(2015-05-27) Hypothesis For Education

HypothesIs has hired Jeremy Dean to focus on the Ed Tech opportunities for Annotation.

I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation when Diigo was introduced at a meeting of the Digital Writing and Research Lab, of which I was a member during my graduate studies at UT-Austin. As a paper kind of guy, I couldn’t see myself using many of the innovative technological tools introduced to us in the DWRL–like teaching composition using Second Life–but collaborative annotation made a certain kind of sense: a simple extension of class discussion (Discussion Forum), where I urged my students to ground their arguments in textual evidence, as homework. Diigo was clunky but it nonetheless transformed our readings from objects of study into spaces to inhabit. Conversations that started there fed our face-to-face conversations and in turn continued online.

As a non-profit dedicated to Open Standards, I think we are poised at hypothes.is to bring annotation to scale in the education space.

And I’ll be working to ship annotation along with the Content and Learning Management Systems (CMS/LMS) used by so many teachers today as well.

Currently my top three product priorities are: private groups, enhanced notifications, and profile pages. *