Month: May 2020

Read Social Reading, Collaborative Annotation, and Remote Learning with Hypothesis (Hypothesis)
Last week Hypothesis saw the largest uptick in interest in our LMS integration since we released the app a little over a year ago. The vast majority of this interest came from individual instructors across the globe grappling with the challenge of moving their courses to remote delivery in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
Annotated Social Reading and Remote Learning with Hypothesis (Hypothesis)
Recipes for Annotation
We are also establishing a hub for teaching materials related to collaborative, digital annotation where we will share resources to help instructors get started with practices other teachers are already using. We would be grateful if veterans of Hypothesis, social reading, and online learning would share their lesson plans and activities with us so we can share with others and credit your work. Annotate this post with your ideas or email your contributions to education@hypothes.is.
Your Content Goes Here  ❧
Interesting… earlier today I was actually thinking about how it might be easier to help both students and teachers in their onboarding process. I had thought that a set up like Terry Green’s Open Patchbooks might be an interesting way to do this: see http://openlearnerpatchbook.org/ and https://facultypatchbook.pressbooks.com/
 
Annotated Social Reading and Remote Learning with Hypothesis (Hypothes.is)
It’s not the same thing as being face to face in a room together, but it’s a much closer match than a discussion forum or conventional social media where there’s just too much distance between the conversation and the text itself and, quite often, between the comments and commenters themselves. ❧
This suggests an interesting tagline for Hypothesis: “Shortening the distance between the text and its readers.”

Replied to a tweet by Xinli Wang (Twitter)

Outline for a Hypothes.is Crash Course

I often find examples to be most immediately helpful. You might look at Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN: Marginal Syllabus 2018-19 which has some solid multimedia resources around a group of educators annotating. It’s not only an interesting public example, but will introduce you to some helpful people in the space.

For a “textbook” example, I believe American Yawp may be one of the most annotated textbooks online.

I Annotate 2019 was an interesting conference and Hypothes.is has kindly aggregated videos of all(?) the talks. You can skim through some to find applications relevant to your interests. In addition to this example, the H blog is also a great resource for other examples and news.

More specific to your initial question, you’ve got a lot of options. You can open .pdfs on your local machine and annotate via Hypothesis, but if it’s for a bigger group, hosting it somewhere on the web that is easily accessible may be best. Hypothesis has also made some significant leaps for integrating their product into LMSes recently which also helps in seamlessly making accounts for new users.

Once it’s available to the group, you may want to decide whether you want the group to annotate in the public channel or if you want to annotate in a smaller private group. 

Most importantly, explore. Have fun. There are lots of off-label uses you’ll run across using the tool as you play around.

Replied to a tweet by Ali SpittelAli Spittel (Twitter)
Nearly headless WordPress (for ubiquity and ease-of-use) + Micropub (for posting almost anything quickly) + Webmention (for cross site communication) + frosted in IndieWeb goodness = blog evolved.

Sadly, it seems like too many in the thread completely got lost on the “why” portion which was the best part of the question.

Replied to a thread (Twitter)
Lots of potential ways of shaving this yak.

The best “modern” way would be to create a Micropub endpoint and then you can use some of the excellent multi-platform Micropub clients like Quill, Omnibear, Micropublish.net, etc. The benefit of this is that you get way more than just bookmarks.

I don’t know if anyone has set one up to work with Eleventy or Netlify, but there is some prior art for other static site generators. 

The low brow solution may be to take the route I took with TiddlyWiki, but that includes some cutting and pasting, so it may be helpful, but isn’t a completely automatic solution. You’ll note there’s a reply at the bottom of the post that modified my code for use with Roam Research which also includes code for browser extensions as well.

If you want to go crazy with some .php, there’s Parse This code for a plugin for WordPress that might be co-opted. It will parse a variety of pages for microformats, JSON-LD, schema, OGP, etc. to return rich data on a huge variety of websites to give you lots of metadata to create a bookmark, but this may be over and above anything you might want. I use it as a built-in product in the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress to create a wide variety of post types for reply contexts.

Acquired Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 by Clare CorbouldClare Corbould (Harvard University Press)

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

This looks fascinating! 

Total impulse buy.

Filed an Issue Make a Comparator (splot.ca)
Create your own! This tool will produce much better results if the images are much larger than the intended size (e.g. 1400 x 800 at least) since it needs to downsize the original to fit the different dimensions.
Alan, I took a swing at trying out the live Comparator SPLOT today. It’s very cool looking! Sadly I kept getting an error in the WP upload interface simply saying “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”

I was uploading a simple .jpg of about the same size and dimensions as those recommended and already in the repository. I tried a few different photo sizes and types with the same result, so I’m not sure what the underlying issue may be. Unless something has changed dramatically, my one guess would be to check the storage limits on the hosting account. I’ve seen that sort of failure before when running out of physical space on a host.

Incidentally, from a security standpoint, I’ll mention that it appears one has the ability within that interface to delete others’ previously uploaded photos. (May want to look at that as a potential future improvement.)

Hope you’re holding up!