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Marginal Syllabus wins 2019 John Lovas Award

As announced at the 2019 Computers & Writing Conference at Michigan State University, the Marginal Syllabus has been awarded the 2019 John Lovas Award.

What is the John Lovas Award?

The John Lovas Award is given by the journal Kairos to an “outstanding online project devoted to academic pursuits.” Founded in 1996, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is an open-access online journal that is one of the longest, continuously-published peer-reviewed journals in the field.

Here’s some additional information about the annual John Lovas Award:

The John Lovas Award is sponsored by Kairos in recognition and remembrance of John Lovas’s contributions to the legitimation of academic knowledge­sharing using the emerging tools of Web publishing, from blogging, to newsletters, to social media. Each year the award underscores the valuable contributions that such knowledge-creation and community-building have made to the discipline by recognizing a person or project whose active, sustained engagement with topics in rhetoric, composition, or computers and writing using emerging communication tools best exemplifies John’s model of a public intellectual.

Award Proposal

The award team of Remi Kalir (University of Colorado Denver), Christina Cantrill (National Writing Project), Joe Dillon (Aurora Public Schools/Denver Writing Project), and Jeremy Dean (Hypothesis) submitted a proposal in the spring of 2019 to Kairos.

A selection of our proposal is included here:

This proposal presents a project that uses open and collaborative web annotation to spark social reading and public writing about literacy, equity, and education. Since 2016, the Marginal Syllabus has organized 27 ongoing “annotation conversations” with educators about equity in teaching and learning. Currently in its third iteration, the Marginal Syllabus is now a multi-stakeholder partnership among the National Writing Project, the National Council of Teachers of English, the web annotation non-profit Hypothesis, publishers of scholarship, K-12 educators, and university researchers (the fourth iteration of the Marginal Syllabus in summer 2019 will partner with the journal CITE: English Language Arts to discuss connected teaching and learning in the context of literacy education).

What’s an annotation conversation? Authors contribute open access scholarship related to educational equity, perhaps also participate in a partner author webinar, and then conversation begins as educators use open-source and collaborative annotation to publicly comment upon and discuss scholarship. Over three years, hundreds of educators and university students have participated in Marginal Syllabus conversations by authoring thousands of Hypothesis annotations.

In addition to ongoing conversation, the initiative engages with various digital-native academic compositions and knowledge-sharing projects, including the Open Pedagogy Notebook, the open learning analytics dashboard CROWDLAAERS that visualizes how “crowds” of annotators contribute “layers” of annotation to online texts (see all Marginal Syllabus analytics here), and the San Francisco State University Marginal Syllabus, a local chapter of the national effort, whereby writing program faculty have read, annotated, and discussed the book Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future (Inoue, 2015).

By utilizing open and collaborative web annotation as both an everyday and disruptive media literacy practice (Kalir & Dean, 2018), the Marginal Syllabus enacts a participatory form of public discourse that exemplifies the “social scholarship of teaching” (Greenhow et al., 2019; see discussion of the Marginal Syllabus on p. 9). This “social scholarship” encourages educators to generate and share new knowledge about their teaching (e.g., Kalir & Perez, 2019; Kalir & Garcia, in press). Educator annotation of equity-oriented scholarship is a counter-narrative about pedagogical practice written and archived as complementary to published literature.

In this respect, the Marginal Syllabus has been described as public scholarship that seeks “to imagine a different paradigm for conducting, consuming, and responding to research” (Mirra, 2018), as well as as an open educational practice that advocates “non-traditional approaches to online collaborative reading of texts… [to] promote transformative learning as dialogue” (Bali & Caines, 2018; see p. 14-15). Furthermore, the Marginal Syllabus’ annotation conversations are a form of post-publication peer review that is openly accessible, democratic in practice, and welcoming of multiple knowledge stakeholders. Finally, the project’s three syllabi – comprised of open access scholarship, public and ongoing annotation conversation, and webinars and other resources – demonstrate how to collaboratively extend the social life of scholarship, curate knowledge for public discourse, and use participatory communication technology to author counter-narratives about educational equity.

Thank You!

Thank you, first and foremost, to Kairos for selecting the Marginal Syllabus as recipient of the 2019 John Lovas Award.

Our work would not be possible without the support of partner organizations the National Writing Project, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Hypothesis. Thank you for believing in this project and its people, dedicating time and resources to encourage our work, and promoting this new model of educator professional learning.

Thank you to the many partner authors who have contributed open-access scholarship about educational equity to the Marginal Syllabus so as to spark and sustain our conversations. You and your scholarship are, in many respects, the anchor of this entire project.

And, of course, thanks to all the educators and learners who have participated in Marginal Syllabus annotation conversation over the years – we are most appreciative of your time, interest, and contributions.

The Summer 2019 Marginal Syllabus: “Connected Learning in Teacher Education”

Welcome to “Connected Learning in Teacher Education,” the fourth iteration of the Marginal Syllabus. This syllabus is designed to support the professional learning of teacher educators who are interested in discussing and enacting connected learning.

This summer’s Marginal Syllabus programming starts Tuesday, May 28th with pre-readings and introductory conversations about connected learning. Thanks to a partnership with the journal Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE), four featured articles from a 2018 special issue titled “From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching” will structure participants’ annotation conversation from June 3rd through August 11th. After discussing connected learning throughout the summer, participants will also be supported in enacting connected learning through collaborative annotation activities during the Fall 2019 semester.

Stay up-to-date with the latest Summer 2019 Marginal Syllabus announcements by completing this very short form.

This post includes:

Introductory Information

Since 2016, the Marginal Syllabus has convened and sustained online conversations with educators about equity in education through open and collaborative web annotation. Throughout the summer of 2019, teacher educators are invited to read, annotate, and discuss four articles about connected learning so as to support their own connected teaching with pre-service and in-service educators.

In partnership with the journal Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE), the four featured articles in this syllabus have been selected from a special issue of CITE titled “From Connected Learning to Connected Teaching.” CITE is an open-access, peer-reviewed publication of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education and is co-sponsored by four teacher education associations. The Marginal Syllabus has previously partnered with the National Writing Project and the National Council of Teachers of English to organize the 2017-18 syllabus and 2018-19 syllabus, and uses the open-source technology Hypothesis to mediate open and collaborative annotation conversation.As a summer reading group for teacher educators, “Connected Learning in Teacher Education” will begin with introductory connected learning texts followed by the four articles scheduled from June through August.

This syllabus will be facilitated by Kira Baker-Doyle, Program Director of the Transformative Teacher-Educator Fellowship and organizer of the Connected Learning in Teacher Education network, and Remi Kalir, Co-founder of the Marginal Syllabus.

Summer Reading Calendar

Click the following links to access all syllabus readings as PDFs. The web annotation tool Hypothesis will automatically open atop the PDF.

May 28-June 2

Introduction to connected learning (pre-reading):

June 3-23

Connected Teaching and Learning in K-16+ Contexts: An Annotated Bibliography, Sarah Lohnes Watulak, Rebecca Woodard, Anna Smith, Lindy Johnson, Nathan Phillips, & Katalin Wargo

June 24-July 7

This Is How We Do It: Authentic and Strategic Technology Use by Novice English Teachers, Betina Hsieh

July 8-July 21

The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility, Stephanie West-Puckett, Anna Smith, Christina Cantrill, & Mia Zamora

July 22-August 4

I, Pseudocoder: Reflections of a Literacy Teacher-Educator on Teaching Coding as Critical Literacy, Kira J. Baker-Doyle

August 5-11

Debrief discussions, planning for fall teaching, and CLinTE virtual retreat

Fall 2019 Activities

In addition to summer reading and discussion, participating teacher educators will be encouraged to incorporate these same articles into their teacher education coursework throughout the Fall 2019 semester. Technical and facilitation supports will be provided to teacher educators who participate in the summer reading group so as to encourage social reading and collaborative annotation among their courses during the fall.

To help enact connected learning activities, the following reading calendar is intended to support teacher educators as they incorporate articles discussed during the summer into their fall semester syllabi and coursework for collaborative annotation discussion across multiple teacher education courses.

September reading and discussion: Connected Teaching and Learning in K-16+ Contexts: An Annotated Bibliography (Lohnes Watulak et al., 2018)

October reading and discussion: This Is How We Do It: Authentic and Strategic Technology Use by Novice English Teachers (Hsieh, 2018)

November reading and discussion: The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility (West-Puckett et al., 2018)

December reading and discussion: I, Pseudocoder: Reflections of a Literacy Teacher-Educator on Teaching Coding as Critical Literacy (Baker-Doyle et al., 2018)

Annotation Conversation with Hypothesis

Annotation is the addition of a note to a text. Digital annotation tools afford the opportunity to comment upon, mark up, link to and from, and hold conversation about and atop online texts.

As an open-source and free tool, the open web annotation technology Hypothesis adds a new dimension to online reading – making reading public, social, and collaborative. Hypothesis is not a social network, however, and creating a Hypothesis account takes about a minute and only requires an email. You retain the intellectual property of annotations authored using Hypothesis, public annotations are attributed with a Creative Commons license to help build a more robust and open intellectual commons, and the organization’s principles are worth a read, too. It is for these and other reasons that the Marginal Syllabus has partnered with Hypothesis in every iteration of the syllabus since 2016.

Eager to read, annotate, and discuss? First, create your Hypothesis account. Then click on any of the reading links (above) and Hypothesis will automatically open atop the linked PDF. Once the reading is open in your browser, you’ll be able to easily read and respond to all public annotations authored by other participants. And if you’re really geeking out about annotation conversation, check out these resources for educators and consider how to incorporate similar social and collaborative reading practices into future learning environments and activities.

Questions about the “Connected Learning in Teacher Education” Marginal Syllabus may be directed to Kira Baker-Doyle and Remi Kalir.

Marginal Syllabus at 2018 NCTE Annual Convention

The Marginal Syllabus is excited to participate in next week’s 2018 NCTE Annual Convention in Houston, Texas (#NCTE18). Members of the Marginal Syllabus team who will be attending and presenting include:

  • Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project
  • Jeremy Dean, Hypothesis
  • Joe Dillon, Aurora Public Schools
  • Remi Kalir, University of Colorado Denver

In addition, we’re excited to be in Houston with NCTE staff who are helping to lead the 2018-19 syllabus (thank you!), many regular Marginal Syllabus participants, as well as some partner authors featured in the 2016-17 syllabus and 2017-18 syllabus.

The current Marginal Syllabus, “Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN,” features eight texts from 19 partner authors that appear in five different NCTE journals. Learn more about LEARN and view this year’s full syllabus.

Attending #NCTE18? Please join us on Saturday (11/17) and Sunday (11/18):

Saturday, November 17, afternoon: Hallway conversation and annotation

Hallway conversations are a meaningful aspect of any conference. Notably, these exchanges are similar to the dialogues we facilitate in the Marginal Syllabus – informal and professionally relevant, sometimes quite short and sometimes rather long, both spontaneous and familiar, and located in the literal margins of more formal spaces (whether texts or convention centers).

Join Jeremy, Remi, and regular Marginal Syllabus participant Andrea Zellner for an impromptu hallway conversation and annotation activity related to this month’s Marginal Syllabus text “Electing to Heal” by partner authors Antero Garcia and Elizabeth Dutro. “Electing to Heal” was written after the 2016 presidential election in response to educators’ concerns about teaching in the wake of a campaign that threatened violence and stoked fear in marginalized communities. In their article, Garcia and Dutro explore the need for English teachers to respond to contemporary politics and support students in testifying about the impact of vitriolic rhetoric and xenophobic policies. Read and annotate the article here and, if attending NCTE, join us in the hallway to share your thoughts, ask questions, and grow the conversation.

The exact location of this spontaneous hallway conversation and annotation activity within the George R. Brown Convention Center is TBD (likely an open lounge area), so follow #MarginalSyllabus on Twitter for up-to-date information. Swing by anytime Saturday afternoon!

Sunday, November 18, 10:30a: The Marginal Syllabus: Educators Annotating the Web as Professional Development about Educational Equity (George R. Brown Convention Center, 360E).

How can open web annotation support educator professional development about educational equity? This panel presentation featuring Christina, Jeremy, Joe (joining virtually from Colorado), and Remi will engage this guiding question by discussing:

  • Background about the Marginal Syllabus as an openly networked and equity-oriented professional learning initiative supported by multiple organizational partners and educator stakeholders;
  • Information about open and collaboration web annotation, with detail about how Hypothesis web annotation supports educator voice, agency, and learning;
  • Educator experiences participating in the Marginal Syllabus as a “geeky book club” that supports critical inquiry across sociopolitical texts and contexts;
  • Research updates about educator participation and learning in Marginal Syllabus conversations; and
  • How to contribute to this month’s annotation conversation about “Electing to Heal” through a guided and hands-on annotation activity.

If you have connected with the Marginal Syllabus in any way over the past few years – as a participant, as a partner author, as a member of a partner organization – please join us for this session so we can hear from your experience and perspective, too. And if you’re learning about the Marginal Syllabus for the first time, this will be a great session to learn about all aspects of the project. Please join us for this interactive and participatory session on Sunday morning!

Finally, if you’re not attending NCTE in Houston and would like to connect with the Marginal Syllabus, please Contact Remi with questions and comments.

Marginal Syllabus at #OpenEd18

Remi is heading to Niagara Falls, New York this week to present about the Marginal Syllabus at the 15th Annual Open Education Conference (#OpenEd18).

Learn more about the Marginal Syllabus’ research and please join Remi at the following sessions:

Thursday, October 11 at 11am: Open Palimpsests: Layering Technologies, Partnerships, Resources, and Practices for Open Education

During this roundtable presentation, Remi will present his article “Equity-oriented design in open education” (to appear in the International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, read the preprint via OSF). This article advances an “open palimpsests” model for equity-oriented design in open education, and details how this model has guided the first two years of open educator learning in the Marginal Syllabus. The model includes a strategic layering of four design principles: Leveraging the ope web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content, and engaging professional learning as an open practice.

As I note in the article:

I have drawn upon the design theory of infrastructuring to advance a model pertinent to learning initiatives with dual commitments to educational equity and educational openness. The open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education suggests that design principles may be layered together – in strategic and complementary fashion – so that the relevance of any given principle informs design decisions while, simultaneously, all the principles influence more equitable outcomes.

During the roundtable discussion, I will briefly detail how this model guided iterative design and decision-making during both the 2016-17 and 2017-18 Marginal Syllabus. Perhaps more importantly, I welcome conversation and critique as we explore how this model may be useful to others designing equity-oriented open learning initiatives, and/or may be adapted (or modified) to meet the needs of likeminded efforts.

Friday, October 12 at 2:45pm: Open Annotation Data as Learning Analytics: Workflows and Visualizations for Educator Learning

This research presentation will feature CROWDLAAERS, a public dashboard for Capturing and Reporting Open Web Data for Learning Analytics, Annotation, and Education Researchers (pronounced “crowd layers”). CROWDLAAERS is a real-time dashboard relevant to collaborative processes and reports learning analytics associated with group – or ​crowd​ – discourse ​layers​ added via Hypothesis open web annotation to online content. For any publicly annotated document on the web, CROWDLAAERS provides learning analytics about the active participants, temporal activity (active days of annotation), collaborative discourse (threads of annotations), and also tags. Groups of individual annotations may be sorted by date, contributor, annotation, tags, and level (or the position of an annotation reply in a given thread). Via CROWDLAAERS, researchers and educators can also select any annotation to read the full content within CROWDLAAERS or in context of the annotated source document. Here are two examples of annotated texts associated with the current Equity Unbound open learning course.

The presentation will discuss the development and use of CROWDLAAERS within the context of Marginal Syllabus research and educator collaboration, and will detail how others interested in open web annotation data and learning analytics can use this open resource for their research and teaching efforts.

Bonus! Want more open web annotation? Come to “Open Web Annotation: Open Infrastructure for Next Generation Digital Learning Environments” with Marginal Syllabus friend – and, more importantly, Director of Marketing for Hypothesis – Nate Angell, Thursday the 11th at 8:30am.

Finally, if you’re not attending OpenEd and would like to connect with the Marginal Syllabus, you’re very welcome to:

 

Marginal Syllabus at 2018 Connected Learning Summit

The Marginal Syllabus project is excited to participate in next week’s 2018 Connected Learning Summit at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. First, the following Marginal Syllabus researchers, partners, and collaborators will be attending:

  • Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project
  • Joe Dillon, Aurora Public Schools
  • Kira Baker-Doyle, Arcadia University
  • Francisco Perez, University of Colorado Denver
  • Remi Kalir, University of Colorado Denver

Please join us at the following three sessions:

Wednesday, August 1st, 2p: Research Paper Panel: Web Annotation and Exemplary Connected Learning in Saudi Arabia and India

During this research panel presentation, Francisco and Remi will discuss how the Marginal Syllabus has supported educators’ “connected conversations.” Here’s the paper abstract:

Research has yet to explore how the social and technical affordances of open web annotation (OWA) can mediate connections between educators in service of their professional learning. This study examined educator participation in the Marginal Syllabus, a computer supported collaborative learning environment that encouraged connected conversation via OWA. Multiple quantitative methods, including text sentiment and social network analyses, were used to discern key discursive characteristics among the nine conversations of the 2016-17 Marginal Syllabus (1,163 annotations authored by 67 educators). Key discursive characteristics include: (a) generally positive sentiment; (b) educators who annotated most prolifically also authored the greatest percentage of annotations with neutral sentiment; and (c) conversations of at least four annotations tended to demonstrate a greater percentage of negative sentiment. The sentiment trends and study limitations are addressed in the final discussion.

Researchers interested in learning analytics and open data are encouraged to attend as, during this research presentation, we will also share updates about our recent work to capture, report, and visualize educator collaboration and “connected conversations” through the CROWDLAAERS dashboard.

Thursday, August 2nd, 2p: Educator Connected Learning via Collaborative Web Annotation

This spotlight – an informal and big-picture conversation about the project – will feature multiple stakeholders sharing their experience with the Marginal Syllabus. Here’s the session abstract:

This spotlight describes a multi-stakeholder partnership that supports educator connected learning via open and collaborative web annotation. The Marginal Syllabus convenes and sustains conversations with K-12 classroom teachers, higher education faculty, and other educators about equity in education using the web annotation platform Hypothesis. The spotlight will feature stakeholders discussing the project’s development, design principles, and the 2018-19 syllabus.

Remi’s recent paper “Equity-oriented design in open education,” which discusses Marginal Syllabus design principles and project iterations, will also be referenced and shared during this spotlight.

Friday, August 3rd, 8:30a: Connected Learning in Teacher Education (CLinTE) Network Meeting & Mixer

Facilitated by Kira Baker-Doyle, join the Marginal Syllabus to help plan the 2018-19 “Pedagogies of Connected Learning” syllabus:

At the CLinTE network meeting and gathering, attendees will learn of collaborative research, teaching, and leadership work done by members of the group, and hear opportunities to take part in for the coming year. Also, the group will begin work on designing the “Pedagogies of Connected Learning” Marginal Syllabus project, curating a series of texts that teacher educators can use in coursework related to connected learning principles, and which classes can join in on collective text annotation activities.

Finally, if you’re not attending the Connected Learning Summit and would like to connect with the Marginal Syllabus, you’re very welcome to:

Civic Writing on Digital Walls: Roundtable at 2018 AERA Annual Meeting

Attending AERA? Hear from Marginal Syllabus researchers on Sunday, April 15th, 2:45 to 4:15pm, at Sheraton New York Times Square, Second Floor, Metropolitan West Room (Roundtable Session 17).

This post supports the roundtable presentation “Civic Writing on Digital Walls,” presented by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia at the 2018 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting during the Division G (Social Context of Education) session “Rejecting Neutrality and Challenging Inequity: Fostering Critical Youth Civic Engagement Across Informal Learning Contexts.”

Working Paper

This case study examines how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on the walls of everyday digital environments. Specifically, we focus on how a repertoire of social, technical, and literacy practices associated with Hypothesis open web annotation (OWA) develop and amplify educators’ critical civic literacies. The case study is bound by educators’ OWA activity associated with the November, 2017 Marginal Syllabus conversation. The first and quantitative phase of our analysis identified: a) descriptive statistics of educator participation in the focal conversation; and b) topics of civic relevance that emerged through educators’ OWA conversation. The second and qualitative phase of our analysis was informed by inductive methods of discourse analysis; we examined situated meaning in educators’ OWA to identify and categorize types of annotation as a civic literacy repertoire.

Our case study identifies as its primary finding ten annotation practices that comprise educators’ collective repertoire of civic literacy practices. We embrace the heuristic of an acronym to both organize and express an ethos relevant to the layered meanings and shifting authorship present in the focal annotation conversation: SUBLIMATES (Summarizing, Unpacking, Building, Linking, Illustrating, Musing, Affiliating, Translating, Evaluating, and Sharing).

Educators’ open web annotation practices as a civic literacy repertoire

  1. Educator OWA served as a means of summarizing, or reviewing and highlighting, specific civic topics associated with the conversation’s focal text. Read an example of summarizing in context.
  2. Educators also authored OWA to unpack complex civic ideas by expanding upon pedagogical and political implications. Read an example of unpacking in context.
  3. Educators used OWA for building: in some annotations, educators established connections from the focal text to related civic conversations or concerns; in related threads, educators’ OWA co-constructed commentary that built upon civic topics and insights. Read an example of building in context.
  4. Given the technical affordances of OWA, educators frequently exhibited linking whereby their annotation content included a hyperlink that tethered the focal text to related civic content. Linking established connections across texts and contexts to a variety of civic resources including books, reports, scholarly articles, and even other Marginal Syllabus conversations. Read an example of linking in context.
  5. The practice of illustrating occurred when educator OWA explained in detail the pedagogical or political relevance of a specific civic topic. Read an example of illustrating in context.
  6. Questioning–or musing–was a common OWA practice among educators as they advanced both open-ended and pointed inquiry about civic topics. Read an example of musing in context.
  7. Educator OWA was also a means of affiliating among Marginal Syllabus text-participants, or strengthening connectedness and community, via meta-language, in-jokes, and playful, multimodal expression. Read an example of affiliating in context.
  8. Educators’ OWA could also be a practice of translating civic education and engagement ideas from the focal text to other academic disciplines, educational and civic settings, political circumstances, and even popular culture. Read an example of translating in context.
  9. At times, educator OWA adopted a more critical stance with annotation evaluating civic topics as well as critiquing particular claims and analyses. Read an example of evaluating in context.
  10. The final practice comprising educators’ OWA repertoire was sharing, or instances in which text-participants openly communicated information about their personal lives, values, or opinions while discussing civic topics. Read an example of sharing in context.

Thoughts and feedback? Please contact us:

Remi: Connect with Remi

Antero: antero.garcia@standford.edu

Marginal Syllabus at 2018 AERA Annual Meeting

Attending AERA? Hear from Marginal Syllabus researchers on Monday, April 16th, 4:05 to 5:35pm, at Millennium Broadway New York Times Square, Third Floor, Room 3.11.

This post supports the presentation “The Marginal Syllabus: Mediating Educator Learning via Web Annotation,” presented by Remi Kalir and Francisco Perez at the 2018 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting during the Division C (Learning and Instruction) session “Emerging Technologies and New Media for Situating Learning Environments.”

Paper

The presentation features findings reported in “The Marginal Syllabus: Educator learning and web annotation across sociopolitical texts and contexts” (Kalir & Perez, in review).

Abstract: This case study examines educator open learning with web annotation among sociopolitical texts and contexts. The chapter introduces annotation practices and conceptualizes intertextuality to describe how open web annotation creates dialogic spaces which gather together people and texts, coordinates meaning-making, and encourages political agency. This perspective is used to present and analyze educator participation in the Marginal Syllabus, a social design experiment that leverages open web annotation to foster conversation about educational equity. One conversation from the inaugural year of the Marginal Syllabus is analyzed using mixed method approaches to data collection, analysis, and the presentation of findings. Learning analytics and discourse analysis detail how open web annotation mediated educator participation among sociopolitical texts and contexts of professional relevance. The chapter concludes by discussing open web annotation as a means of coordinating educator participation in public conversations about sociopolitical issues related to educational equity.

Keywords: Annotation, Dialogic Space, Discourse Analysis, Equity, Intertextuality, Open Educational Resources, Open Educational Practices, Open Web Annotation, Political Agency, Social Design Experiment

Data

The presentation introduces a dashboard prototype visualizing educator participation in Marginal Syllabus annotation conversation. The dashboard is a real-time reporting system that analyzes and visualizes Hypothesis open data as learning analytics. Furthermore, the dashboard is an open source service that can be applied to any URL on the web that features  public annotation data for the analysis and visualization of collaborative group processes.

Additional Resources

Resources related to our presentation include:

American Creed Screening- Writing into the day


 

At the invitation of Molly Robbins, a Denver Writing Project (DWP) teacher at Aurora’s Cherokee Trail High School, Remi and I will help facilitate today DWP’s screening of American Creed, a documentary which will be released nationally by PBS on February 27. We’ll share about the Marginal Syllabus after the film, but our first order of business will be to lead the “writing into the day,” a routine practice at National Writing Project professional learning.

Using hypothes.is, I highlighted three short excerpts from Danielle Allen’s “Night Teaching,” a chapter from her book, Our Declaration.

Above is a screenshot of three notes I made.

By remixing lines from Allen’s chapter into sentence frames for teachers to use as starting points for their own writing, I will ask them to write about their classroom experiences, or to reflect on the purpose of democracy…or both. (Or neither, if they want to write about what they had for breakfast instead.)

After the film, when we convene a breakout discussion group about the movie, we’ll invite attendees to add their informal writing into the margins. This small experiment with a “nerdy book group” convening is another example of the way this project tinkers with replicable professional learning practices in the context of equity conversations.

Here’s the first note in context.

Here’s the second note in context.

Here’s the third note in context. 

Lists and public syllabi; or what the Internet ought to be good for

The Internet is good for making and circulating lists. Blog posts with titles like “3 ways to engage students with Google Slides,” “10 ways to make your Makerspace buzz!” or “The 5 classroom management tricks you need for Monday,” abound online and elicit a clickbait response from curious teachers.

At its core, a public syllabus is a curated list of texts and resources that has more substance and transformative power than informal, clickbait lists. The most noteworthy and potentially impactful examples of public syllabi that I know of are the #Fergusonsyllabus and the #Charlottesvillesyllabus, both of which illustrate the way social tools mediate vital public conversations when current events provoke an activist’s response from educators. The vision for the #Marginalsyllabus is to tinker with the affordances of the Internet in much the same way other online social justice efforts have (though I would not want to compare our humble efforts with the aforementioned, mostly because of the way those two captured the response of educators of color so profoundly.)

The #MarginalSyllabus aims to convene equity conversations in the margins of texts about equity. It tests the potential of public syllabi and online annotation. In the conversations we convene, we observe all kinds of things, and the work gives rise to all manner of questions. Our project unfolds monthly, one author partnership at a time, one text at a time, one new reader at a time. Remi studies what emerges formally, and I chicken scratch in my notebook and blog about what I see informally.

While syllabi and their evolution have an importance historically that  predates Twitter and tools like Hypothes.is, the current social landscape of the web is fraught but fertile ground where things emerge. Reading Twitter as I do to better understand issues of equity, I’ve encountered two tweets lately that help me think about the role of syllabi. What is more, participating in the #MarginalSyllabus this month has helped me make two connections between texts. What follows is my attempt to describe the connections that I make between tweets, and between texts, a reader’s response of sorts to the wide reading I’ve done lately in a politically charged time.

Two tweets –> two lists

Chris Gilliard’s tweet is overtly invitational. The volume of replies he received on Twitter created a pop-up syllabus of sorts that kept me navigating back to his tweet and reading the responses for a few days. I think his tweet, complete with replies, should be required reading for anyone working educational technology in public schools.

Clint Smith’s tweet is a call to interrogate syllabi. His stance and tone are markers of our turbulent political climate. When I read Smith’s tweet it caused me to reflect on my own teaching and the texts I’ve put in front of my 11th grade students this year as an English teacher in an urban setting. It also reminded me that all teachers should regularly reflect on the texts we put in front of students, especially white teachers like me who work in urban settings, because choose texts for students with different cultural backgrounds than our own.

Two connections between texts

This project, and our partnership this year with the National Writing Project, has given Remi and I a few occasions to look back at our first year’s syllabus for the purposes of curating it. The internet’s good for that too- curating curation efforts. This month’s reading, Danielle Allen’s chapter “Night Teaching,” excerpted with her permission from her book Our Declaration, caused me to look back at last year’s syllabus because of the connections I made as a reader. I was reminded of two texts and found myself looking back at my notes.

Above is a screenshot of my note in Hypothes.is. Click the image to see the note in context.

In the note pictured above, I explain the connection I see between two important texts about social justice. I was inspired by the way Allen focused on the word “autonomy”  when reading the Declaration of Independence closely. She does so to foster agency in her students. It reminded me of the way Linda Christensen aims to foster agency among teachers with her article, Critical Literacy and Our Students’ Lives .

Though I didn’t  create the link in my notes, this same section of Allen’s text reminded me of the way Bronwyn LaMay asked her 11th grade students to define the words “truth” and “agency,” work she detailed in “Revising Narrative Truth,” a selection from our syllabus last year. Both Allen and LeMay explore words and their meaning with students as an way to unpack identity. Their teaching goes beyond word study towards a study of the self. For me, this intertextual connection helps me reflect on my own work as a teacher and see ways I can be more responsive to my students.

The monthly reading we do with educators invites educators to make these kinds of connections and to test out the bridges they see between texts with other readers who might tread over those bridges on the way to more equitable teaching.

Here’s hoping the Internet is also good for promoting more equitable teaching.

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