Abstract:

Both in the classroom and in the broader educational space we know as the Web, we are entering an Era of Annotation. While there is nothing new about the age-­old learning practice of annotation, social reading and commenting platforms have recently emerged that allow students to better engage with each other and the texts they study online. Digital annotation enables students to explore independent lines of inquiry more dynamically, but also to collaborate in powerful new forms of knowledge production.

This paper will provide an introduction to Hypothes.is, an open source platform for web annotation that asserts no rights over the content generated by individuals and can be tailored to the language and learning goals of the instructor. Hypothes.is promotes open collaboration and scholarship in STEM educational settings by allowing students and teachers to interact over online documents. The software provides an easy-to-use interactive layer that can be launched from any web browser and allows inline annotation of web documents, including PDF’s. Users can highlight text and add notes, including tags. Unlike scribbles or underlining on textbooks, annotations are presented as an interactive overlay to the original text. Annotations may be turned off, shared, replied to and searched. Annotations can be either public-that is, anyone with Hypothes.is active can see the annotations- or private. Users may annotate as individuals or as part of annotation groups.

Over the past year, Hypothes.is has been used in over 100 classrooms as a core teaching technology. Students have generated thousands of annotations in their exploration of texts from works of literature to scientific articles. Teachers have incorporated online collaborative annotation into assignments aimed at enhancing scientific literacy and building critical reasoning skills. Our feedback suggests that student annotation of class assignments is a powerful means to promote critical thinking, prepare students for class and for working in teams. To date, the majority of use has been in the humanities; preliminary explorations of Hypothes.is in STEM areas suggests, however, that the use of web-based annotation will have a similar impact in these fields as well. In addition to classroom use, organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science are producing annotated scientific articles to be used in the classroom. We further propose that web annotation tools such as Hypothes.is have the potential to link classrooms and students separated by distance and national boundaries to foster the training of the next generation of STEM students in a global environment.

Keywords:

Annotation, collaboration, critical thinking, networking, open source, scientific literacy.