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4CD Hypothesis Pilot - Spring 2020

Diablo Valley College,

Pleasant Hill/San Ramon

Contra Costa College, San Pablo

Los Medanos College,

Pittsburg/Brentwood

Kat King

kking@dvc.edu

Instructional Technologist, DVC

English Instructor, Las Positas College

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Why are students struggling with reading?

Too busy?

Too distracted?

Too unprepared?

Too apathetic?

It’s CA AB-705!

Is it me?

“On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4th-graders was 45 percent. For 8th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42 percent...These dry statistics translate into greater struggles in high school, lower college attendance and graduation rates, a higher likelihood of incarceration, and generally bleaker futures.”

pilot = positive outcomes

digital annotation allowed for scaffolding and at-home support
image, video, and audio annotations helped students struggling with text-heavy learning
social annotation led to an increased sense of community

And then...

#ZoomFatigue

Photo from nadia/snopek Adobe Stock

Reddit post by zeHerrDanIII

asynchronous dialogue among authors, instructor, and students

nimble way to promote active learning and digital literacy

Big struggle during shutdown was student engagement - instructors largely dislike lecturing to a sea of black Zoom tiles with students passively listening (or not) to a lecture. Because Hypothesis makes it so easy to link out, you can flip the script and have students actively contribute to their learning by bringing in their own source material.
Instead of fighting the fact that we all wanted to be glued to our phones and social media during the crisis, Hypothesis helps turn social media into a learning experience. I asked students to bring in tweets, memes, and news posts to analyze how the virus was covered differently based on political ideology and discuss why that mattered.
Our instructional librarian, Emily Moss, uses Hypothesis to promote digital literacy - students collaboratively work to understand how to evaluate material on the open web beyond the “CRAPP test” that doesn’t take into account that there is a lot of important work happening in unexpected places - like Twitter - and that these open sources can often be more representative of diverse voices than literary journals behind an academic paywall