Bringing Social Learning to All Educational Texts: Creating a Coalition

00:35 - Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us. We’ll get started in a little around a minute or so.

01:18 - Thanks for joining us, we’ll be getting started shortly.

01:41 - All right, why don’t we go ahead and get started so welcome everybody. I’m Cliff Lynch, the director of the Coalition for network information. I’ll be introducing the session today.

01:53 - You’ve reached the final session for the first day of the synchronous briefings for the 2021 spring virtual CNI member meeting minutes. Great to have you here with us.

02:11 - I’ll just remind you that we will be having additional synchronous project briefings during various times for this week and next week we will do a couple of days of plenary sessions to close out the meeting for the spring meeting we’re relying more heavily on pre recorded project briefings and I just want to remind you that as part of the meeting opening today we did release, quite a number of pre recorded project briefings that are available on demand I think you’ll find there’s a rich assortment of material in there.

So, please look through that, when you have the opportunity.

03:07 - This session is being recorded and the recording will be publicly available subsequent to the meeting.

03:15 - Just a couple of mechanical things we have got a chat window, and please feel free to use that to make comments Introduce yourself, etc.

03:27 - There is also a q&a tool at the bottom of your screen at any point during the presentation if questions occur do, please feel free to put those in the q amp a tool.

03:43 - and we will address all the questions at the end after we’ve been through the presentations.

03:53 - It’s also possible during the q amp a to raise your hand and we can turn on your microphone so that you can ask questions by voice if it’s a more involved question and you prefer to do that.

04:11 - And I think that’s all the mechanical sorts of things I need to say.

04:17 - We have quite a panel today and Heather stains who is going to be kind of running the panel will introduce everybody in a moment.

04:31 - I just want to first off, thank, Heather and all of the panelists for putting this session together it’s really interesting and a very timely topic.

04:48 - This whole issue of social learning, and how that can contribute to things like close reading has become extremely intriguing topic that’s opened up in the last year or two.

05:05 - At the last hypothesis meeting that happened in person that I was able to attend there which I guess was 2019.

05:19 - i. Time has gotten so strange since the pandemic.

05:24 - There were a series of fascinating presentations where we had a number of faculty who taught.

05:34 - Little literary analysis writing and things like that, talking about how class annotation was an incredibly powerful tool for enhancing student learning and engagement and, you know, I guess I sort of see what we’re going to hear about today as perhaps the next logical step at taking that to to a much broader scale so I’m really delighted that Heather and her colleagues can join us Heather will introduce all the rest of the folks on the panel.

06:15 - And at this point, I’ll just say thank you for joining us. My thanks again to the panelists, and I’ll shut up, go away and turn it over to Heather.

06:26 - Thanks so much cliff, I’m really excited to be here today. This is my first CNI meeting.

06:32 - So thanks to Cliff for inviting us to do the project briefing and to Diane, for helping us with the behind the scenes logistics, as was mentioned previously, we’re using a zoom webinar format so I don’t believe you guys can see each other, but the secret is the chat box is open to everyone so if you’d like to introduce herself, maybe explain a little bit about why this session was attracted to you what your interests are in social learning.

07:01 - That way, you can see what others have have found of interest here. And no, you know really who’s out there in the ether.

07:11 - And then we’ll have the, the questions at the end. So first we’re going to hear from Dan Whaley Dan is the founder and CEO for hypothesis, where I used to work, I’d say I should say I’m Heather stains and I’m currently a independent consultant I’m remiss if I didn’t say that.

07:29 - Dan from hypothesis. Dan is a coder and entrepreneur. He created the first online travel reservation company on the web, called get there in 1995. He wrote much of the software launch the business and guided the long term technical and product vision, got there went public in 1999 it was sold to saber in 2000 with nearly 600 employees, while processing approximately 50% of travel transacted online dn currently serves as a director of Sauce Labs the leading open source functional testing company and get around a peer to peer car sharing company.

He’s a Shuttleworth fellow. After Dan, we will hear from him acquire.

08:07 - He McGuire is the CEO. He’s the co founder of the, of the Rebus foundation.

08:13 - He’s been building tools and communities to bring books into the open web since about 2005.

08:19 - He’s the founder of Libra box. org, which is free public domain audio books made by volunteers from around the world, and press books which is an open source book publishing platform, go to the next slide with the names on it.

08:33 - There we go. Built on WordPress, along with Brian O’Leary, who is the CO editor of the book, called a book, a futurist manifesto essays from the bleeding edge of publishing.

08:46 - I’m sure there’s lots of folks would be interested in that. Next up, will be re McAleer Ramy as an assistant professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado, Denver School of Education and Human Development.

08:59 - He researches how social annotation facilitates collaborative open and equitable learning. During the 2020 2021 academic year career, serving, I should say Rabia serving as hypothesis is inaugural scholar in residence and it’s helping to lead a new research initiative related to social annotation and student learning.

09:19 - He is also the lead author of the forthcoming book called annotation of volume in the MIT Press essential knowledge series.

09:27 - He’s co founder and facilitator of marginal syllabus that I hope some of you are aware of already a research practice partnership that sparks and sustains conversation about educational equity through social annotation here in this PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

09:44 - And finally, rounding out our panel today will be Mark Graham.

09:49 - Mark grams created and managed innovative online and products and services, since 1984 as director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive markers responsible for capturing preserving and helping people discover and use more than 1.

10:02 - billion, new web captures each week. That’s billion with a be.

10:08 - Mark was most recently senior vice president with NBC News where he managed several business units including Garvin garden web and string wire.

10:16 - He was senior vice president technology with I village and early internet company that focused on women and community, and you’ve co founded row networks, one of the first large scale feed aggregators and personalized blog readers marks early training experience with computer mediated communications was acquired when he served in the US Air Force spending more than three years working at the Air Force Data Services Center at the Pentagon marks nonprofit work includes volunteering with the Open Educational library, or commons.

org, and he’s a board member also of open recovery.

10:48 - sf. org. And with that I will hand it over to Dan to kick us off.

10:56 - Thanks Heather. Hey everybody. Nice to see you all here.

11:02 - And thanks, thanks for coming. Give you a little bit of background on on what we’re thinking about and then let remain Hugh and Mark dive a little bit into kind of how they see that context and and roll from this from their different perspectives in scholarship and publishing and archiving and also wanted to say that this, we’re going to be talking about an initiative here. The primary feedback is to give you a little bit of information about this but most importantly, to solicit your feedback and your input, about how you see this, what you think.

What do you think about it, what, Maybe we should consider what we might be missing.

11:54 - Who else we should be reaching out to and, and how this may relate to your work in libraries, and so forth.

12:05 - So the context of this is that in this is this ultimately came from a problem that we were seeing at hypothesis and with other platforms kind of like ourselves.

12:18 - We’re trying to bring interactivity, to the classroom experience.

12:23 - And in doing that in most of the time, and a lm s authenticated way inside.

12:34 - Inside platforms. And the goal in order to, you know, keep students engaged, make better use of the classroom time.

12:42 - Leverage peer learning as we’re students help each other.

12:47 - And that this bringing this activity to these platforms requires connection to the material.

12:55 - And, you know, in the texts that make up that material. Next slide.

13:02 - And so the problem, though, is that, because we’re sitting inside this lm s authenticated experience, most of the time. Sometimes things like our hypothesis are used outside the LM s.

13:16 - There are plenty of instructors out there who, you know, prefer not to use the LM s.

13:22 - And, which is just fine with us. You can, you know, also use annotation in a way that’s that’s outside that that framework. But, you know, at least, well over 90% of the folks that are using this are using it kind of within that context and as it becomes more popular. We expect that percentage will probably increase because the folks that tend to be outside tend to be the early adopters and, you know, whereas the folks that are inside tend to be you know a little bit more of the mainstream adopters.

13:51 - So, right now, our tools like ours can use on texts that are inside the LM s or, you know, or stored as, as PDFs.

14:04 - Google Drive box etc, or in just on the open web, you know, an HTML web pages, etc. But when it comes to texts that are stored inside external platforms.

14:20 - Number one, on reading platforms that are apps themselves like vital source and and so forth, or inside authenticated experiences where they might be IP range limited or in some way need to be logged into that system to be able to gain access to those tax.

14:48 - Then, The third party tool can’t and that authenticated classroom experience, you know inside the office. Can’t be brought over that third party tool that third party experience, or that that remote context platform.

15:05 - And so the the downside for instructors and teachers and so forth, is that that experience that they’re having over text like PDFs that are stored inside Canvas can’t be brought over the platforms that are that are external to the system. And so what happens most of the times that the teachers just simply take that third party content downloaded as PDF and re upload it into Canvas, which is a problem for in a couple ways, number one, it’s just kind of a poor user experience it’s a lot of friction it’s an extra step, but also a lot of times it’s a violation of whatever kind of license requirement that they might have with that third party agreement now generally speaking, and this is a widespread practice that’s going on already teachers are downloading tax and uploading them in to into the systems and I think generally folks either considered to be, you know, fair use or they kind of look the other way.

16:09 - But as this practice of social learning of peer learning becomes more mainstream. And this becomes more of something particularly if if annotation or these kind of things are required as part of the grade.

16:23 - Then, and the option to use the, the print or the other text is not an option because the interactive experience over the digital text is required than having something that is integrated with all the platforms that detects might be on becomes more and more important.

16:45 - So we asked ourselves how, how could we solve for this problem, not just for ourselves but for other third party applications like ourselves.

16:56 - Next slide. Just, you know, kind of, from our perspective, the you know the landscape of platforms that are out there kind of falls into these categories, there’s the LM s itself.

17:14 - The aggregators the EPS goes into pro quest and so forth. Oh, we are materials.

17:20 - The actual publishers archives like Jace Jordan Internet Archive and so forth. The digital distributors textbook distributors in particular like vital source and read shelf.

17:32 - Local PDFs that might be stored in a drive or box instance, the open web, of course, as Brian is suggesting having annotating content on the open web which is a major use case.

17:45 - And then other kinds of scholarly materials like pre printed journals, self publishing, like us, folks are using press books to publish their own materials and then e readers like Kobo and Amazon, and most of these represent, except for the elements themselves and for maybe the local PDF or the website category, our materials, often which are opaque. to the third party tools that like hypothesis that are being used.

18:22 - And so what we wondered is could we bring a coalition of platforms together, to work, to address the identify what the obstacles are to more seamless integration of content with with interaction, find ways to eliminate those obstacles, potentially in some. In some instances natively integrate great the third party technologies but at a minimum, not to obstruct them by in terms of the the way that the content is, is, is offered or rendered or, you know, sometimes it’s not even selectable with your cursor and there’s all kinds of kind of inherent limitations and would they would that coalition work in the open, in terms of cooperating to solve these things.

19:21 - Excellent. That, so we have begun to have a wide range of conversations with many of these platforms Heather has been helping us drive that that experience, drive, drive those conversations.

19:39 - They’ve gone, I think fairly well. And the, the main ask that we’ve you know kind of established the context and the landscape here. The main ask that we’ve had them is, you know, would you join this this coalition, you know do do kind of agree with a vision.

19:58 - Would you work to figure out what this would mean in your own platforms, work, and prioritize the effort to remove some of the obstacles that are that are there, collaborate with others and you know be public about that.

20:13 - So the work of the coalition would be focused on set of technical recommendations for coalition members or others to.

20:23 - To achieve this kind of interoperability narrative produce initial demonstrations of this what it looks like.

20:33 - And then see if the recommendations can be incorporated.

20:37 - If, if necessary into other standards framework so county on so forth.

20:42 - So that’s, that’s the basic background. And do I don’t know how we want to run this, there we have the face of questions. These are the ones I kind of suggested at the beginning, you know, what do you think about this, what should we be thinking about here.

20:59 - How can you see any benefits to this, you know, kind of in your own world, what are the issues that you see and who else should we be talking to.

21:08 - We can either. I think again it’s best if we hold the questions till the end because I think the speakers are all going to, you know, kind of play off each other and you can go ahead and put a question if you haven’t now into the q amp a, we can all see that.

21:22 - Or you can hang on until the end and raise your hand and you will be unmuted.

21:27 - Let me go ahead and hand over to Hugh flow and.

21:34 - flow and I do have to update that picture I used to find it strange that people with gray hair and their beard showed pictures for many years ago and now I’m doing that to swim and updated this and how many years but anyway I’m very happy to be here, here, particularly with hypothesis, which I can just been doing so much cool stuff for the web for a long time, and as well as the Internet Archive which is kind of inspired a lot of my journey and in the universe thinking about universal access to all human knowledge.

22:06 - Next slide. So quickly what is press books.

22:11 - We are a open source bookmaking platform that’s how we started with the idea that press books could help different models of publishing emerge. And we’ve been adopted largely in the Edu universe we work with about 150 educational institutions around North America mainly and press which is used to create adapt and share educational material, largely.

22:34 - We are so open educational resources. We have a new thing that we’ll talk about a little bit here in the context of social learning which is the directory which allows you to search and use a lot of these books that are published within the press books ecosystem.

22:49 - And what we are mainly known for is they’re offering an editing platform that allows you to offer adapt content with a full toolbox and features and one of those.

23:00 - Part of that full toolbox is native integration with hypothesis. Out of the box.

23:07 - Next slide. Let’s talk a bit about the directory it’s a new thing we’ve just rolled out and they thought in the context of social education was important to take not just is that annotation layer but the idea of what do we do with tech and the directory oppresses coming around for a while but the directory is the first time where we’ve made it easy to surface and find texts that have been created on the press box platform that, if you’ve got extra to breakfast books you can pull into your own system if they’re openly licensed and make adaptations yourself.

23:41 - And this is kind of followed this question, how do we find good oh we are from other institutions, what are some good quality OER. How do we extend the reach of great stuff and how can we get started with existing oh we are to build upon.

23:56 - Next slide. So there’s this growing community of our practitioners. And I think again it’s interesting to think about oh we are in the context of being a great tool to start building these ideas on where it’s a lot easier to work with content that’s in the open and educational content that’s in the open for the challenges that Dan outlined at the beginning, and we work with hypotheses but for instance this question we have our own API integration tool into the LM s, but it doesn’t play with hypotheses.

24:32 - I said they say that hypothesis is LCI integration. So, how do we were operating this space will probably a good starting place to start building some of these tools.

24:46 - But how do we collaborate, not just on on content, but how do we start thinking about the infrastructure for this content to flow properly in these kinds of interactions to flow properly.

24:58 - Next slide. Yeah, and I think what’s interesting about this new directory is that it’s this always updated index of good quality or textbooks built on an open source platform where we can start thinking about how to, you know, as it becomes exposed to more places, how do we think about these items as really social objects that are part of the web that can be built on and use in different ways. And, again, what’s that infrastructure layer that higher ed needs to be thinking about beyond just the closed platforms that we know are there and how do we build on this infrastructure.

25:42 - Next slide, please. Heather. And I think that, yeah for us this directory was an easy way to help get more of this content out there so that it’s more exposed makes it easier for people to find the stuff that they might want to be adapting.

26:01 - And this brings up issues about metadata about making sure that the stuff people is producing are producing is fundable.

26:11 - And I think back to when we’re thinking about metadata conversations I had with john you del few many of you probably multiple years ago but it’s talking about.

26:23 - If we have multiple versions of the same text living in the web, or slightly adapted versions, and you have an annotation layer from hypothesis on one of those texts How was it was selected the cross to another version of that text somewhere else, hard problem, super interesting and excited about a universe that’s evolving that wants to solve that problem more.

26:50 - Next slide, please. Heather. Yeah, and I think, again, just going back to broadening the idea of what we mean by social education for us. All we are is interesting, we’ve, because you can build on text as they are so there’s the social part which is the annotation layer but there’s also the modification, and the changing existing texts which is a big part of why people like press books directory making that easier, but that starts introducing, again, a complicated question about how your.

27:25 - If you want to be annotating and seeing this in. In, across the web for different versions of the same text, what does that look like.

27:34 - And next slide. Just going back to the directory again. So we index, all these press books networks that are sort of independent publishing entities that the different higher ed institutions were just out indexing all those together.

27:54 - And then pulling all the metadata, that’s collected into one single place and you can search and sort using a variety of faceted searches.

28:04 - And next slide Heather. So there are some of the examples and there’s a link if you want to play around with the directory and see what’s there.

28:14 - We could do a quick check to see how many of them have hypothesis enabled.

28:19 - And we’re still in early days so this is not quite a first cut but we are evolving this platform and it’s exciting to see, even for us for the first time to have a clear view on what’s being produced and how much activity there is.

28:34 - Next slide. And that’s it. So thank you all.

28:40 - Thanks you and we will be adding this presentation to schedule, and also as soon as I’m not screen sharing. I will make sure that a link of it gets put into the chat.

28:52 - And next we will hear from Amy. Well, again, it’s a pleasure to connect with everyone thank you so much for joining our session, as, as I mentioned in our introductions. My name is Randy clear and this year I’m serving as a scholar in residence at hypothesis and so with my commentary Today, I’d like to help define social learning and really position, social annotation as a use case, through which we can understand the various qualities of social learning and make an argument for why this matters for educators and for students.

29:24 - And so we’ll use of course hypothesis as an example and I’ve put together a pretty simple slide here but I want to unpack it in detail, which is that social annotation Of course built upon annotation as an everyday literacy practice.

29:37 - And so we see across disciplines and of certainly across institutional types, as well as grade levels, the ways in which students with their teachers with a variety of course content, engage with these texts, as discursive texts for social learning.

29:55 - And so the question then becomes what does that look like and what does that look like in practice, what is a research, show us about this type of learning, you know, when Dan was introducing his comments a few moments ago, he actually mentioned some friction that both educators and students may encounter particularly as learners perhaps move into something like a learning management system, and some of the even kind of like pedagogical workarounds that educators need to creatively employ to make perhaps their content more available to students.

And of course, reducing that kind of friction and creating a more seamless and interoperable experience is of course very important for educators and for students.

30:31 - And again, looking at the social annotation literature, we can see uy, creating these types of seamless social learning experiences matter, and they matter one because disciplinary engagement and really deep disciplinary engagement is possible through social annotation and this can happen in a variety of ways, one with more experts, sharing their knowledge, their terminology their key concepts with groups of learners and a lot has been gleaned from again the research literature about the ways in which learners benefit from reading expert annotation.

And again we see that both in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities and social sciences, but a lot of disciplinary engagement also arises through peer to peer learning and again the social aspects of students, raising questions with their peers, having those questions answered and moving into more again type of deep reading an interpretive practices that even Clifford mentioned at the beginning of his introduction today.

31:31 - We also know that as students engage with a texts through annotation and engagements types of social participatory practices, they construct a new knowledge, and there’s some very excited research including some that hypothesis is helping to lead right now, that is looking at the ways in which knowledge construction activities, including elaboration interpretation disagreement conflict, as well as consensus building are all possible through this type of learning experience.

31:58 - And again, reducing students friction around their engagement with peers and texts and their educators, is going to get more beneficial and contribute to the ways in which knowledge is constructed in these types of classroom experiences socialization is of course a form of collaborative dialogue and it’s important to understand that there is of course, someone might call a genre of online learning associated with things like the discussion forum, and the ways in which the so called dreaded for the discussion is a kind of stable, particularly in higher education.

And, notably social annotation is working really to kind of break free from that model and showcase a different way in which digital discourse and collaborative dialogue occurs in context and again, turning texts into discursive contexts or multiple people can take more nuanced views of sharing their knowledge and expertise with one another.

32:51 - And that leads to a fourth important afford its of social annotation which is of course, shared meeting making. And of course we want particularly in educational contexts learners to make meaning of what they are reading, again, across disciplines and social annotations a key way to enable that type of shared meaning making informal educational contexts. So I want to keep my comments brief today, only because I hope that this elicits conversation with this entire panel as well as everyone attending the webinar about the ways in which we can understand social annotation as a venue for exploring the full kind of potential of social learning.

The last thing I’ll just mention very briefly, is at the bottom of this slide there is a link to a public curated bibliography of scholarships specific to social annotation and more particular, the technology of hypothesis which is the most researched social annotation technology ever created and I think that that speaks volumes to both the technical capabilities of the hypothesis tool, as well as of course the leadership, you know, by the organization as Dan was speaking to a few months ago, really leading the charge to create the kinds of open and interoperable learning technologies that create these types of virtual learning experiences.

34:06 - rich learning experiences. Thanks so much, Amy and I believe this may be our last slide. Yes, so I will happily get out of the present mode. One second, and hand it over to Mark and then after mark is finished, we’ll open the floor for discussion.

34:27 - Take it away, Mark. Great, thank you very much and I’m just gonna drop.

34:32 - There we go. Some URLs into the to the chat over there so I first of all I’m happy to share that the Internet Archive is the latest member I think maybe of this Coalition for us so social learning engagement.

34:46 - As of the end of last week, and. And also I think it was the last person on this panel so I don’t have any slides I do have a few comments I’m going to keep them brief.

34:55 - First of all, the Internet Archive has been involved for a long time and helping to open up access to learning materials in general.

35:03 - We do this in a variety of ways we have a project called turn or references, blue, the goal basically is to acknowledge that everything that any human has ever been ever created and written or video, audio format.

35:15 - That should be accessible to people, which means that it should be digitized and available via the Internet, and any references to those materials that may exist in other formats a Wikipedia article or web page, or a book should have within that a link to the actual resource. So the turtle references blue project has been working with Wikipedia sites now we have software writing on within seven days language Wikipedia sites to add links to references to books.

35:49 - And we’ve added about the 800,000 links to books in the last few months to two websites web pages that have gone bad, and returned to fall for we’ve fixed fixed about 14 million of them.

36:03 - And now with the, with the launch last week of scholar. archive. org, which is a platform for open publications academic publications. We’re going to be accelerating our effort to add links to academic papers, as well.

36:19 - The idea of Toronto references blue and implies that the references self is accessible which maybe is obvious but in many cases it is and I see Mark Miller ask the question about, you know, making the resources of libraries available, generally speaking Generally speaking, and the first step there is that the the materials within the libraries need to be accessible they need to be an additional format.

36:42 - To that end, we have a project called control digital lending to extend the world of a library that digital age, their basic concept is that if that if a library owns a physical copy of a book that it can lend out digital versions of that book one at a time equal to the number of paper copies that the library owns with controlled digital lending. So I put a link in the chat here actually some recent link for a myth busting session that we did about control digital ending, because of some of you probably know the Internet Archive is being sued by the major publishers about this now.

37:22 - I also just want to know I’m, I’m in the offices right now of ismi iskb. org, and they run our comments, or comments is a leading platform directory for open educational resources, and I’m an advisor to that project.

37:41 - The cats currently catalog hundreds of thousands of education resources is more than 10 years old, and is a leading player in the space of making educational resources available in a variety of different formats.

37:55 - I just find the end fed vi also put a link up to work we did around the Molly report it’s probably the closest that we did around annotation in full disclosure the Internet Archive is not yet adopted an annotation platform in the classic sense like apotheosis We do, however support many annotation activities. One example was acknowledging when the molar report first came out, there were more than 2000 footnotes in it, but only about 14 of them were links.

38:24 - And so we we had a project to identify the resources that were referenced in the molar report through these footnotes. In some cases, get the version of them that wasn’t online make it available online, and then work with Digital Public Library of America to produce an updated epoch version of the molar report, with more than 700 active web links in it. So we take a very holistic view to information access in general, and to to annotation, in the sense that things that should be linked are linked and things that should be accessible, are made accessible through those links.

Thank you. Thanks so much, Mark and Remember if you would like to ask a question, you can either put it in the q amp a or you can raise your hand and someone will unmute you.

39:18 - I’ve got a couple questions, I always do. Dan I know one of the things that you’ve mentioned as really being key to this discussion that you’d like to the coalition to undertake are the role of interoperability and standards, could you tell us a little bit more about that side of this.

39:38 - Yeah, I think the you know the key, the key problem that we have now is that the kind of experience that a teacher or student might have in one place is not equivalent to the experience that they could have in the other place so just at the most basic level there might be one kind of annotation experience here and then the platform has its own, but they can’t take notes in both and have them searchable or have the same discussion, you know, in the in the class in one place of the Canon the other.

40:17 - So the first thing that we’re trying to do is see, you know, what would it take to create a framework for that kind of interoperability.

40:25 - And also that the the underlying technology that might be brought might be based on standards, you know with open API’s and so forth so that the high quality kinds of experiences and that the data itself is not locked away and proprietary formats.

40:46 - Thanks for that, um, I want to ask Ramy now you were using social annotation, long before many people were forced off campus and into the virtual classroom exclusively.

41:01 - So I would imagine it might have been a little bit more straightforward, at least in one aspect for to move those discussions, entirely online. Can you talk a little bit about the strategies that you found effective for social learning, so that you know others might kind of learn a little bit on that.

41:21 - Absolutely, and apologies for the little one who may be screaming in the background right now as we all work from home, most of us at least.

41:31 - You know, I think that we can look at this from the perspective of both, you know, a teacher and also a student you know a lot of educators now are talking about two topics when it comes to social annotation, one is how educators seed SCD their expertise into texts, identifying again key terminology, the ways in which researchers describe their methods, asking questions of students to elicit their responses and there’s a bit a lot of discussion recently, some anecdotal son now appearing in the scholarly record about the ways in which instructors are making these kind of moves within the text again as the discursive context.

42:06 - Something else that that a lot of educators are currently experimenting with particularly given the shift to fully online learning, again, pretty much across higher education during the pandemic has been what we may call orchestration to use the kind of technical learning sciences jargon. How do social annotation activities sequence with a line to and then perhaps complement other kinds of classroom activities is social annotation a pre reading activity that then proceeds a lecture from a faculty member is social annotation done to review course materials, is it done as a peer review activity among students, and how do these socialization activities that dovetail to and also extend other kinds of course specific activities, and there’s a lot to be learned there again that kind of rich ends and kind of deepens the kind of overall peer to peer learning experiences within either on the ground or certainly online classrooms, and then you know Heather, you know briefly to the point that of what do students do and how do they approach this.

You know I’m increasingly speaking with educators who mentioned the importance of students, having a lot of agency and ownership into the margins, and that these kind of marginal discursive spaces are an important place for students to make their thinking visible share rough draft thinking elicit feedback from their peers to clarify misconceptions and that there’s an importance to opening up these margins, as really a kind of space for exploratory again kind of first draft thinking through often difficult course content and so having the kinds of interoperable experiences again that Dan and others have spoken to now to make that just easier for students from a technical perspective will be so important, as they then move across multiple classes, multiple years of their scholarly journey, and then can take those notes and can kind of collect take that record of collective intelligence, with them over time.

44:07 - Thanks so much and Dan has included in the chat, again, some of the questions that he had on his slides so we’d love to get your reaction from the audience whether that is a written reaction or whether you’d like to actually speak with us to some of those questions in the in the in the chat box.

44:29 - Anybody want to take a crack at it. I just want to put a plug in for the value of open standards and the importance of it.

44:37 - These visa v long term sustainability. I mean think we all recognize that individual companies and projects, and priorities, they shift, and sometimes go away completely.

44:49 - And there’s been many examples of that actually even in the annotation world we remember that YouTube had a very robust annotation system, which they took took down the eliminated it.

45:03 - And there’s many other examples that I could this year but but the point is if if annotation systems and these data meta data, data, data about data is accessible, both in a standard format, as well as through some sort of open standard space access method, then the probability that those systems are going to be replicated. They’re going to be widely adopted, and be archived and archives in a way that they confirm the we use a different context is increased.

45:35 - And so certainly it makes my job, I here at the Internet Archive easier to the degree that these materials are available in open standards and and that’s something that it’s almost any system that we would adopt and use within the Internet Archive.

45:51 - It will be a requirement for us actually that that may be standards base, so we we welcome the you know the leadership with hypothesis particular in this and I just just put a plug in China say I’ve been going to, to the hypothesis, you know, face to face conferences for many many years now, and even though we’ve never formally have not yet formally adopted the positive platform, it certainly influenced some of our priorities and thinking that the Internet Archive, to have the benefit of the sharing within that community, which itself is an expression of openness, I think, the spirit in which those conferences have been held over the years.

46:31 - Yeah, I think that I annotate is coming up in June, save the date has has gone out. I have a question for you. He has his camera off so I’m hoping that he’s actually still there.

46:46 - Okay. Yeah, so, so I’m really interested in, open, open educational resources and given that marks sitting in the in the home of you know your comments. I think it’s even more valuable and.

46:59 - And just to highlight the point that social learning is not just students, social learning is across instructors who work in the same discipline or who work in an interdisciplinary manner and having the different versions of our texts, connect to each other and be discoverable and shareable. Can you talk a bit about how that contributes to social learning amongst the, the faculties that.

47:28 - Yeah, I guess we can talk about as well from my context is I’m the CEO at press books. Also, Executive Director at the Rita’s Foundation which does a lot of work helping groups.

47:44 - So, I think, for me, what’s interesting again is just zooming out there is the annotation layer in the way that that encourages socialist but what we’ve seen in press book land and read this land is that power of people working together from different places on creating content or adapting and and pulling apart and building a new kinds of ways and I see that to me is such an exciting part of the future of educational content is the way we can start thinking about content is something that is not just a final monolith and output but something that can be chewed up and rearranged and moved around and I think that annotations are a big part of that kind of that the social aspect, but the idea is that what we see a lot of is people taking a piece of content from the press box ecosystem and then we building it adding a new set of we also integrate in addition with hypothesis with h five p which allows people to take something and build in new interactive content, quizzes, etc.

49:04 - And I just think that that I’m going to go back to what Mark said about the open standards is that very exciting I mean it’s we’ve, I think most of us have been in this for a long time.

49:17 - long thinking about ecosystem for information where it just is more fluid and flexible.

49:28 - But what’s really exciting is that notion, or what’s really important is that open standards make that possible in a way, and platforms that that, think about information is not something that is captured just in one place in one closest them but can out and be built upon and, and changed in different ways and so that was a very rambling answer but I think the idea that open standards should allow us to think about how we can take pieces of information and build and do different things with them to me is, is just, I mean it’s driven a lot of the work that I’ve done and it’s exciting to see where hypotheses going, but I like getting into the actual bricks of the content itself and how can that be pulled apart and rebuilt and that’s an inherently social activity because you’re taking something from somewhere else to rebuild it.

50:21 - Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more. Hugh and, you know, that’s really the space that’s been the most interesting to me. In recent years, and if if you’re you know here today on this session, there’s definitely ways that you can participate in.

50:37 - increasingly in a distributed information environment and I firmly believe that the you know the future involves not only Open it, open standards but Open Knowledge graphs, where publishers and librarians and individual researchers will be able to curate resources and annotate them with assertions so for it’s going to be so important for trust and transparency and provenance as we move into really a more complex system.

51:05 - Dan if if folks are interested in joining the coalition what’s the best way for them to reach out, they should.

51:13 - Ping either myself or you and just just drop an email and say hey, and we’d love to tell you more about it and.

51:23 - And this is not only for for publishers but also for institutions who are interested in how to ensure these kind of experiences across the content that their licensing and connecting to on the back of their students and faculty.

51:41 - And what if you’re not super technical, is there a role for you to play.

51:45 - I mean, the whole goal of this is to make, you know, great experiences for people, regardless whether they’re technical or not. So, for sure it is, I think the, what we what we care most about is hearing what people need.

52:01 - And you know that it’s not not about whether they have a technical perspective, or not.

52:08 - Fantastic. Well, I want to thank our speakers, collectively, I was amazing tour through the world of social learning and all of the places that are touched by that and will hand back over to Diane to close this off, I guess we’re going to be able to stick around and continue to chat but to close off the recorded version of the session.

52:30 - Yeah, great. Thank you Thanks Heather. Thanks to all of our panelists that was really interesting. Fascinating tour is Heather said, I just dropped.

52:42 - Dan’s email in the chat. And it looks like other folks are sharing their emails as well so please reach out if you’re interested in getting more information about this project or joining the coalition.

52:57 - Let’s see, let’s see Heather I see your email address, but I think. Did you mean to check that out. and now I’m going to check it out.

53:07 - Okay, cool. Thanks. All right, so yeah, I think we’re going to go ahead and close down the recording of this session again Big thanks to our panelists and thank you so much to our attendees. .