On September 23, 2022, the College of Arts and Sciences Office of Distance Education hosted a Teaching Forum to discuss instructional methods and practices related to Social Annotation. Social annotation is a discursive practice in which readers can share their personal thoughts, opinions, and questions regarding specific content with other individuals or groups of individuals within a digital community.
Faculty and a staff expert from the College of Arts and Sciences shared their experiences with social annotation as an instructional strategy, their ideas about creative use of social annotation tools, and specific techniques to make this practice an essential part of synchronous and asynchronous courses.
Anticipated Outcomes - Our goal was that by the end of this session, attendees would be able to...
- Appreciate how active social annotation strategies can facilitate student peer interaction in online learning spaces
- Consider methods to utilize social annotation activities to help students decipher and discuss complex texts.
- Understand how social annotation activities provide support to minority student populations
- Identify areas in which social annotation strategies can support learning objectives in your class
- Describe the basics of Hypothesis, a College-approved tool that can be integrated with CarmenCanvas
Teaching Forum Panelists
Sarah Dove (Office of Distance Education)
Dr. Nikole Patson (Department of Psychology)
Dr. Beth Hewitt (Department of English)
Dr. Catalina Iannone (Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
Download Audio Transcript Here (Captions also available in the video recording)
Hypothesis Demonstration Participation Instructions
Near the beginning of the Teaching Forum, ASC Office of Distance Education Instructional Designer, Sarah Dove, provided instructions for trying out the Hypothesis tool in a web browser. We have kept this available for asynchronous viewers that wish to view and try out the tool.
Note: Hypothesis is a fully integrated tool in Carmen, which is what we recommend for use in classes. However, when using it in a browser, this is currently limited to the Chrome web browser.
- Sign up for a free account: https://web.hypothes.is/start
- Follow the steps to add the Chrome Extension to your browser: https://go.osu.edu/hypothesischromeextension
- Pin the extension in your browser (Note: If you use the Adobe Acrobat browser extension, make sure it is toggled off)
- Use this link to start annotating with us! https://go.osu.edu/hypothesisplayarticle
List of links and resources that were referenced during the panel discussion:
- ASC Office of Distance Education Instructional Design Consultations
- Student Video Resource Tutorials
- ThingLink Now Integrated in Carmen for Use by ASC Instructors and Students
- ASC Online Course Syllabi Examples
- ASC ODE Hypothesis Tool Resource
- Sarah Dove's Presentation Slides
- Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation article, Social Annotation
- University of Arizona article, Empowering Students with Social Annotation
- University of Minnesota article, In the Margins: Using Social Annotation to Support Reading and Writing
Teaching Forum Evaluation Survey
Whether you viewed this Teaching Forum live or asynchronously, we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future ASC Teaching Forum Panel Discussion. Please take 2 minutes to complete this Teaching Forum Evaluation Survey. Thank you!
Acknowledgements:
We wish to convey our thanks to each of the panelists that contributed to this Teaching Forum. We also want to thank Dr. Joseph Tien (Mathematics), who met with our office to describe his use of Hypothesis in his class, MATH 5421: Mathematics of Infectious Disease Dynamics, as well as Dr. Thomas McDow (History) and Dr. Jesse Kwiek (Microbiology) who described to us how social annotation assignments play an important role in their interdisciplinary course, HISTORY/MICROBIOLOGY 3704 HIV: From Microbiology to Macrohistory.
These discussions informed our planning of this Teaching Forum and we used a research article assigned in Dr. Tien's class for our Hypothesis demonstration. Faculty guidance and perspectives about the specific needs and use cases for learning tools is essential to inform our work, and we are grateful for their time.