Social Reading with Hypothesis

If you are a reader of eBooks and use a Kindle or similar device, you’re probably familiar with the “Popular Highlights” setting that allows you to see how many other readers have highlighted a particular passage. Now imagine not only seeing what other readers have highlighted but their marginal comments and annotations as well. This is essentially what the Hypothesis program allows you to do with any digital text you assign in your classes. Hypothesis is a social reading/annotation application that works seamlessly within Blackboard and “makes reading active, visible, and social, enabling students to engage with their texts, teachers, ideas, and each other in deeper, more meaningful ways.”

I have been using Hypothesis in my face-to-face writing, literature, and FYS classes for a couple of years now to supplement assigned readings, but since our campus-wide move to remote learning, I now rely on the program as a rich central space for asynchronous collaboration and engagement with course content.

I use Hypothesis in three basic ways:

• To invite students to interact, through marginal annotations, with each other’s ideas, personal connections, and interpretations of a text (syllabi, articles, essays, poems, stories, websites, etc.)
• To invite students to respond to specific passages and text-based, open-ended “discussion” prompts directly in the margins of a text
• To invite students to engage in specific reading tasks/strategies central to the goals of the course, such as 1) identifying and analyzing an argument’s central claim and its supporting evidence or 2) identifying and analyzing a text’s literary elements and structural patterns (theme, motif, figurative expressions, etc.) or 3) identifying and commenting on passages that exemplify the genre

Hypothesis is currently used by over 200 colleges and universities across the nation. While several SUNY schools are currently piloting its use, FLCC is the first college in the SUNY system to license and implement the program for college-wide access. In order to support the Hypothosis/SUNY partnership, the SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) is running a pair of free webinars on “Social Reading for Student Success at SUNY.” The first webinar was held October 13, and you can watch the video here:

The second webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, November 10, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.

“A Closer Look at Social Reading.” Dive deeper with Hypothesis in this follow up session focusing on best practices, including how to introduce students to Hypothesis and ideas for social reading activities and assignments. Specific attention will be paid to how social reading and annotation can support remote learning. Join Hypothesis representatives and SUNY colleagues in this in-depth exploration of the pedagogy of social reading and annotation. Presenter(s): Jeremy Dean, Erin Barker, Loree Buchan, Katie Lynch, Margaret Schmuhl & Zoë Misiewicz.

You can register for the event here.

If you have any questions or are interested in seeing a demo of how I use Hypothesis to support social reading in my classes, feel free to reach out to the folks at Hypothes.is.

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Photo by Salomé Watel on Unsplash