Curious / Interested in Web Annotation? iAnnotate this week

Who out there has an interest/experience in web annotation? Largely, but not totally these days, this means use of the open platform Hypothes.is.

This week is a free online conference and series of activities related to annotation

Annotation is a familiar scholarly activity, and support for Hypothes.is is built into Pressbooks, but hardly is limited to it. Public/social annotation is definitely in the realm of Open Pedagogy.

And web annotation has been long an interest of mine and I would love to see this as an action we take on much more at OE Global / CCCOER, and I would welcome spinning out some discussion. activities here on how to explore/integrate it into your interests.

I hope someone gets a chance to check out iAnnotate. Maybe share back here what you find?

Added later…

2 Likes

Thank you Alan, personally I have an interest in looking at the possibilities, the strategies, or solutions out there for implementing web annotation in courses or educational resources.

I have some experience using the WordPress plugin, it is very easy to set up, but the part planning the activities in a specific context is what I am still curious about. I know you can create groups, like for example a class, so students can subscribe to this and have interactions only with the group.

I haven’t checked iAnnotate, but I’ll surely will.

I’m glad to hear your interest, Mario. There might be too much to fit in a reasonable reply here! My first suggestion are the examples and rationale shared from Hypothes.is itself

The plugin part you speak of is more about educators who wish to automatically make their materials annotation ready, and it comes built in with any OER published on a Pressbooks platform. An example I found recently was by David Buck at Howard College, where he has activities for English Composition students to listen to TED Talks about the UN SDGs and asks them to annotate the transcript, e.g.

https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/essentials/chapter/su21-transcript-how-to-make-the-world-a-better-place-by-2030/

But you do not need to host content to create annotation activities. You can create activities, assignments where you ask students to annotate any public web page.

Try this, if you visit the web page with OE Global’s history– it’s just a web page. But install the extension or bookmarklet to your browser, and the notes/conversations become available.

It becomes an extra layer of information on the entire web.

Yes, you can create groups to have annotations only available to a class. In my use, I found this a bit cumbersome, as it requires all participants to remember o flip the interface control to use the group. And I think it makes for more potential open pedagogy to engage in public conversations.

Annotations can be tagged, say with a course tag, or assignment tag, so you can pull notes form multiple sources into one view. I used this for a few different iterations of a course https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3Anetnarr

Another aspect that is useful is that your Hypothes.is username becomes your activity archive- so you can find links to everywhere you have annotated (the highlight tool becomes useful as well) https://hypothes.is/users/cogdog?q=

1 Like

I came across an interesting use of Spanish language annotation

and I am curious too if/how open pedagogy folks are using this web tool. A huge advantage is that it is not tired to any platform and that any public available web page can be annotated. I see so much potential.

This is one of the interactivity elements I hope to share some in the July 27 webinar session, but because we have the opportunity to have activities any time, I will toss some out here in OEG Connect.

Who is interested? Who has experience using Hypothes.is or something similar? What other forms of interactivity are you interested in learning about?

1 Like