Web collaboration and critical thinking: Hypothes.is and annotation 2.0

Back to report on the intersection of pedagogy & technology -fun!
Props to Bonnie Stewart for turning me on to this cool technology...

I'm not sure whether to populate this post with abundant links, videos & screenshots, or just to wax rhapsodic about collaborative annotation in general...maybe I'll start with the second and insert the down at the bottom - scroll down if at some point you want to see what some of this stuff actually looks like!

So what is collaborative annotation? Well, if you're not a writing teacher, one might ask: "what is annotation."

The answer is - many things, but in a nutshell, it is the notes that one makes on a text.   So simple - but as many of us know, can be such a powerful tool.

Productive Failure & instructional design

A few weeks ago, as part of my introduction to instructional design course, I got introduced to blogger & instructional designer Cathy Moore.   If you are deeply interested in how people learn, and what powerful, interactive e-learning can look like, you'll find her blog completely addicting.  She offers some basic, simple tools for corporate instructional design that seem so intuitive and non-painful (and heck, maybe even empowering!) for the learner that I can't believe that's not how all elearning is done.

One post, however, is one of those ideas that starts out rolling around in my brain, gathering weight and heft like a snowball as time goes on.  It's the idea of productive failure.  Check out her post about it here.

Here's the basics: the traditional idea of scaffolding education says: structure your teaching in an "I do, we do, you do" fashion -