Category: Free Inquiry

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.

It’s amazing how polarizing something as seemingly innocuous as bike lanes can be. For my mom and grandad, they are an unwelcome blight on the landscape. A real-life manifistation of Victoria Mayor Lisa’s Helps’ desire to remake the City into her own image.

As a cyclist, I must say that for the most part I support what’s been done. The bike lane on Richardson was illthought out, dispersing traffic in a way that has turned previously quiet streets into busy ones. I’m also not sure that it was needed, given that I didn’t see any issue riding on that street in the first place.

But overall, I think it’s nice to ride in bik lanes, and I also believe that they can help the City move to a more sustainable future. They make cycling easier for current cyclists, and they will likely encourage others to start cycling. One stat, I read on the City’s website, impressed me: Currently, 27% of all trips to, from, and within the City are by walking, cycling or rolling- this is one of the highest rates in Canada. By 2030, the goal is for 55%.

That’s extremely impressive, especially when one considers how much that has changed over time. In 2017, 9% of all trips to, from, and within the City were by cycling- the next measurement will be in 2022

Safety, of course, may be the biggest reason to support bike lanes. According to the City, Betwen etween 2007 and 2016, an average of two pedestrians/cyclists died due to traffic collisions. That’s quite astonishing if you think about it. It also underscores the importance of investing in the bike lanes.

How you do so while not alienating longtime Victoria residents is a difficult challenge, one that it seems that the City has not exactly thrived at.

Perhaps above all what has people off guard is the sheer volume an pace of the builds, the majority of which have been built in the past five years. The project, which is known as the All Ages and Abilities cycling network, aims to build 32 km of bike lanes by 2022.

The following document illustrates the projects that have been build as part of this.

Here is a map of the various City of Victoria bike routes: