I’ve been a big fan of writing in the margins for a long time. It all started in university, when I was first introduced to reading dense, journal articles.

Like many, I found the act of marking up the text to be tremendously helpful. I like to highlight certain passages and write notes to the side of others. Not only does it help me identify important bits for future reference. But the act of marking the text up seems to help me understand it in a deeper level.

That’s why I was so intrigued by Hypothesis, a new application that holds the promise of revolutionalizing how we surf the web. The application essentially allows users to mark up webpages. They can see what they mark, what they highlight or make notes beside. Users can also adjust the settings, allowing for others with the application to view their annotations.

On a personal level, I find the possibilities to be very appealing. I’ve always struggled with the very nature of surfing the Internet. You look for certain things on a webpage, and then you move on to something else. When you return, you have to go through the original process of searching out the same information. It’s also difficult to interact with the text, to get to know it in the deeper way I tried to describe above.

As a teacher, I think that the tool could be useful in a number of ways.

  • You could insure that your students actually read the texts you assign with it
  • You could judge the quality of that engagement through the richness of the comments
  • You could facilitate a dialogue among small groups on specific texts.
  • You could facilitate interesting dialogue and observations on poetry
  • You could identify specific themes within a text that you want students to pay attention to

A good video of educators waxing eloquent on the app can be found on Youtube here. You can watch below.

With all this said, I think the biggest thing I’d like to model with this app is the importance of annotations. Doing it can really improve one’s reading ability. If kids could come out of my classroom with improved ability in this domain that would be great.

I have downloaded the app and invited some classmates to join a public forum. I hope to continue my exploration of this app.