Published: Mon 09 December 2019
By Filipa Calado
In failures .
Yesterday I submitted my final paper for the ITP (Interactive
Technology and Pedagogy) certificate program. I started working on
this project in the spring of 2018, when I theorized the purpose of
building and using a (digital) multi-color highlighter to teach
close-reading.
Since then, I've built the highlighter (see my detailed development
notes )
and spent a lot more time thinking and writing about how color and
nonverbal methods can help teach critical reading and writing. I've
been interested in critiquing Educational Technology (EdTech) tools,
which track and quantify student performance in ways that automate and
standardize learning. I wonder how we can build tools that refuse to
follow these trends of data collection. In the paper, I use the
multi-color highlighter to bring edtech into conversation with
neuroscience, exploring how digital annotation engages embodied
reading practices that subvert edtech's attempts to measure and
quantify student reading.
The paper, as it stands, has some work to do. First, I need to tie
these threads of EdTech and neuroscience more firmly together. I also
need to smooth out the interweaving of my tool's development (linked
above) to the body of the paper. The goal with inserting the dev notes
throughout the paper is to make my coding work more visible, signaling
to the nontechnical reader some of the confusions and suspensions of
knowledge necessary for this kind of labor, that occur regardless of
technical proficiency. That's a lot of work to do already, but the
most important task is to finally use this tool in a classroom,
allowing my students to play around with it and inspire further
developments.
This is the big obstacle. I cannot use the tool in a classroom until I
get some kind of server authentication for storing and retrieving
annotations. I had a meeting last week with the Hypothes.is
team, and they cannot support the data model of multi-color
annotations, which is understandable. I'm meeting with another of
their developers next week, individually, and I think he can help me
at least to understand the server-side of things so I can potentially
make my own database to store annotations. We will see.
The more I think about this, however, the more I wish that I had
chosen something less complicated than Hypothes.is to work with. This
tool is much too complex for my purposes, as I'm not interested in
tagging, or even commenting at all. I only need a minimal
highlighter ,
a bare-bones highlighter. This kind of tool (I think) would
short-circuit the attempts to track and quantify student performance.