagogical relevance” and “impact on learning”—and this is becoming especially true in the game-based learning environment.

      Happy to b hawking an authentic one in this landscape. :)

    1. The ‘recorded’ item, the open educational resource, has a low headline price, which has been great for creating an educational commons, but the price of an educational experience has diverged between the very high cost, place-based ‘experiences’ in the presence of ‘top’ educators and the lower cost blended or online-only ‘experiences’ for everyone who cannot afford those place-based experiences.

      This is a fascinating point!

    2. Yes, folks sampled other people’s work, and yes, they could produce their own work and release it on the Web as they saw fit, but very, very few ‘made it’ without the support of the big boys.

      But have more "made it" through the likes of Bandcamp and Soundcloud then previously? Has there been some degree of democratization?

    3. Although free at the point of use, MOOCs actually fitted a consumerist model of behavior, rather than the prosumer and co-production of knowledge model that many advocates sought.

      Interesting. Learning was still too passive?

    4. anyone can add resources to the commons, and yes, anyone can adapt, modify, and republish what is already there, but in reality this reaches far fewer people than the big boys do.

      So amplifying non-mainstream projects is a goal?

    1. It struck me as the best possible documentation of my actual year in reading — not a vague memory or an idealized portrait, but the moment-by-moment experience itself.

      In terms of teaching, could a record of annotation be a better view into reading/thinking than even a final essay? (Especially when viewed over time?)

    2. A rare haven of total focus in a culture plagued by distraction?

      Would it be? Or would the annotations distract from the at times solitary experience of deep, close reading?

    3. broken spines, dog-eared chapters, marginalia

      What the digital equivalent of the first two here? xAPI data about time spend reading, where readers scrolled, clicked, etc.?

    4. “metadata” about our reading

      Or the reading of others, thinking of this in a classroom setting. This metadata could be so useful in the teaching of reading.

    5. And yet I’ve continued to hope that, in some not-too-distant future, e-reading will learn to take marginalia seriously.

      This is just a matter of providing annotation ability, but of doing so in an interoperable way. If my notes on a Kindle are not also available elsewhere, alongside my notes from a book read on an iPad, then it would be as if I could write in certain books but not others, or had to put on a different pair of glasses to read my marginalia in different books.

    1. and what if our characters created had their own hypothes.is accounts??)

      Yeah, I really love this idea. It'd be especially interesting if participants created dummy accounts of various sorts--characters, commentators, etc.--but did not reveal the identity (or even purpose) of the person behind the annotations at first.

    2. combinatorial creativity?

      Not that collaboration is anything new, but the central tension in the idea of "networked narrative" is the unprecedented force of the "combinatorial creativity."

      Surely all stories are networked: a storyteller listens to other storytellers, calling themselves storytellers or not; a storyteller is always listening to stories, whether capital "s" stories or not.

      But there does seem to be an exceptionally centripetal force about the digital era, or more the era of social media, that truly challenges the notions of story, author, book, etc.

  4. Nov 2016
    1. When we start to organise learning / technology outside of the establishment (universities, colleges, libraries, curricula), we quickly find ourselves inside a different kind of established order:

      Can the Ivory Tower and Silicon Valley really be so easily divided? Among other things, how are colleges and universities outside of the marketplace?

    2. And how we love convivial institutions in the ed tech community! We know them as networks, rhizomes, MOOCs, the ‘long tail’ of diverse opinions. They are non-hierarchical, or at least the hierarchies are unofficial (which can mean simply reproducing existing power relations). They agile. They are alternative. They fit with the counter-cultural, anarchism-lite that has been the prevailing politics of the tech industry since the year dot. Give me a provisional organisation any time I am organising a protest, or a development project, or a bit of voter intimidation. But provisional organisations are not inherently more progressive than formalised ones. Where has the populist right been organising, up until the moment they successfully took over the institutions we were so down on? Where have the conspiracy theories flourished, that have not unseated a single crooked politician that I know of, but have undermined the grounds for a rational political alternative? Those spaces.

      This "rant"--and I mean that in the best of ways--belongs in a play or a speech. I've been literally lifted out of my chair by it.

    3. The eternal referencing of Illych’s ‘deschooling’ meme – an essential diagnosis of what goes wrong for individuals when their learning is standardised, credentialised  and consumerised, but a poor analysis of what we should do about it collectively.

      I want to read another blog entry, essay, or book, just unpacking this fascinating statement. Or maybe Helen can just respond here or push me in the right direction.

    4. But it’s overwhelmingly the people who are already educationally successful who are learning successfully online, at least in ways that have an impact on our worldview and life chances. How are we going to ensure that everyone in our society can benefit from the knowledge that is there in abundance? How are we going to develop everyone as  independent learners and critical thinkers and interconnected citizens? That should be the only question we ask of e-learning now.

      This is the critical work that needs done.

    5. Thanks to Tinder

      It should be noted that the Foundation has thankfully changed it's name. Given the more popular internet Tinder, these sentences could cause puzzlement if read out of context.

    6. So in a culture where everyone has access to information 24/7, the political divide between educational have and have-nots is getting wider.

      Another truly remarkable statement here. In the wake of the US election, much attention has been paid on the role of mis-information. We have 24 hour access to information, but what kind of information? And how are we navigating that information? Both algorithmically and critically?

    7. It is no small thing for democracy that we live in an age of abundant information, including some of the most intellectually and commercially valuable knowledge on the planet. But access to this knowledge rarely means educational success

      I've read this statement a few times now. To me, it's remarkable in how obvious it is, but also how often we forget it.