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.