Trailblazing and Annotation Systems: Documenting Connectivity through Hyperlinking

Editor's Notes

• #3: This project begins and ends with the concept of connectivity, defined as the state of being able to recognize, understand, and act on connections made across content, people, space, and time
• #4: You can look at connectivity through another lens – in terms of some fairly standard pedagogical terms – synthesis, collaboration, and reflection require connectivity across concepts, people, and our own lifetimes.
• #5: Or you can look at connectivity through the lens of pedagogical approaches; Dewey talked about the importance of social context for learning, social learning is based in interpersonal interaction, and the newer digital pedagogies are all centered on this concept of connectedness.
• #6: Connectivity plays a huge role in how we consider learning at my home university.
• #7: Our Vice Provost of Learning Innovation and Student Success, Gardner Campbell, is dedicated to creating an environment that has a cultural commitment to “learning that matters,” with a lasting impact beyond any course, major, or degree. And to make that happen, VCU is trying to innovate opportunities for faculty, students, and the community that are creative, holistic, integrative – and we are attempting to achieve that through a framework of open education and connected learning.
• #8: We are at the beginning of this massive experiment, but a broad-stroked concept of connected learning is beginning to emerge. we tend to promote connected courses as those which are implemented through public course websites and involve student blogging and tweeting in public spaces.
• #9: There are a lot of interesting opportunities around this initiative. There are significant challenges in convincing faculty and students to work in public, but once we get them there, what next? How do we talk to faculty and students about the importance of connectivity, encourage acts of meaningful connectivity, and then document it?
• #10: And documentation is key – because documentation through assessment and evaluation plays an essential role in contemporary higher ed settings.
• #11: Therefore, the purpose of my work is to create an assessment toolkit – a collection of strategies from which faculty can pick and choose and adapt—that tell stories of connectivity while also being feasible, scalable, integrated, and sustainable – in the sense of peer and self assessment.
• #12: So when doing things like this, I like to work backwards – what exactly am I hoping students will be learning in these communities? What exactly am I trying to document? Given my definitions of connectivity that I shared before, I am hoping that students will communicate ideas and information effectively and intentionally within the course; recognize and relate connected ideas across courses, contexts, and time,
• #13: Engage in dialogue with others around learning processes and products; and learn to use networking strategies to amplify their personal signal or someone else’s signal if they choose.
• #14: And I would like to do it in a way that takes advantage of the uniquely digital aspects of blogging and tweeting.
• #15: So I have focused on annotation systems, which are the symbols, abbreviations, and phrases included within the text of the post or tweet that have separate meaning from the content and are meant to demonstrate communicative intent. Examples include: hyperlinks, mentions, retweets, hashtags. AndI have data and very detailed things to say about all of them but today I want to focus on one little section of the project...
• #17: So let’s start with some basic numbers In the summer of 2015, VCU ran five 8 week-long summer courses that fit our (loose, emerging) Connected Learning concept – they were fully online, they were implemented on public course websites, and students blogged and tweeted as part of the course design. I looked at four of the five. Those four courses generated a collection of 1618 posts and 5343 tweets from more than 300 people, 60 of whom were registered VCU students.
• #18: Course contexts varied across topics, disciplines, student level, and instructional designs – entirely different, actually. One of them was truly an “open” course in the sense that the course instructors actively recruited and promoted open participation and these open participants added their blogs to the course blog roll, etc.
• #19: Of the 1618 blog posts available, I sampled 496 – all generated by enrolled VCU students and in the case of the course with enrolled open participants, I included them as well. Within those 496, I extracted 1189 hyperlinks. I had to manually extract them but it can be done automatically. I followed the hyperlinks and catalogued the type of document, source of document, the apparent purpose of the hyperlink, and took note of the digital grammar around them (meaning broken links, awkwardly embedded or visible urls).
• #20: A typology emerged around hyperlinking.
• #21: Students connected to things that made sense given their level and the course. Categories across type included scholarly journal articles, news and magazines, government and organizational factsheets
• #22: They used these links to make connections to different things. The first was connections to the course – the graduate students (not the undergrads) would link back to the course website to provide context for an assumed audience – here’s why I’m writing this. Or links were used to connect to or embed assignments when faculty asked students to create non-text based learning assignments like infographics or concept maps
• #23: Links helped students create a narrative across posts – I saw this in the course where blogging assignments purposefully built on each other. So the student would say Earlier, I did this...(and link to the earlier blog post) now I’m doing this....” so the links helped make the learning narrative more concrete.
• #24: And across concepts. And this is where things start to get interesting. While some students were quick to use hyperlinks in ways that were consistent with traditional style guides (graduate students, in particular, especially hyperlinks to scholarly articles), hyperlinking seemed to open up the possibilities of how students linked to things beyond linearity. Some students – and not just the grad students – used hyperlinks to link to examples, further description or embed diagrams in ways that would not have been encouraged by traditional style formatting.
• #25: Let’s talk a little bit about images, because they were everywhere – across the courses. In all cases, students had reasons to include videos. They illustrated, they provided more information. And students always explained why they were there. Pictures were much more likely to be there just because they were pretty – particularly in the classes in which faculty told the students to make their blogs different than a written assignment but then didn’t give them much more guidance than that. I was kind of left thinking that when you tell students (graduates and undergraduates) to use the affordances of the web, they think that means to add some pictures. However, two things stuck out. First – when students used their own photos – there was always a story – they always explained the personal connection they were making between the photo and the topic. Second – when the instructional designs required students to learn certain creative platforms early on in the process (like how to use canvas to make an infographic), students started making their own illustrations for subsequent assignments and then explaining what was in the illustration – it’s as if they took over more ownership of the process.
• #26: Also, it wasn’t about the number of links – because students could have a long list of references at the bottom of their posts – and many of the graduate students did; posts that demonstrated more types of connectivity demonstrated different types and purposes for hyperlinks.
• #27: There was a lot missing, actually. All students weren’t perfect – far from it. There was a full spectrum of hyperlink uses. But what was almost always missing? While students often mentioned each other in their blog posts, they missed opportunities to link to each other’s posts.
• #28: When instructors made hyperlinking important through modeling, explicit expectations around hyperlinking, and pointed feedback, students tended to respond.
• #29: When instructors made hyperlinking important through modeling, explicit expectations around hyperlinking, and pointed feedback, students tended to respond. When instructors said “use the affordances of the web” students tended to think that meant writing casually, adding emoticons, and adding photos.