After a set amount of time, he asks students to go back to the articles and respond to any questions or comments made by their partner.

To help engage his students in small group work surrounding primary literature, he pairs students together and asks them to annotate texts with questions and comments. John Berini has used Hypothesis for two terms in Ecology courses. This idea is supported by Chico Zimmerman here at Carleton, who reports the same opinions from his students.

Using an LMS discussion board was seen as harder to use for these tasks since some navigating around was required to quote and respond to the appropriate posts. (Sun, 2017) writes that students reported that it was often easier to share ideas with classmates through an annotation system, since comments were easy to access and the context was evident. Students using Hypothesis may have a tendency to write shorter, more targeted comments about specific points in the text, while students who used an LMS discussion tool may write longer, broader comments about the document as a whole. Some assignments previously completed on the Moodle discussion board or even in Zoom breakout rooms might be equally or more successful using Hypothesis, depending on the learning goals for your students. ( Adams, 20) “It captures students’ thinking and processing in the moment, more closely mirroring the learning that one might see in a face-to-face class when students can discuss content with their instructor and/or classmates….It seems to us that during-reading activities such as collaborative annotation can serve as more authentic spaces for community building in an online environment because they capture that in-the-moment thinking rather than the final product posted to the standard discussion board.” (Adams, 2020) Since students can see each other’s annotations, Hypothesis can be a convenient way for student to collaborate around a text, build on each other’s ideas and answer each other’s questions. Social annotations systems like Hypothesis can also help build a sense of community in your course, with both text-directed and peer-directed comments often added to a document, and may be better suited to replicating in-person interaction than an LMS discussion forum. Comments about the point or thesis of the article lead to improvements at the text-based level, and finally summaries of the article with connections to other resources or experiences leads to greater comprehension at the situation-based level. Vocabulary-related annotations – defining unfamiliar words, etc – leads to improvement at the surface level. Using a social annotation tool can help students grow at each of these levels, depending on the type of annotations or comments they make in the text. The Construction-Integration model of reading comprehension includes three levels of reading comprehension: surface-based, text-based, and situation-based ( Kintch, 1988). The type of annotations students make can affect their learning differently. We have read and heard generally positive reports about student attitudes towards completing annotation assignments, with the idea that it helped their learning. Students use the annotated document as a reference, looking through comments to see if their questions have been answered, and answering questions themselves. As students ask and answer each others’ questions, they build a resource for understanding the text. Students appear to spend more time with the material when they are required to make annotations, and may read the article multiple times, annotating as they go back through it.

Especially in an online course, where it is important to be more deliberate about community-building strategies, social annotation can be a meaningful addition to your class and give students an additional way to connect around course material.Īdding annotations to an electronic document encourages students to read closely and stay engaged with the material. Social annotation is useful for helping students to understand your course material, improving their reading skills generally, and for building community among your students. Annotations can include text highlights as well as comments. Hypothesis allows for any webpage or OCR document to be annotated, and so it makes this function available to almost any text. This is a way to bring the long-standing practice of writing in the margins to electronic texts in a way that is reasonably easy to use, and adds a level of collaboration by allowing others to see and comment on what you write. Hypothesis is a tool that allows for social annotation, the ability for students to annotate an electronic document as they read, and for those annotations to be available to their classmates for comment.

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