Tag: highlight

Deep processing together

I encountered a recent article on “Annotating the scholarly web” in Nature and the author was promoting an activity that has long interested me (click on the highlight tag attached to this post to see earlier posts with a similar theme). The article describes Hypothes.is which is open source software for pdf and web annotation and highlighting. This article would not be published by Nature because it describes this software. It was included because the idea is to use the sharing of highlights and annotations as a way for scholars to interact in the discussion of published work.

As I suggest above, social bookmarking/highlighting is not a new idea. What this venture has going for it that is unique is the effort to go beyond developing the tool and attempting to establish partnerships with publishers.

I investigated Hypothes.is a bit more and have a better understanding of how they see the “big picture”. In addition to attempting to gain the cooperation of partners, the group is also working toward the development of annotation standards. One of the problems at present is that the various methods for web highlighting operate in different ways and likely struggle to develop a sufficient following to continue. Working toward standards would allow those adopting the standards to use different tools to share.

Hypothes.is is also thinking beyond the development of tools for advanced scholars and presently offers suggestions for how students might use their resource.  

Here is my take on how this works. I think of it as similar to tools I use to highlight pdfs I read (e.g., Skim ). It is like the software adds a layer over a page and allows a user to mark on this layer. The original is not actually altered. The software/online service saves the marked up layer separately. When shared (or just retrieved by the individual adding the highlights), the original and the extra layer are combined for viewing.

Highlighting and annotating (with the opportunity for replying to comments) goes beyond the addition of comments at the end of a document or post. It is much easier to understand the context of an embedded message.

Hypothes.is allows public, private, or defined group highlighting. I have added some highlights to a personal page so you can see what a marked-up page looks like. 

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Edge Browser

Let me get this out of the way first.

Yes, it is true that I seldom write anything positive about Microsoft.

No, I am feeling just fine, but thanks for your concern.

I kind of like Microsoft’s new browser – Edge.

I can’t say that I anticipate Edge becoming my daily workhorse, but it seems suited to one process I do a lot. I locate content, annotate and highlight that content, save what I have marked up, reflect on several marked up documents, and then write something. I have a system for doing this from PDFs (mostly journal articles I download), but I have yet to find a perfect system for doing this with web content.

Edge has what I regard as reasonable markup and share tools built in. I can’t really say that build in tools are better than capabilities added as plugins or extensions, but I am just guessing that there is an efficiency advantage. As long as a browser does not integrate too many capabilities, built in would seem to offer advantages. This is the present state of Edge.

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The icon to activate the annotation/highlight options appears in the upper-right corner of the browser display.

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Selecting the annotation icons opens up a tool display (top left-hand corner). You can highlight, write/draw directly on the browser image, or add a text comment. Your finished work can be saved to OneNote or shared to several to one of several options (I save work to Evernote).

My only complaint at this point is the method of highlighting. I would prefer a highlighter that carefully follows a line of text. The Edge highlighter is used like an actual highlighter meaning my highlights come out messy rather than neat.

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Individualizing literacy instruction with Newsela

The individualization of learning experiences is one of those educational goals that sounds so logical, but ends up being difficult to implement in a practical way. Finding or generating learning materials suited to individual needs can be quite time consuming. What could be ideal in many situations is combining individualization with group discussion. Discussion and sharing can be an important social and learning activity, but learners must share at least some background in order to have something to offer.

Newsela is an online service suited to these circumstances. The benefits of the service have been described in several different ways depending on the reviewer. Newsela offers news articles within several topical areas ranging from science to world events. Each article offered on multiple reading levels – the claim is from 3rd grade through high school. To be clear – this means students reading at different levels can be reading about the same specific topic. Each article connects to a writing prompt and comprehension questions.

It seems that Newsela could be used to completely individualize the learning experience. One strategy would be to differentiate the experience for each level based on interest and reading level. I like the alternative of having students read a similar article suited to their level of functioning and then having the opportunity to discuss the article in a group context.

Newsela comes in a free and a pro version. Newsela requests that educators or administrators contact the company for a bid. EdSurge suggests the cost for the pro version is approximately $2000 per classroom. The pro version offers features such as an annotation tool for teachers allowing teachers to highlight content within articles to guide students and advanced data tracking features. It seems that the free version might be a great way to supplement/diversify literacy instruction and the pro version would appropriate if one wanted to make these resources a core part of instruction.

As the year winds down and educators are seeking a few new things to spice things up, it might be an ideal time to explore Newsela.

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Comparison of free and pro versions

Setting up an account for your classroom

 

 

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What I think is important – what you think is important

I read a lot of Kindle books. My wife and I have written a book available for the Kindle. The “Kindle model” offers some capabilities that are under appreciated and often unknown to many readers.

For example, I am interested in the potential of sharing highlights and annotations. I have taken the time to highlight and annotate our own book and the books I assign for me graduate classes.

I have a new fascination. I was searching our Kindle book for a specific references and discovered that I can now view the most frequently highlighted passages by readers. Do the readers highlight the same content as I highlight? Do they highlight what I think are more applied content or content I would describe as conceptual and likely to be unfamiliar. There must be something here for deeper analysis. I had thought shared highlights was something I could share or readers could share with each other, but now I see value in the annotations as feedback to the author.

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Marker.to

If you write much, you likely read a lot. If you read to write, you also likely have explored many systems for taking notes, highlighting, and other systems for “boiling down” your research into the ideas that you then build back up into the content you offer others. (In case this is the topic that interests you, try this.

This is not about my use of such tools. This post was prompted by a post I read that commented on ways to offer what you highlight to others. The post focuses on a Chrome extension (there are extensions available for other browsers), Marker.to, that allows highlighting and offers a link so you can share the page you highlighted complete with your marks to others. I can probably offer you half a dozen ways to do this, but what I like about this approach is that it does not capture the content from the original site. As a content creator, I hope individuals come to my site. I do not want a service to take content from my site and then provide it to others.

When you install the Chrome extension, a new tool will appear near the top right-hand corner of your browser.

This tool (the highlighter) allows you to highlight and opens a dialog box that offers a URL that you can offer so others can view the highlights you have added.

 

The URL (here is a sample – http://www.marker.to/YX4mLT) can be added to content you create to take your readers to the content you have highlighted.

When I find a tool I like, I always wonder how the creators will receive compensation. I must admit I am often a little concerned. Will the company go away or sell out? Is there something I am missing? I think useful tools should cost something perhaps after a trial period.

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Highlighting

I have always highlighted the content I read and I have always been interested in highlighting. Way back when, I even tried to do research on highlighting. I have been more successful in publishing studies related to note-taking, but highlighting has many similar characteristics.

Recently, I have found the public highlighting feature of the Kindle app quite interesting. If you turn this service on, Kindle will show you the most frequently highlighted passages in a book. Wouldn’t this kind of feature be of value to students?  What if a similar feature could be enabled for digital textbooks and students could see what other students highlighted and annotated.

It turns out that a service something like this exists. There have been similar ideas (e.g, sidewiki – just dropped by Google I think). Highlighter.com is closer to what I have in mind and offers a service involving “social” highlighting. I am not completely satisfied with the way this works (if you highlight a page, your highlights should be visible the next time you visit), but the concept of group highlighting is being explored and you can access your previous highlights in another way.

A reality check – social highlighting requires the cooperation of the author. I can see both sides of this issue. I guess as an author I would want to have some control when the capabilities of the services allow content to be moved (which is different than taking a collaborator to a site and having previous highlights be visible). I am never certain of the limits. For example, if I highlight an entire chapter on the Kindle will the online page showing my highlights now contain a digital version of that chapter for me to take?

As an author wanting to make highlighting.com available for your content, you have to add a short script to the html above the </body> tag. This will probably scare some people away.

I have added the script to a sequence of web pages I wrote about online safety and responsibility. You can give the highlighting service a try if you are interested. Highlight a section of text and a miniature menu will appear near the content. Also look in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window for a menu that allows access to Highlighter.com.

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Real Reading on the Kindle

I differentiate reading for pleasure and reading for work. As an academic reading is a big part of what I do. I sit around and read stuff – books, journal articles, and some web content.

When I read for work, I am reading to understand, but I am also reading as a way to accumulate information for future use. I was never one who could remember names and date so I must generate an external record of what I have read. I must generate an external record of what I think may be helpful to me in the future. In the old days (and with me that means before the Apple II), I used to highlight everything I read and I used to create note cards. The note card would contain a brief summary and the highlighted original would offer greater detail should the comment on the note card indicate the article might be  useful. At some point, the note cards were replaced with some method for storing content on a computer. I still have digital versions of note cards I initially generated on the Apple II and the found a way to pass forward as word files over the years.

My strategy for journal articles has changed a lot. I do not really read the physical journals anymore. I have some journals dating back to when I was a junior in college (1971). I do not get out of my chair to walk across my office to my shelves anymore. I download anything I read from a journal as a pdf. This is how I use the college library – the library offers this service. I store the pdfs using a program called YEP and I annotate them using a program called Skim. I should probably describe this process – maybe a future blog.

More and more I am reading books on a device. I started to do this to see if I could. So, in exploring issues such as whether college students could actually read their textbooks from a device, I decided I should have the experience myself. Between Cindy and I we own a Kindle, iPod Touches, and iPads. I can say I have read at least one book on each. Both the Kindle and the iPad provide very acceptable reading experiences as far as I am concerned. By that I mean the visual experience of reading from the screen and my ability to read for extended periods of time are fine. What has been missing is the opportunity to take a more active approach involving highlighting, annotating AND externalizing for future use.

I realize that highlighting and annotating can be accomplished, what I was looking for was a way to generate what Skim lets me generate for pdfs – the external record. I knew there was a way to do this with the Kindle. Thanks to a post by Will Richardson I learned that the Kindle was capable of some things I had not discovered. I am describing the use of Kindle software on the iPad in this case. It turns out that the Kindle software uploads your notes and your highlights back to Amazon. I wondered how they did that popular highlights thing. Amazon must know what thousands of people have highlighted within a given book. You can access this content. The system as is does not provide a way to download this content, but you can save the web page as a text file. This is not a perfect system, but it works.

Kindle highlights and notes can be found at http://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights . You log in and you should see your collection of books and related notes.

It did occur to me that there is some danger here. You may not like Amazon storing this content. Amazon may not like you downloading the content as I have described. I have no idea if I could highlight and download an entire book. I have no interest in doing that, but it did occur to me that Amazon should probably limit the amount of highlighted text that can be stored.

It turns out I prefer the iPad to the Kindle for this form of active reading. I find the process of selecting chunks of text a bit cumbersome, but I am getting better at it. The iPad seems never to know quite what I intend – when I am selecting text and when I want to highlight the text selected seems to be difficult for the device to differentiate.

Clearly what I am describing here may be different from what you think of when considering how you read a book. Perhaps reading as research might be a way to label what I have described here. I expect that we will all be looking for ways to use the advantages of technology in solving our personal information problem solving tasks. More and more I am thinking in terms of work flow and how to take ideas from what I read and make them my own.

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