Category: Presentations

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:

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