Optimal Annotation?

What’s the optimal amount of annotating?

I’m planning to use Hypothes.is to have my students annotate readings and discuss their reactions and interpretations with each other online, this summer and fall. During the summer session I’m teaching an online “Readings in American Environmental History” course, so any discussion of texts we would do would necessarily be online. But I’m not particularly thrilled with the experiences I’ve had trying to run online discussions in my university’s LMS (D2L), which seems particularly ill-suited to the task. Maybe if we had something available like Slack and Canvas I’d be more excited about trying to do discussions in the shell. Even so, I suspect I’d be leaning toward using Hypothes.is directly. And in my fall classes (three in person, one online), I’d like to grow beyond the model I’ve been using, where the students’ written responses to readings are only visible to me. I think posting responses that their peers will read and respond to could be an incentive to more thoughtful engagement with the material. It will also set a baseline of sorts and may tend to raise the bar a bit as students see the efforts their peers are making. And beginning a discussion in Hypothes.is may make the transition to in-person discussion in class smoother and easier.

One issue I’ve encountered as I’ve begun preparing to assign web-based readings is, how much prior annotation is optimal for a reading I’m going to ask my students to highlight and annotate? There are several possible approaches, which each seem to have their pros and cons. My first thought was I would go with a well-annotated source, such as the famous 1962 Doug Engelbart essay, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” which I was considering assigning in my fall course, “History of High Tech: Computers and Communications”. According to Hypothes.is, this essay has 408 annotations, including nineteen I made myself. Earlier this year, the essay was the subject of a formal annotation event sponsored by Gardner Campbell and the Doug Engelbart Institute and featuring luminaries such as Howard Rheingold (see Gardner’s video conversation with Howard here). I was personally excited to read the annotations and comments of these folks and eavesdrop on their conversations regarding Englebart’s ideas. I threw some thoughts into a couple of these conversations, and I did manage to find several points to comment on, where I thought there were gaps in the conversation that had been had already.

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I was impressed with the ideas raised by the annotation group, and I suppose I was a bit gratified that the format of the project not only allowed me to add my own comments that would be visile to the previous annotators (a core feature of Hypothes.is), but how the project page includes a feed of “Latest Annotations” that currently lists five of my own made yesterday. Will this feed (or will the notification feature in Hypothes.is itself) lead to some of these previous annotators seeing and responding to my comments? That’s an exciting possibility. But is it a level of exposure I want to impose on my students, the first time they use a tool like this?

Another heavily-annotated volume I might use this fall is Robin DeRosa’s Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, published as a Pressbook in 2015. I could use this as a source of readings for my World History course like the excerpt from Columbus’s Journal of the First Voyage to America. Once again, assigning this version of the reading in my class will help my students understand that they are part of a much wider community of readers and learners working on and responding to this text. But…is there already too much here? The passage currently has 244 annotations. As I read through them, some seem very insightful and some seem less so. There are sections of the text that are heavily commented and others where whole paragraphs go by without a word. What effect will the annotations and the gaps have on my students? Do I want their reading and responses to be influenced (determined?) by a previous group of students? Would I learn more about their engagement, responses, and gaps in reaction if I assigned my students a new, fresh version of the passage?

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Maybe I’ll give my students links to heavily-annotated versions of some documents, to serve as examples; but then assign them a fresh version to read and annotate in the class. This would mean, though, that I’m denying my students the opportunity to participate in this wider community of scholarship. Their contributions will not become visible to other scholars; their comments on annotations will never be visible to the students who originally annotated the text. No conversations will ensue. And to the extent I use “disposable” versions of readings housed within the LMS, these annotations and conversations will disappear at the end of the semester and won’t even be available to the students themselves to revisit in the future. This seems like the type of situation I really want to avoid. Almost as bad as the “inclusive access” online rental models the publishers seek to impose.

So maybe the solution is to use the power of OER to remix an open but outward-facing anthology of my own for my classes, where all the open-licensed material I’m assigning exists in a fresh form, but in a form where annotations will accumulate as I teach the courses from semester to semester. This provides a bit of continuity and a potential for conversations across semesters and student return to previously-read texts, but it doesn’t overwhelm my students with so much prior annotation that it seems impossible to say something meaningful about the reading. Maybe later in the semester or in more advanced courses, once students are comfortable with annotation, we can move out to more public venues.

If people reading this have already solved these issues to their satisfaction, I’d love to hear about it! Comment via Hypothes.is! Thanks, –D

Minnesota OER bill not for 4-year schools?

I was initially excited about the prospect of an OER provision in the new Minnesota budget. I’m still excited, although I’ve discovered in the last day or so that the bill wasn’t really designed to address textbook costs at four-year institutions like Bemidji State University, where I work.

Based on information I gleaned from a conversation with people from the MinnState system office (some of whom were in the meetings that led to this legislation), the current bill (SF2415) is the result of a more-or-less last-minute negotiation that mashed together language from a senate bill (SF699) and a house bill (HF2730), but to some extent the senate bill came out “on top”. SF699 was the “Z-Degree” bill introduced last January, which in its original form would have mandated a zero-textbook-cost AA degree program at every college in the MinnState system and would have allocated $2 million spread over two years. This is also the source of the two-courses-per-transfer-curriculum-area stipulation used in defining a Z-Degree, which probably isn’t a bad model. SF699, which seems to have been written to address the needs of two-year institutions and pressing concerns of the two-year students’ group, LeadMN, had also included language requiring that “Each instructor must review and approve open educational resources for use in a course” – clearly a worthy goal although untenable as a mandate. At least it didn’t include the “inclusive access” pilot program language that had been floated in SF2214!

HF2730 was a much more incentive-oriented bill written with input from the IFO. It called for both colleges and universities to “develop a program to expand the use of open textbooks” and charged the system office to “provide opportunities” and “develop incentives” to meet this goal. The bill specified that these faculty efforts should be voluntary (hence the incentives) and “in coordination with faculty bargaining units”. Much of this language has been retained in the second paragraph of the budget bill (Subd. 3, a. and b.). But this paragraph does not seem to include four-year institutions in the way the original bill intended.

The charge presented in the budget bill, as the system office seems to understand it, is to develop Z-Degrees (AA degrees) at three MinnState colleges by the beginning of the 2020 academic year, and to produce two reports in January 2021 and 2022 listing “the number of courses transitioned to using an open textbook resulting from the programs in this section” and “the total amount of student textbook savings resulting from the transitions.” As you’d expect, I think the charge is too narrow because it doesn’t include four-year institutions. But I also think it’s too narrow in that it only seeks to track the number of OER adoptions in courses that contribute to the Z-Degrees. I get that they want to focus on the savings resulting directly from the establishment of these Z-Degrees. But is that really the way to measure the effect of OER adoption on a campus?

I think the system office should take the money and create three Z-Degrees. But I also think it should over-report OER results in the following ways:

In addition to OER adoptions and student savings in Z-Degree courses, measurements should be taken of all OER adoptions and money saved on the two-year campuses where these Z-Degrees are created. I suspect there will be additional results and savings beyond the Z-Degree program courses, as awareness of OER increases.
Measurements should also be taken of two-year and four-year campus OER adoptions and savings not involved in these three Z-Degree projects. The number of adoptions and the student dollars saved throughout the rest of the system will not only crush the savings achieved in the Z-Degree programs, it will provide guidance for future decision-making regarding where to allocate development resources and incentives.
If there’s a cost associated with gathering this information, the investment will be well worth it because this data will help direct future efforts. And it will more firmly establish the system office’s expertise in determining the best ways to promote OER (as opposed to the legislature somewhat blindly following the advice of the most vocal advocates with the greatest access).

It remains a bit of a mystery to me whether two-year students are actually in a more tenuous financial position than their peers at four-year schools (BSU sits in the center of the second-poorest county in the state). But we can probably agree that all students will benefit from lowered textbook costs. I do think incentives are an important way to move faculty to make the effort to consider, adopt, adapt, and ultimately author OER. But as long as the system office has additional resources they can allocate to four-year institutions, I think it will be possible to push the program forward at BSU. It’s even possible that additional state money made available for these Z-Degrees might free up some existing system funds for projects at four-year schools. And finally, the increased legislative, administrative, faculty, student, and public attention being devoted to open education can only be good for everybody in the OER community. Greater buzz and increased statewide momentum are good for BSU, even if none of this particular appropriation comes our way. And the greater success the system has meeting the goals set out in the bill, the more likely the legislature will be to continue incenting Minnesota Higher Ed. to change.

Some specific things BSU can do to support this change are:

Focus on the transfer pathways that may enable students in the three new Z-Degrees to enter bachelor’s programs.
Begin making the case for the importance of “greatly-reduced-textbook-cost” (GRTC) programs as well as fully Zero-textbook-cost (ZTC) programs.
Identify subsections of departmental work that might align with ZTC or GRTC, such as the History program’s service of Social Studies Education. It might be easier to provide a ZTC Social Studies track (or even minor) than a full ZTC History major.
Create a “Zero-textbook-cost” designation for courses; possibly even a ZTC icon. Begin listing such courses in the catalog (this was an innovation described today at the Northeast OER Conference at UMass).
Explore the possibility of Z-Degrees in BA/BS programs, using similar criteria (2 ZTC courses per goal area or major requirement). The idea wouldn’t be to guarantee that every student would avoid textbook costs, but that it would be possible to graduate without textbook expense.
Explore how the Library might be able to support ZTC in upper-level courses where not all texts can be acquired without copyright restrictions. This might require some combination of access to periodical and services to which the Library subscribes, purchase of texts, ILL, and course reserves; so guidelines could be created and programs put in place to coordinate course development.

This is just a preliminary list – let me know what I ought to add!

Z-Degrees or OER?

The newly-posted Minnesota Budget for Education proposed by the governor (SF2415) includes $250,000 in FY 2020 and $250,00 in FY 2021 “for developing and offering courses to implement the Z-Degree textbook program”. This Z-Degree program is described on page 49 as a “zero-textbook-cost associate’s degree” including at least two zero-textbook-cost courses in each transfer curriculum goal area.

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The requirement is for three additional colleges in the MinnState system to offer a Z-Degree by the 2020-21 academic year. The means to achieving this goal is described as “expanding the use of open educational resources”. This paragraph of the bill continues, “The system office must provide opportunities for faculty to identify, review, adapt, author, and adopt open educational resources. The system office must develop incentives to academic departments to identify, review, adapt, author, or adopt open educational resources within their academic programs.”

An important question, I think, is whether these two additional “musts” in the paragraph are independent of the Z-Degree requirement or are merely means to that end? The reason this is an important question is that it will determine whether the system office will be able to allocate funds to develop OER that, although they may greatly reduce student textbook expense, do not lead directly to a zero-textbook-cost Associates Z-Degree program?

My institution, Bemidji State University, seems to offer an A.A. in Liberal Education, which is apparently a 60-credit program. It might be adapted into a Z-Degree program. I’m not sure if this is currently a “live” program or how many students may be using it. The point is that my institution does not grant a lot of Associate’s Degrees, but we do have significant issues with student textbook expense. So will any efforts be funded under this statute to increase OER on my campus?

If the system office can invest in providing “opportunities for faculty to identify, review, adapt, author, and adopt open educational resources” and “develop incentives” for faculty at four-year institutions as well as 2-year, then I think BSU will be a potential beneficiary. I’ve authored three OER and counting, and other faculty on campus are working on original textbooks and ancillary materials, and on adopting more open learning resources to reduce student costs. I’ll be devoting a significant amount of time next semester to spreading the word about OER on campus, documenting new and ongoing efforts to reduce student expense, and leading bi-weekly training in OER concepts and tools. Hopefully the new interest in open education shown by the governor and legislature in this bill will not be limited to only the Z-Degree Associate’s initiative. In the longer run, there may be opportunities to move many Bachelor’s Degree programs to either greatly-reduced- or zero-textbook-cost models. A more liberal reading of the three “musts” in the bill that opens some funding to efforts at four-year institutions would facilitate this change.

Weekend reading via Hypothes.is

A couple of the most valuable features of Hypothes.is, for me as a reader, are the ability to easily look through my list of annotations to see what I’ve been reading and pull it together into reflections on that reading. That’s what I’m doing this morning: taking a look at the notes I’ve taken as I’ve read several articles this weekend and seeing what I can learn from that. The second valuable feature is that I can do the same thing with the annotation feeds of other people. That allows me to follow the breadcrumb trails of others who are interested in the same sorts of issues, which expands the discoverable material and potentially begins conversations about that material and the issues we found in it. This can be a two-way street, as I discovered when I began following another Hypothes.is user (gowellja) and commenting on some of his annotations, and he not only responded but started doing the same.

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So what were some of the things I ran into this weekend? Inside Higher Ed ran a story a week or two ago about publisher Wiley buying ed-tech company Knewton, which prompted a response by Rajiv Jhangiani about the distinction between openwashing, where publishers pretend to be embracing OER while really locking resources behind access paywalls, and open-wrapping where publishers provide “value-added services that map onto OER.” My question about this is, aren’t publishers who do this merely shifting their focus from a desire to “eat the lunch” of OER authors to an even broader desire to displace the instructors who normally create and provide the “value-added services” that wrap around textbooks? I assume Rajiv (who is famously outspoken) was trying extra-hard to be nice. But my immediate reaction to open-wrapping is to consider expanding the scope of my CC licenses to include NC, which hopefully would prevent a publisher from wrapping my content into a format that would try to disrupt my role as an instructor.

From there I followed a link that led me to Amy Collier’s essay on “Not-Yetness” which she describes as a “space that allows for emergence.” I like the idea that collaboration happens in this “not-yet” space where the object hasn’t quite hardened into its final form. I’m going to start experimenting with “publishing” Pressbooks OER texts before they’re 100% done and then encouraging students to annotate them with questions and comments as I use them in my classes while I continue to build them. For example, there’s an evolution from a series of lectures to a survey textbook – but why shouldn’t that evolution be visible to the outside world and a bit more collaborative. Rebus seems to be doing something similar with their textbook production projects, but in a highly organized format I find a bit off-putting. Maybe I’ll become more comfortable with their organized collaboration over time, but maybe this more student-centered approach is an alternative until then.

From there I moved on to looking for texts to use in my “History of High Tech” course this fall. I went looking for Chris Hughes’ NYT article, “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook” after hearing Kara Swisher’s May 10 interview him on a Recode Decode bonus episode. I’ve already listened to the audible version of Roger McNamee’s book, Zucked, which I think highlights a lot of the important issues. I’m planning to talk about these present issues at the end of the semester, after tracing the growth of the personal computing and communications sectors that enabled these unanticipated problems. I’ll also be referring a lot to Jaron Lanier for not only historical perspective but a sense that the outcome we got was not inevitable. This led me to Hypothes.is user gowellja’s annotations of Engelbart’s seminal paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect” which mind-blowingly was written in the year of my birth. This article had been on my radar along with Bush’s “As We May Think” which dates all the way back to the end of WWII and will probably be a starting-point of my course. It’s fun to know that others are following similar threads and having interesting thoughts about these texts.

Gowellja had also commented on an EdSurge article a couple of days ago about the Gates Foundation’s attempt to measure the value of college. He made what I thought was an interesting point about measurability, and we had a little discussion about that in back-and-forth responses to his comment. I was also interested in the article’s observation that often “rankings have focused on the input side of the equation, not the output.” I think the Gates approach is often incredibly ham-handed, but not necessarily a bad question to be asking, esp. as digital education begins disrupting brick-and-mortar schools. Can we be more explicit about the value we add as educators?

Continuing to follow gowellja’s annotations, I read an Atlantic article from last August on the “crisis” in the Humanities. The main takeaway from the article, I thought, was ultimately that the surveys that lead to compelling headlines may be asking he wrong questions. Between the lines, it seemed for example that history course enrollment is decreasing the most at institutions (big private universities and R-1s) that offer MA and PhD terminal degrees and may actually be increasing at those (regional universities) that offer only bachelors. A big discovery of the surveys seems to be that for most students, the great recession of 2008 never ended. An unaddressed issue influencing the perception that students have become more vocationally focused was the mountainous debt students now face. Could that be a contributing factor to the more precipitous decreased in Humanities enrollment at the most expensive schools? Another graph showed that between about 2010 and the present the number of women getting Humanities degrees has decreased to be about equal to men. The implication there might be that degrees for women finally relate to careers rather than to general preparedness for the “Mrs” degree. That may be bad for course enrollment, but it may also be a positive change for society.

The Atlantic article linked to an AHA article about declines in history enrollment. This was the source of the info the Atlantic cited about the disparities in decreasing enrollments between large and small institutions. But this article also failed to address the relative costs of enrollments at these schools, OR the likelihood that survey courses (where most of the decline is at the large schools but most of the growth is seen at small schools) at regional universities like mine tend to be taught by fulltime faculty like myself, while at big, expensive schools they’re often substantially or entirely taught by grad student TAs. The AHA article did mention that graduate enrollment in History was down 12% in the three years between the 2013-14 and 2016-17 academic years. Again, that’s unfortunate for History grad programs – but has anybody asked how many new History PhDs should America be producing each year?

All this reading led me ultimately to a reading list from The Disquantified Reading Group which was not only a great source of additional stuff to read but a very interesting example of how to do course content in an outward-facing way that makes it accessible to more people than just the current cohort of the current course. I’m going to try to emulate this, as much as I can, in my summer and fall courses.

New Focus and Look

I haven’t been doing a lot of personal blogging recently, and I’ve begun focusing much more on my two professional interests, Environmental History and Open Education. So I decided to change this blog to reflect that focus.

Welcome to OERFuture.net!

This will document my process learning about and talking about open educational resources and my own work to make my courses and teaching more open and collaborative. I’m not sure exactly where this will lead, but I’ll talk about it whatever it turns out to be. Of course, the opinions I express are my own and don’t necessarily represent those of any institution or organization I’m affiliated with, yada yada.

I’ve published a few OER and have several in the pipeline. In general my goal is to make all of my course material outward-facing and available to the public. This has something to do with some disruptive ideas I have about the future of higher education which I’ll elaborate in more detail at a later date. In the meantime, suffice it to say that one of my goals is to make all my course material and as much of the supplemental reading as possible open to the public.

Blow are links to my OER. I’m going to provide links to these that allow you to use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate what you read. This makes you part of an ongoing conversation about the texts which I hope will grow and spread. Your reactions to what you read will also give me feedback about things I might be able to clarify or expand on, or things that need more explanation, stronger arguments, or basically more work. For more info about Hypothes.is, check out the videos I made for my students. Also, if you want to give me feedback but not in a public forum, you can email me.

Published:

American Environmental History textbook

A Short Handbook for writing essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences, with Salvatore F. Allosso, PhD.

The Ranney Letters: Family Correspondence During the Yankee Expansion, a primary source reader of 19th-century letters with historical background.

Works in Progress (textbooks or other projects I’m working on, which are not yet complete but may be useful while I’m working on them. Part of the project of open learning involves students and instructors, readers and authors collaborating in the creation of knowledge. Reader annotations and reactions to these works in progress will help me and my collaborators produce the best possible versions of the projects.):

US History I: Precolonial to Reconstruction, my extensive revision of the Openstax US History textbook.