Workshop Idea 2: Students, OER, and Reading Online

Reading and Annotating Online -- Mindful OER Engagement

Description
Online delivery makes the growth of OER possible. And while there are often options for low cost print on demand for OER texts, as OER grows more sophisticated and Web native, those print options will be less attractive. More students will be reading from and with devices. Reading in this new context means not just text, but studying from videos and learning animations, working in Web-based math labs and science labs, students visiting on their own sites such as Kahn Academy and Purdue OWL, taking courses that use open adaptive learning technologies and content print cannot replicate.

This workshop focuses on strategies for note taking and study using digital tools when learning in digital settings. It will help not only students using OER, but also students working in other digital settings such as publisher textbooks sites, Moodle classrooms where teachers post notes, PDFs, and links, library data bases, and more.

Students will practice, during the workshop, online note taking and text annotation techniques.


Goals and Outcomes

1. Students will learn a bit about what science has shown about reading, reading online, note-taking versus highlighting, and practice.
2. Students will explore and reflect on their current strategies for mindful reading both online and in print.
3. Students will practice both private and communal annotation strategies on their choice of a text, audio, video source, learning animation, or learning engagement source.
4. Based on the annotation experiments, students will craft a mindful reading plan for their next reading assignment. They will complete the workshop by logging back in the Moodle space, or submitting by email, a reading reflection where they both show their annotations and discuss why they made them for, ideally, an OER text used in one of their courses.

Materials

Student experience
A digital OER source assigned in a course, a digital OER supplement a student choose to use in a course on their own.

Workshop Technology
If available, computer networked classroom with projector
If available, Moodle coursespace for OER workshops

Pen and paper/ whiteboard / projector and instructor computer in a pinch


Agenda — 50 minute base version, assuming a context of fitting this in during class periods

10 minutes
Welcome and opening writing prompt

Play an excerpt  from “How to Take notes From Textbooks // 12 Tips for Note-Taking!,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_a8NNiAOKg

After the excerpt, which focuses on a student working in pen and paper with a print book, students will write on this question: Based on the video and your experience, what is annotation and note taking to you?

10 minute discussion:  As a group, we will develop a definition of annotation that includes reasons why it is effective in learning and careful reading. Students will skim reading assignment directions from a course they're in to look at key verbs that can help guide how they would annotate.

15 mintues
Annotating  online. In a networked classroom, students will be asked to group annotate a shared text. Depending upon the technology, it could be a common text from an OER source if students are assigned it, or a supplemental text. If the text does not afford shared notes (say as Medium does, or Google Docs can), then we’ll use a strategy of shared notes in a discussion board or other electronic commons.

15 minutes
Closing discussion.  Students will compare the experience of communal annotation to what they know of their own experiences privately annotating. Simultaneously during discussion, each student will be asked to sketch out, via notes to themselves on the discussion, their own strategies for annotating their next reading assignment.

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Longer versions.  A T-Th version would give students a chance to apply an annotation to a text they're assigned to engage; that experiment would be brought into a closing discussion.

A companion workshop for faculty would look at assigning and assessing group annotation projects -- essentially a form of virtual study groups.