Stacey Johnson 0:07 This is Leading Lines. And I'm Stacey Johnson. Our regular listeners might notice that Derek Bruff typically hosts the episodes and that I am not Derek Bruff. I'm sad to report that after more than a decade of directing the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Derek recently left us to pursue other opportunities. We're really excited for him, and in his place, I'll be hosting the remaining Leading Lines episodes for the rest of 2022, and I promise to do my best to fill those big shoes. I'm also going to include Derek's Twitter information in the show notes of this episode. For those of you who want to follow Derek as his work takes him in new directions. In any case, we're very excited that you're here with us today for a very cool episode where Derek is actually the interviewer. Today's episode is about annotation. Thinking about annotation and listening to this episode led me to the question How do you engage with your reading? Some of us like to write in the margins of our books dog ear pages highlight bookmark. Maybe you prefer digital annotation on a PDF. If you look at my bookshelf, the one I'm sitting next to right now, my preference is clear by the colorful post-it notes just swarming out of the pages of my favorite books. It's also a good sign that I haven't read or perhaps haven't enjoyed a book if I get all the way to the end without a single post-it note emerging from its pages. However we engage with reading. The process of annotation is probably familiar in some shape or form. In this episode, Derek Bruff interviews Remi Kalir, associate Professor of Learning, Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. Remi's book entitled Annotation came out in 2021 through MIT Press, and many of us who are in the teaching and learning community on Twitter also know Remi from his frequent online engagement on topics of annotation. In this interview, Derek and Remi talk about annotation conceptually and also the potential for digital annotation tools as part of structured learning experiences. Derek Bruff 2:47 Welcome Remi to Leading Lines. I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. I've been following your work for years and we met at a conference a long time ago and I feel like you're overdue for an appearance on the podcast. So thanks. Thanks for being here with us. Remi Kalir 3:01 Derek Thank you. It is really an honor to be here. And as I mentioned before, it's great to always listen. You've got such a wonderful guests. Thanks for inviting me. Derek Bruff 3:09 You're quite welcome. Yeah, I'm excited about the conversation here today. I want to start with a question. I know you're a listener of the podcast, so you might have expected this. Can you tell us about a time you realized you wanted to be an educator? Remi Kalir 3:22 Well, that's a great question, because for me, it was it was in the air and it was literally in my family. I am a 31st generation descendant of Roshi, the rabbi who is considered one of the really eminent scholars of rabbinic Talmudic thought was, of course, a teacher as a rabbi. And there's literally a direct line for Rashi in 1000 to me, to me. And it comes through my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, who was a teacher herself, was a special education teacher, and then became a school leader in the Los Angeles Public schools. And so public school grandmother. My mother was in arts education for her entire career as a teacher and in the kind of arts, both visual culture and did some stuff with kids as well, even do some stuff with dance. And so that's my lineage. My mom, my grandma, Rashi, it's who I am. And so I began my career in the South Bronx, in New York City and was a classroom teacher, did a lot of interdisciplinary work as we'll, kind of allude to and talk about even in this conversation. And that was it, you know, and I've been a public educator since, you know, I'm at the University of Colorado, Denver. I did my degree I Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. I'm a strong advocate for our public schools and proudly come from a lineage in my family as well. Derek Bruff 4:44 Yeah, that's great. Growing up knowing this is this is good work to do and now being a part of that good work yourself, that's fantastic. So let's talk terms for a minute. Yeah. Can you define annotation, social annotation and social reading? Remi Kalir 5:02 Absolutely. Absolutely. I love the pairing of these three. And I want to actually start with social reading, which is because reading is and has been for for centuries a social activity. And when people write things they're doing so often for another audience. And when people read things, they often talk about that with other people. And that goes for religious scripture and that goes for all kinds of legal texts. And so I want to always start this conversation by reminding people that whether we're talking about historical contexts across a variety of cultures all over the globe and certainly in a contemporary context, reading is social. And today we see that, of course, on social media, these are all actually social reading platforms. Pick your pick your poison, right? Facebook, Twitter or TikTok. They may be multimodal now. They may be faster paced. They may be actually, in some cases extremely harmful and dangerous. But they're social reading platforms. And so reading for me has always had those social qualities. And I want to start there now. We can return probably in a bit and talk a little bit more specifically about certain maybe technologies that make that reading social in educational ways. But I always like to remind people reading it is it's a social activity. And so when we do that, Derek Bruff 6:22 I have been in a book club, right? Remi Kalir 6:24 Like, Right, exactly. Well, and I think that's important to remember because book clubs happen outside of school, right? Yeah. People want to be in book clubs outside of classrooms. Right. And so there's a lot that we can also appreciate about the ways in which people want to engage with texts, engage with each other beyond the requirements of an assignment, or a syllabus. Yeah, the school day. And I always also like to keep that in mind as well when we talk about the social pleasures of reading. So so let's get to this next this next piece, which of course is that annotation, right? Like people respond to what they read. And again, they've been doing this for centuries. And I love looking at old marginalia. I look at, you know, medieval manuscripts, people add notes to texts. Sure. And that's the core definition that I've picked up is that when people are engaging with what they read, they add notes to texts, they annotate. And you Derek are an annotator. And in fact, if you're probably listening to this podcast, you're an annotator too. There are all kinds of ways that you interact and leave a mark, leave a trace, change the things that you read, whether you're doing so because you're peer reviewing a scholarly paper or you're reading a newspaper circling an advertisement in a newspaper that classic that classic scene from TV shows and movies, right? We see people writing on texts all the time. And so and again, we'll probably dig into this more. I try and take a very expansive, a very inviting definition to understanding how people add notes to texts and what counts as a text and what counts as a note. And so then, you know, your third your third question, Derek, a little bit more specifically, and then particular to learning and education in a more formal way, we have this thing called social annotation, and it's often referring to certain technologies. There are actually many, many, many out there, and they have actually existed for at this point decades that help people to read and interact with and make sense of digital texts. And so people have been reading online, they've been reading the web again for decades. And when people read the Web, whether they're reading a blog or a news article, they're interacting with those texts in the context of that media and social annotation helps people to then have a conversation, share a resources, link to other things. And so now we've seen in a really concerted way, especially over the past decade, the rise of social annotation as a particular approach to learning in formal educational contexts. And that's where I really now focus a lot of more of my empirical research. Derek Bruff 9:15 Okay. And so maybe I obsess a little with definitions because I'm a mathematician. Remi Kalir 9:22 Yes! Derek Bruff 9:23 But let's let me take a non-digital example, right? I go to the library, I pull the book off the shelf, I check it out. I realize someone else has checked it out in the past and they've added some notes here and there, Right. Like, this has happened to me multiple times. Yes. What is that? That they annotated that text. Right. And it feels social to me because now I am not just seeing the text, but I'm also seeing their annotations, their thoughts, their questions, their what they felt was important. Right. Is that kind of like a slow social annotation, especially if I. Remi Kalir 9:56 Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, you know, it's well documented that in the Victorian era, particularly in England, throughout Europe, in the rise of book culture, there were well known instances of people sharing marked books, of sharing their marginalia with their friends as social activity. So they would have the first read of a book, they would write reactions. They would sometimes, you know, allude to maybe some of the subtext of what was being discussed. And then they would share that with their friends in social settings. And so they were literally passing along, almost like the game of telephone that we have now, right. Young children passing along what they hear from others. But doing so in the context of that book. On social media last summer, somebody found a used book of poetry at a bookstore, was enamored with the individual's annotations because they were so abrasive and they were so kind of rejecting, I think it was Bukowski like rejecting the poet, and they began to then screenshot all these examples of marginalia and post them on Twitter and it went viral. And then you had hundreds of thousands of people commenting on this other person, this unknown author's annotations in this book. So the reader of the text and the, you know, the previous marginalia then made it social, right? And eventually it got back to the initial annotator and it became this really kind of fun viral moment. And that's wonderful and great, but I want to pilot a few things for an example that you shared because I think they're really important. One is that a lot of marginalia is extremely circumstantial. It may not reflect the highest quality thinking. It doesn't necessarily provide particularly useful insight. Actually, it can be knee jerk, it can be all kinds of scribbles, and it's often to the point you're making private. And when I as a teacher work with students, I always want to emphasize the importance of that private marginalia. So the question becomes what happens when it does become social and what happens what I know if we're in a class together that I'm not only writing for myself, I'm annotating for you, I'm annotating for my peers, I'm annotating for the purpose of shared meaning, making. And so that changes the context from I happen to take a book off the library shelf. I see somebody else's previous marginalia. I may like it, I may laugh, I might not like it, I might add my own. I might just put the book back. I don't know what happens. That's different than saying we're all going to read this book together or we're all going to read a journal article together, maybe in a graduate class, and we're going to collectively analyze the rhetorical moves that an author makes or the way in which evidence is presented in a scientific paper or the methods that are used in a particular approach to inquiry. And that's a very different approach to authoring and reading annotation. And that's what I'm really excited about. Derek Bruff 12:49 Okay. You have an intentional audience in advance of the annotation process as opposed to an accidental audience that happens that comes together afterwards. Remi Kalir 12:58 Yeah, and there can be great meaning in that accidental audience. And I'll just quickly give a shout out to Andrew Stauffer and his colleagues University of Virginia. The Book Traces project is amazing and they're cataloguing across multiple, you know, university libraries. Now they're essentially mining the material text record and saying, Oh, wow, look, here are these incredible examples of annotated Bibles and books of poetry and commonplace books and old textbooks, primarily from the 1800s into the early 1900s. And the Book Traces project is amazing, and it shows how we as readers today can make meaning of private annotations or primarily private annotations from many, many years ago, and then do so in a shared digital space. But you're absolutely right, Derek. It's a very different context than as an educator priming a class to say, Hey, we've got a mentor text right here. I really like the scholarship of Dr. So-and-so. Let's collectively read this and use annotation as the means by which we discuss and make sense of this text. Derek Bruff 14:06 Okay, So let's get practical for a minute. What would that look like? Right. What are some some ways you might see this in a classroom, a course context? Remi Kalir 14:17 Absolutely. You know, there's a few examples that I always like to bring up because I think that the quality of the use of annotation in a formal educational context is so compelling. One is a project has been funded for years by the National Science Foundation that's called Science in the Classroom, and it takes primary source scientific articles from the entire Science family of journals. So now these are all of the various publications under the umbrella of Science across a whole range of topics biology, chemistry, astronomy, genetics, climate science, all kinds of articles. And so they've been published, they're in the record. They have, of course, been peer reviewed. And another scientist, it's often case, an early career researcher and maybe a graduate student who has subject area expertise, will go in and publicly annotate this article, and they'll do so by calling out particular terminology, connections to the researher's prior studies, aspects of the methodology, key findings. They'll put the study into context with other literature, and they categorize these and they make public this entire layer of annotation. It serves as like a translation guide, and then those annotated papers can get picked up by students in high school science classes, definitely students in undergraduate science classes. And there's actually some really nice research about the use of the science in the classroom room project and a resources in undergraduate science classes and how it helps students to develop deeper disciplinary understandings. You know, better and, you know, analyze graphs better, understand these kind of key terms and methods particular to a given domain. And so that to me is a great example because it also draws upon this rich history of the fact that when you look back at, you know, again, like illuminated manuscripts from the 1500s, in the 1600s, they were translating words for other audiences. They were clarifying confusion. They were adding annotation for other readers who would be encountering a text for the first time. So now we can think of a typical undergraduate student in a bio 101 class encountering primary research published in Science for the first time and needing annotation as that scaffold. Derek Bruff 16:45 I was just got some scaffolding right? Because those. Remi Kalir 16:47 Exactly yes. Derek Bruff 16:48 Yes, those articles were not written for the audience of an undergraduate science student. They were written for peers in the field. And so there is a certain amount of assumed knowledge and experience on the part of that set of readers and the things that aren't said there because they don't need to be said for those readers, would make reading that article very challenging for an undergraduate student. So it sounds like the annotation layer is is is the bridge right? It's the scaffold. Remi Kalir 17:16 Exactly. Yes. So that's a great example of an annotation layer that is social because it's public social because it's engaged by an entire class. And then the primarily used as you're saying, for actually individual comprehension. Sure. But I think it's a nice example of how we might begin to appreciate this. And again, Science in the Classroom, very easy to find. Again, AAAS NSF-funded, it's out there. You can find it. But let me give you another example of what this looks like in practice, because it comes from some work I'm doing right now. And it's well known that at Indiana University right now, there's a large scale research project happening in collaboration with the Department of English, where a particular social annotation technology called Hypothesis has been integrated into first year composition courses. And so if you're an undergraduate student at Indiana University, sometime in your first year of college, you're going to be taking this core composition course every single undergrad at IU. And over the past few years there's been intentional curricular redesign to say, We want students talking together. We want students understanding how authors of a variety of kinds of text, you know, essays, poetry, you know, all kinds of even like blog posts and things. How are they choosing to make their authorial moves? What conventions are they drawing upon? How do we bring thematic analysis? You know, how do we build arguments off of all of this? And so in this case, then we've done a really intentional job of setting up a sequence of social annotation activities where undergraduate students, freshmen are engaging with a series of texts, they're having conversation with one another. Those conversations are, to piggyback off of the words you just used, you know, scaffolded by their instructors. There are particular requirements for how students might want to reply to peers, might want to tag their annotations, might want to elicit certain types of noticings or evidence. And we are now looking at how these undergraduate students are having conversations together and learning together and making meaning together. But they're doing so by reading and annotating these same core set of texts. And for that example, I just want to make a quick sidebar distinction here, which is that in a lot of online learning, a lot of our emergency remote instruction, given the shifts of the past few years and a lot of what counts, as you know, even a high quality online instructional design, the discussion forum, Capital D Capital, F right, It's kind of always there. You know, if again, if you're listening to this and you're a, you know, an instructor in higher education, you've probably seen a learning management system, you've probably seen a discussion forum, you've probably used them, and designed them. And there is this kind of presumed architecture of the learning that you're going to have students go and read something. And that's kind of over here. It's like the texts, it's the readings, it's the syllabus, it's it's over here. And then over there there's the discussion forum, right? You go a read it over here, and then you walk over here and you go discuss it. It's disconnected. It's not it's not tethered together. The thing that you're discussing and the discussion that you're having, they're not close to each other. And the term without getting too jargony that a lot of scholars use now is anchored. We want to have an anchored discussion. And so social annotation and the example I was just giving of this research project at Indiana University, it's anchoring the discussion back in the text, right. That the text itself becomes the discursive context. You don't have to go anywhere else. Once you read the text, you're in it, you're on the playground. You know, I'm not going to belabor the the analogies here, but you're there. And so you can you can meet your peers there. You can meet your instructor there. You can voice confusions, you can ask questions. You can be extremely specific about a word or a phrase or an idea and say, hey, what's happening here? Like, I'm not sure I understand what's going on. As an instructor, I might highlight a particular sentence and say, Hey, class, like, what's the author doing here? Yeah, like, what's going on? And so, you know, we can dig into even the pedagogy much as the research of that and maybe in more detail. But those to me are some particular examples of, of how we're seeing social annotation, as I would call it, almost like a genre of learning really becoming quite prominent both in K-12 and certainly in higher education contexts. Derek Bruff 21:59 Yeah. So in my campus of Vanderbilt during 2020, we were helping a lot of faculty get ready to teach online. Many of them for the first time. And I had had these social annotation tools and practices on my radar for a while. I hadn't really dipped into them in my own teaching, but I felt like just what you were saying, this is another way to do discussion Online and anchoring can be really powerful. And so we started sharing these tools with our faculty who were going through our online course Design Design Institute. And I mean, it wasn't universal. There were many faculty who looked at this like we we don't work with texts in that kind of way, but we had a lot of faculty who were very excited about the opportunities that these kinds of tools opened up of. Remi Kalir 22:42 Of course. And I think that, you know, this is where I really appreciate now being involved in a line of research and an area of scholarship where I can approach many faculty, whether you're at a community college or at a research intensive university. And I can say like you want your students to do the reading, right? Right. Derek Bruff 23:01 Yeah. Remi Kalir 23:02 Like whether you're teaching about, you know, medieval history or you're doing like, you know, post structural theory or you're like me and you're a learning scientist or whatever, you know, you want your students to read, right? And then not only to just superficially do so, but to really deeply engage with the material and through that with their peers and to make meaning of this for themselves. They need not always agree. They can certainly disagree with you, the instructor or the author. They can disagree with one another. But let's make sure that that's productive, that that engagement and perhaps conflict and conflict resolution, consensus building, those are actually knowledge construction activities. And in fact, we've we've researched how those show up when students are having annotation conversations. And so for me, this is just a really inviting way to say to all kinds of educators like, hey, let's do something for our students that can really powerfully influence their learning. Derek Bruff 23:58 Yeah, yeah. Well, and I'm struck this idea of doing the reading, right? And so in essence, you're kind of saying, yes, we're going to do the reading and we're all going to go to the reading to do it right. That that the anchoring piece is so powerful, I think of so my wife is also in arts education. Like your mother. I think you said Remi Kalir 24:17 my mother was. Yes. Yes. Derek Bruff 24:18 And so I've been learning a lot more about the pedagogies they use in art education in the classroom settings in her case. And they are often the text is is the student work right here's some painting or sculpture or some piece of art that the student has created. And and one of their signature pedagogies is the critique. Everyone's looking at it together and everyone's discussing it and engaged in it. And they are in essence, anchored in that piece of work that's right in front of them. They don't go look at it on their own and then come back to class and talk about it like we do in a traditional seminar class. And so I think that anchoring is really powerful. Remi Kalir 24:56 It is. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I and this might be fodder for another conversation, but I am increasingly interested in how not only annotation is also a visual and multimodal practice, but how people are also very much drawing upon aesthetic conventions. Yeah, to markup. To markup the world. Sure. And we can see we can see annotation expressed again beyond the classroom in also civic and political contexts as well. And so I also try and at least appreciate that that this is a social practice that happens in our classrooms, but it's also all around us. Derek Bruff 25:31 Right? When I take a screenshot of a tweet and I circle something with my pen tool and I retweet that, right. I'm annotating Remi Kalir 25:40 well, and Twitter itself is an annotation platform. Twitter for me is the I think, the most useful example of one of the really, in this case, few prominent social media platforms that shows the text based affordances of annotation. Right. Again, core definition here, a note added to a text. Well, so what's a tweet? Right. It's essentially a note added to this huge thing that we call Twitter. Now. And of course, you can apply to people most, I think, in terms of that proximity of notes to text, the quote. Tweet. Is an amazing technical convention because you can quote, tweet people that you disagree with. You can quote, tweet things that you've never read before from people you've never met before, from people who, again, you could really find solidarity with or vehemently disagree with. And you're putting your note in direct proximity to their initial statement. And so Twitter for me is this incredible kind of platform of annotation. And I should say that that's not my original observation, and I need to always carefully cite my own sources here. People have been talking about Twitter as a kind of like text based marginalia, you know, marketplace for many years. What I'm wasting far too much time doing now is watching videos on Tik Tok because and that's again, a whole other conversation. But to me that's where multi-modal annotation is happening. That's where content producers, video producers are really digging into the multimodal ways that notes added to texts are reaching all kinds of new audiences, whether it's with actually health care workers combating COVID 19 misinformation and using annotation as a way to kind of make higher quality videos to communicate with new audiences or high school students, annotating their own videos as a kind of critique of American history curriculum like that's all out there on TikTok. And I have and I am spending way too much time watching those videos. Derek Bruff 27:42 Yeah, Yeah. So let's let me come back to the student piece because you've talked about or rather kind of the formal education environment is what I mean. You talked about some of the research that you're doing. What does the research what is it starting to say about the benefits to students of some of these practices? And does it offer some kind of choice points for faculty who are thinking about how to do this well? Remi Kalir 28:04 Absolutely. I mean, I think that the first point that I always want to make strongly is that there's at this point, probably close to two decades worth of research showing that reading comprehension in a whole variety of ways comprehending and across across disciplines. Again, this really good work in science, science, education, there's a lot that's happened in composition, rhetoric, writing, you know, English courses. There's some really interesting examples that have popped up in legal education as well, actually, because annotation is actually, again, a very discipline specific practice in legal education as well. So you're seeing now across fields research that says when we get students annotating together, again irrespective of the technology, irrespective of even some cases, the particularities of instructional design reading comprehension really comes through as a way in which we know we can support students learning. So that's one piece. I would also say that student perceptions of their learning and student perceptions of the technology is also really important. And I think this has become increasingly important in the kind of now pandemic era. You know, when I was initially launching some aspects of my research agenda and getting some of my kind of initial kind of core publications out the door, it was interesting to receive some pretty notable pushback from scholars who were saying things like, you know what, we've done the student perceptions thing. We don't really need to know more about whether students do or don't like technologies. And I think that the COVID context has really shifted the fact that if we're going to keep students engaged, if we're going to keep faculty engaged in their course design, we need to have students really bought into their courses, the feel of their courses, how they are using technologies that are responsive to their needs and there's some really good research out there about the fact that students perceive social annotation in very favorable ways. They perceive social annotation technologies as helping to connect it to their peers, helping to connect the back to the text, expose them to diverse perspectives, allowing them to kind of work through their rough draft thinking and confusions. And we found and this is some of research that I've done with with my colleagues, we found that there's also a strong sense it strengthens their their kind of sense of community. Like, yeah, they feel connected to their peers. And I have to say, I have to just think now that coming now out of three ish years of the pandemic moving into another probably uncertain school year, if we're asking students to take on the burden of new technologies of online learning or of hybrid learning or of toggling back and forth, or of just ongoing uncertainty, we want students to feel comfortable in their classes. We want students to feel as though they're using tools that are going to be beneficial for them. We want them to perceive their own learning as useful, and we can also measure them their outcomes in other ways. But I do find a lot of I guess I'm heartened by the fact that now there's a good body of research out there that shows that social annotation is again, generally favorably viewed by students. And then again, and I'll cut my rambling here, I'll just say quickly, there's one other area of annotation that the research I think it is extremely important to always point out, which is in language learning and this has been the case, of course, across many cultural contexts. There are great studies coming out of China and Japan and Italy. All these are some scholars that I know have gotten to know over the years where there's just a really good lineage of research now showing that if we're having students learn to read texts in another language, if they're learning to speak or write in another language, particularly in a more formal academic way, annotation And again, the affordances of social annotation are particularly beneficial in language learning contexts. Derek Bruff 31:49 The student perception piece I I've seen that in my own teaching, right? So the the semester I started using a social annotation tool was when I was teaching in one of these awkward hybrid environments where my students were six feet apart from each other. They're wearing masks. I have one or two students participating via Zoom. I just knew that was not a very easy way for students to feel part of the learning community. And so we had this whole other part of our community that existed on our social reading platform as students were annotating and conversing right there. And I mean, certainly my impression was that it felt more vibrant and they felt more connected to each other because some of the moves we would have made during class time to help create that community were a lot harder to make. And so it gave us a whole new set of tools to do that. Remi Kalir 32:39 Exactly. And I think that this is where, you know, I'm a teacher too much as I enjoy the research and I enjoy my writing, I'm a teacher. And so when I'm working with my students, you know, I always say to them again, I remind them you're an annotator. And so to your point about low barrier, easy entry opportunities to then quickly begin to participate in higher quality, more substantive class activities, like, again, a reading discussion, I want that barrier to be as low as possible. And I understand that discussion forums have a pretty low barrier. But again, if we remind students that hey, like you can print out the readings, I want you to use a pen, get out your highlighters, mark up the paper, and then once you've written all your private marginalia and once you've marked up the reading, however you want to. Yeah, we've got this digital thing, we've got this platform, we've got this social annotation technology, like select two or three of your own. You know, it's almost like self curation. Yeah. You know, you've taken that first pass. You've got now all of your, you know, kneejerk reactions or I can't believe the author wrote this or yeah, I disagree but take two or three of those annotations and make them social, make them a shared resource that your peers can respond to. And I find that when I'm talking to my students and I frame it in that way and I remind them that, you know, they are annotators that their handwritten annotations are very welcome, that they can kind of again bridge that kind of using a different idea, that kind of digital divide from writing by hand or to writing online. Yeah, right. It makes it a lot easier to kind of say, Yeah, I can pick up this new thing I've maybe I've never heard of Perusall or Hypothesis or Now Comment or, you know, any of these. There's just so actually so many of the platforms now, right? Yeah, there actually are a lot. And it's good sign Derek I can't keep up that's another funny thing about this and so people people will ask me because I'm kind of known for this now, it's like, Oh hey Remi, like what about this thing? And I'm like, I actually just don't know. Like, I don't have enough. I don't have enough time to follow all the new tools. Derek Bruff 34:47 I hit that with a classroom response system several years ago where I wrote my first book on teaching with clickers in classroom response systems, and people would ask me about tools I had never heard of because there's there is there's a kind of evident value to it. And I think that's why there's growing interest. Remi Kalir 35:02 And that to me is the sign that again, exactly there's evident value in this. And so great, go experiment yourself and we can continue to try and build a research base that broadly shows the value of this as a practice. Derek Bruff 35:15 I suspect also you talk about barriers to entry, and I'm thinking of other activities where in like a workshop setting with faculty, I might ask faculty to draw a picture that represents a certain idea to them, right? Either realistically or metaphorically. But then I've also done activities where I give faculty a set of photos that are laminated that show lots of different subjects, right? And say, select a photo that represents this idea to you conceptually. And the selection is a lot easier. It's a much lower barrier right here are the things drawn. And once you ask them to draw their own photo, there are all of these anxieties about I'm not an artist and it's just and I wonder if there's a bit with the discussion board where when you walk into a discussion board, certainly if you're the first student there or if you have to kind of post your own post, that's not in response to someone else. It's this empty canvas and that's a little intimidating. Whereas when you go to the text, you've been reading right? I guess kind of mentally you're not carrying the whole load of that discussion because the author has already done the heavy lifting and now you're bringing in one or two new ideas. It's a lot easier for students to walk into. Remi Kalir 36:24 Yes, we're a we're a participant in an ongoing conversation, which I think, again, gets back to this broad idea that they're reading socially. But in terms of just even prompts, though, and even like, dare I say, sentence starters, you know, I do a lot of work with K-12 teachers. You know, again, having been one at the beginning of my career, and there's actually a really, you know, robust community of K-12 educators primarily in literacy, you know, English language arts, literacy, education that use social annotation in their classrooms. And in those cases, they do further scaffold students to engage with texts. And they might even say, like, consider starting a response in this way, or consider posing a question that's framed in this way. And it just helps get students into that engagement with the text. And particularly for younger learners, the idea that they can speak back to a text right, right now and that you can then you can even see it right there on the screen or on the page juxtaposed and that it's not transgressive, you know, you're not, quote, defacing. Right. It's actually one of my favorite verbs now is might I'm frenemies with the with the verb deface Derek Bruff 37:30 I bet you are. Remi Kalir 37:30 It's like you know it's like how do you as a reader and as a writer interact with texts? And so the ways in which we provide students in kind of all ages with just these opportunities to see themselves in the text and to reply in the text and use the text as in a way to again, have these consequential discussions. It's just really important. Derek Bruff 37:51 Now, we have talked a lot about the positive attributes of this space. I want to go to the dark side here for a minute. Some students have a very negative reaction to social annotation tools in particular. Why do you think that is? And what what's that little bundle of problems? Because you've written about this. Remi Kalir 38:12 There's I have I have first of all, I want to always bring an asset orientation to my relationship, to my students and just as students generally. And so I don't want to suggest that students have any kind of deficit or that they aren't convinced of the way that I see the world. You know, in responding to this, I think that there might be a whole host of reasons why students may not see social annotation as a particularly useful thing to do. And I suspect that it has actually very little to do with annotating or even with the ways in which they reply to texts. And I think it's probably a symptom of a of a of a larger cause. Right. Which is that some students struggle engaging with peers again, maybe for no fault of their own. And it is hard to be vulnerable with your peers. It is extremely risky to make your rough draft thinking shared public, even if it's just public to your classroom, not public to the whole web, but even a seminar or much less 50 students. That's extremely risky. Unlike some aspects of online discourse in a classroom context, social attention is often not anonymous. It is attributed. People are going to know what I said. And again, that's also the case with discussion forums. And so I think some of these dynamics are not necessarily particular to social annotation and concern. In some cases, the various risks and the subject positions and the power that exists in classrooms. So I always want to recognize that. And again, say that that's not because any student is deficient in any way, but because classrooms are places of power and that as instructors, we need to be very attentive to how we relate to engage with with our learners. So that's that's a piece of it. I think another aspect of resistance is social agitation can actually be an expectation for what to share right? I think that some students have an experience, let's again say with discussion forums, we've mentioned it a few times now. I feel like discussion forums can sometimes be a bit more polished. It's almost like a mini essay and you have to kind of cram all of your evidence into it and it has to almost kind of like look good and sound right. And it's a little harder to do that with social annotation. And so maybe there's some resistance there to say, how do I fit it all in, or how do I shorten or how do I do what I do? And that's where, again, as an instructor, I try and say to my students, this is rough draft thinking, yeah, this is, this is these are initial, we'll do something else with these annotations at some point. I don't need you to feel as though you're writing a micro essay like you would for a discussion forum when you're participating in social annotation, and that's again a potential barrier to students engagement. And the last thing I mentioned is that, you know, in some cases students see it as as as maybe not as playful as it can be. And this is where I want to, again, really invite a more expansive understanding of what counts as social annotation to try and show students that it need not always only be rhetorical analysis, although that's very important or, you know, arguing with a particular viewpoint, I again, that could be very important. One of the things I'll do towards the beginning of my classes typically in some way is I'll say, Hey, for this particular reading, no text. So images you can easily embed images, gifs, you know, share reactions as a GIF. Right. Or I'll have, I'll have a little carve out. You know, the has to always be a good exception to the rule. If you're going to have it, you're going to have a bit of text, make it a hyperlink to another resource. This reminded me of. Yeah, right. This reminded me of a podcast. It reminded me of this YouTube video, embed the YouTube video. And so that for me is an opportunity to expand the typical register, the typical expressiveness of annotation, and that can help some students who are apprehensive or who just have a kind of like a knee jerk reaction to this to say, Hey, let's be playful. Derek Bruff 42:22 Yeah, Remi Kalir 42:22 let's try. Something different. And maybe that'll maybe that'll help you out a little. Derek Bruff 42:25 A couple of good gifs can actually break the ice really nicely. Yes. And I love when my students, I forget what they were reading. So one of the things I had my students do was we have a book up on the platform because it was a Cory Doctorow novel and released under Creative Commons license, so I could get the whole PDF and put it right up there and we could read the book together. And there were these moments where the students there, there were annotation, they would highlight something and just say, What the heck? I was like, Right, that's interesting. I wouldn't have gotten that reaction if I'd asked them to tell me about the book later in class. That is something that happens in the moment in an anchored kind of way, and it's okay to say what the heck, right? Like we get surprised. And that's part of the reading process. Remi Kalir 43:10 That's right. It's part of the reading process. And that is also a great example of the kind of annotation that when my students and I revisit our conversations or we might even use other tools or other processes to go back to that conversation, we can distinguish between those in the moment more quickly responsive, kneejerk, fun, abrasive comments and those that we want to make use of in other ways. And I just want to emphasize that at least in my pedagogy, and we're beginning to see some evidence of this in the research literature, and this is an emerging focus of some studies. How do we connect these annotation conversations to other class activities, other kinds of writing? Maybe we want students to write a reflective essay. Maybe they're writing an analytical essay, maybe they're at the graduate level, certainly at the doctoral level, perhaps preparing a literature review. There are all kinds of contexts where we can go back to those annotations, whether it was authored by the student who's doing that writing or was authored by a peer. And we can say this was a really valuable insight. This is a particularly rich thread of discussion that helps me to understand a point that I then want to write about, or this quote from the original source material that I'm going to use. I can now better interpret because of the discussion that we had, and that's a different set of annotations than the knee jerk. What the heck is going on here? Again, they're all valuable, right? And in the moment there is an incredible satisfaction from just saying, Oh my God, like what happened? Or like the author is like, what? Like, Oh my God, Again, that makes us want to be in the text. That makes us want to be in the reading. In a classroom context, though, as an instructor, I also want to extend those activities. And so that's where I'm looking to also then connect those initial discussions as not a task, as not something that just lives for the sake of, you know, a check assignment. It's for me. Social annotation need not become what we see discussion forums which is post a thought and reply to two peers. Right. You could do that. Derek Bruff 45:26 Hey, I. Got six points. Right? Remi Kalir 45:29 Exactly. And and what I want to do is not give that same kind of rote kind of formula to social annotation. I want students to engage in different kinds of ways and then make use of those annotations in in different kinds of ways. Derek Bruff 45:45 Well, and I will say that the pushback I've gotten from students and from some faculty who found social annotation really problematic and really disruptive to creating a good learning environment, they were using some of the tools in the system that allowed to auto grade students and assign points for lots of different moves. Yes, And I didn't do that myself, and I don't recommend it, I think. But I think you've helped me name one reason why we don't need to do that. So something I read years ago in a book by Barbara Walford that's always stuck with me. She talks about light grading. Remi Kalir 46:19 Yes, yes, yes. Derek Bruff 46:20 A in her case it was the idea that you might have students read something before and write a response paper and then come to class and discuss it and they would turn that response paper in and one could come up with a complicated analytic rubric for grading that response paper. Right. And make it a lot of busywork around grading for that and give students a lot of detailed feedback on the response paper. But what she says, if you're going to talk about the reading in class anyway, that's where they get the feedback is the discussion that happens and the response paper is just there to prime the pump a little bit and so they have more to contribute and so grade that thing on a 0 to 1 point scale that they do it or did they not. Right. We just need to put up we might need to grade it right. You might need to put a few points on the line. Some students will take the time to do it, but the purpose of that grade is not to give detailed feedback. And so I think in the social annotation space, if that if the annotation space is lively and it leads to something else that also matters, then you don't need to grade the annotation space. You can focus your attention at the thing that comes later, right where they are drawing on those conversations in useful ways. Remi Kalir 47:27 Yes. And you know, and I don't want to belabor the point too much here, and I know that we can link to it and share it as well. But our dear friend and colleague, Jenae Cohn and I wrote a short piece, an op ed this spring, that alludes to the fact that the confluence of highly kind of data fied systems, the need to kind of measure in metric everything under the sun, and then to do so with these types of social reading and social annotation platforms does have, as you said earlier, kind of very dark side, which is that we don't need to always be peering over our students shoulders. And I really, again, want to trust my students. I want to help them read in new ways, but I don't want feel as though I need to be always, you know, again, looking at every single move they make in relation to the text and then auto grade it. I agree. And again, both in studies that I've been a part of and even in my own classes, there are very appropriate contexts to grade annotations. But I love what you said about the light touch that's really, I think, appropriate way to do so because again, this annotation thing has to be in service of something else, right? Yeah, right. And so what's the other thing that you're going to point students towards when you do this? And so let's not get hung up on particularly with kind of overly invasive technologies, perhaps let's not get hung up on that part of it. Let's get into the messiness of the annotation. Let's get into all that meaning making so that we could go do all the other very things we do in our class right now. We could go do all the other things that are a part of the learning landscape of our particular, you know, assignments and classes and relationships. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Derek Bruff 49:07 All right. I've got one last question for you, Remi. So in this podcast, we call it Leading Lines, because we like to kind of peer into the future. We try not to predict the future. We'd rather help shape it. And so this question is intentionally broad, but what would you want to see from educational technology in, say, five years from now? Remi Kalir 49:35 I want students to be decision makers. I mean, I really am. And that's why, again, I don't want to predict the future, but I want to draw upon things, if we could beginning to see. Right, which is, you know, students involved in procurement on their campuses, students helping to vet and assess technologies that have been used, students, you know, being really a part of the shared governance structures that faculty have to shape the kinds of learning that occurs on their campuses. And we can say that this is in response to privacy concerns. So we can say this is in response to aspects of surveillance. We can say this is in response to all kinds of at this point, very well documented harms that can be exacerbated by some aspects of, educational technology. At the end of the day, it's our privilege as faculty and certainly our responsibility as researchers to be responsive to the needs of students and to do things that do not cause harm. And, you know, I just cycled off a three year term on my university's Institutional Review Board committee, all of the social science, you know, that big social sciences panel. I was on the IRB committee, and it always struck me that there's, of course, greater oversight for research projects and the methods and the tools that are used than there are for the kinds of technologies and methods that are used in our classrooms and the procurement of technology. And so what's what's the kind of future IRB of EdTech in classroom contexts, and how can students really be key partners in that process on their university campuses? That, to me, is going to be an incredibly important move that I hope is increasingly embraced over the next few years. Yeah. Derek Bruff 51:11 Yeah. The ethics of educational technology procurement. Yes. Yeah It's important. Remi Kalir 51:17 Yeah, it's. It's so important. Derek Bruff 51:20 Well, thank you, Remi. This has been great. I've enjoyed our conversation. We've gotten lots of lots of places, as I expected, but also, I think some really practical advice for instructors who are who are trying to really connect with their students as well. Remi Kalir 51:33 Again, thank you for your attention. Was so lovely to chat and I know that will continue to be in touch about this and much more. Derek, thank you so much. Stacey Johnson 51:43 Thank you to Remi and Derek for that thought provoking interview. I appreciate the connections that they were able to make between our regular everyday experiences as readers and as writers. People who are thinking through and processing what we encounter with the more structured learning activities that we might put together for students as part of a college course. If you've enjoyed this interview, we would love to continue the conversation. Leading Lines is produced through the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching and the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. You can find us on Twitter at Leading Lines Pod, which is Derek and Remi approved as an annotation network and on our website leadinglinespod. com. This episode was edited by me. I'm your host, Stacey Johnson. Thank you for listening.