Introduction
As a language
teacher working in a fairly fast-paced prep school, I often found myself
searching for tech tools in the interstitial moments between classes, after
finishing a big stack of grading, or over my morning coffee before I had decided
what I was going to do with my lesson plans for the day. In other words, my
initial search wasn’t exactly thorough. During that time, I found and
implemented a number of tech tools to great effect – more than one student
remarked to me unsolicited that I was the teacher at the school who most
effectively used tech. But, of all the heavy lifting that I was able to
delegate to technology one type of task dogged me: creating hypertext glosses.
I had read about the efficacy of hypertext glosses in a growing body of
literature (covered below), but none of the software or web tools available
seemed to get it right. My Microsoft Office suite was useless, the tech
mentioned in the journal articles had remained on the university computers it
was tested on, and even when I could get a hold of permission to use some of
these experimental programs they didn’t work correctly. I re-entered graduate
school believing that someone was going to make a lot of money by developing a
working hypertext gloss and sweeping the market.
Now that I’ve had
time to dig deeper on this issue, broadened my perspective on Tech and SLA, and
changed a few of my search keywords, I now realize that “sweeping the market”
probably isn’t as easy as it seemed to me. A number of tools do exist and many more of them are
publicly available. To fill my knowledge gap, I have tested ten good candidates
for hypertext glossing, spending about 45 minutes to an hour with each. Using
my own feature wishlist as a guide, I tried to get these tools to perform tasks
that I knew I would want them to be able to do in my own classroom, creating
teacher and student accounts with different email addresses. I solicited
feedback from my classmates using a short open-ended survey about what they
would like to see in hypertext glosses and added the novel responses to my own
feature wishlist. The end result was a chart with ten tools tested for eighteen
important criteria. Where all the tools had the same feature or feature
deficit, I removed the criterion from the list. My ultimate goal is to help
teachers make an informed decision about which tool to use from among what is
practically available to them, not to gripe about tech that doesn’t exist yet.
With
this preliminary work complete, I have prepared a qualitative description of
each of the ten tools I tested. The learning task for which I want to prepare
is the cultivation of an active L2 reading group within about a week of
preliminary setup and familiarization, followed a full quarter of active L2
reading using hypertext glosses. The students I have in mind are intermediate
to advanced L2 students (B2-C1) in either secondary school or higher education.
The examination of existing tools is crucial not because it will allow us to
choose the “best” tool – though some tools clearly outperform others on similar
measures – but because our choice of gloss will have an impact on the kind of
community of readers that we create.
Research on L2
reading in the field of computer-assisted language learning provides us with
some important goals and signposts. According to Chun and Grace (1998) for
intermediate and advanced learners, we should provide L2 glosses. While
students tend to prefer textual glosses exclusively, textual and visual glosses
improve comprehension and recall (Lomicka, 1998), so we should favor tools that
facilitate the use of multimedia. Including traditional activities along with
reading helps to activate prior knowledge and improve reading comprehension,
which suggests that tools that include activities such as reading questions are
also desirable.
The criteria on which I have tested the tools on the list can be grouped into the general categories of ease of use, accessibility, and gloss capabilities. You can download the full-sized version here.
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Tools
Ponder
The first tool on
my list of for analysis was Ponder, a social reading platform with a lot to
offer teachers looking for quick feedback. It’s clear that this product was
created with classroom use in mind, though probably not SLA. What Ponder lacks
in depth it gains in speed and integration. Using the Ponder browser plug-in,
you can annotate any text on the web and ask students to categorize parts of
the text into predefined groups. Creating annotations is as simple as
highlighting the text and clicking the purple “P” that pops up next to the
highlighted portion. From there, you’ll be prompted to click a quick response
(these are available in English, Gaelic, Arabic, and Spanish), type in a custom
comment, or categorize the highlighted portion as an instance of a predefined
group. For instance, I created a category called “Verbs” that prompts the
student to categorize highlighted portions as an instance of any number of
tenses, modes, and aspects, e.g. (“je marchais” - past, indicative, imperfect).
Ideally, I’d like
to be able to turn off the reaction buttons or at least be able to edit them
into a form I like beter – I’d like my students to get more out of the text
than “Awesome!” and “Really?”. On the technical side, the minimalist settings
menu might keep students from fiddling too much with the plug-in, but it also
keeps me from figuring out why it isn’t working. Sometimes, I highlight text
and the “P” fails to appear, meaning that glossing ability is suddenly just...
gone. Ultimately, by handing more control over button text to instructors, this
tool could become even more powerful.
Hypothes.is
Originally
designed for purposes other than classroom, Hypothes.is offers us the
much-needed capability to create a mark-up of any webpage on the internet,
engaging in discussions with those who have also downloaded the Hypothes.is
browser plug-in. During my initial investigations, I discovered that the
Hypothes.is community seems primarily interested in science and politics,
rather than glossing L2 texts. Aside from the superficial question of what
everyone on Hypothes.is is talking about, emerges the very real issue of who
can see what my students are talking about, which in the case of Hypothes.is,
is everyone on the internet. To underscore this fact, Hypothes.is even placed a
little warning text underneath the comment
button which reads “Annotations can be freely used by anyone for any purpose.”
As someone who works with minors and frequently asks them to write their
intimate thoughts on some of the most controversial issues of the day, the
possibility of one of my students getting quoted out of context makes me more
than a little uneasy.
Beyond this
concern for “reasonable” efforts to protect the privacy of my students, I find
Hypothes.is very straightforward. Without the bells and whistles of some of the
other products I tested, Hypothes.is has a fairly gentle learning curve:
install the plug-in, highlight a work, and click the little pen that pops up.
Once the feed has been started, it’s a snap to respond to someone else looking
at the same page, making discussions the strong suite of Hypothes.is. For an
advanced, discussion-based SLA class of students with their own laptops,
Hypothes.is could be the way to go, especially if you aren’t very interested in
keeping track of whether everyone reads or contributes.
eComma
In a word, tools
like eComma break my heart. Here we have a wonderful and innovative gloss tool
with almost everything most SLA teachers could want, and yet, you’ll probably
have to bake a cake for the entire IT department at your school or university
to get them to help you set it up. eComma relies on the Drupal server system
and on local tech support personnel who 1) know how to use it, and 2) can
devote time to setting it up and maintaining yet another server module
specifically for you.
As if this weren’t
enough, however, in terms of desirable features for SLA – features which have
been shown to aid comprehension – eComma is also a little behind the curve
without multimedia support. Besides Tiara, eComma is the only other tool I
tested that was specifically designed for L2 learning, which is shame
considering its aloofness.
Kindle
Notes
In an effort to be
inclusive of what is perhaps the most widely available digital annotation tool
in the world, I have included Kindle Notes on my list. Initially, there was
quite a bit of excitement about Amazon’s decision to move Kindle annotations
from the private sphere to their public website. Bloggers raved about the
possibility of, say, reading George Bush’s memoirs annotated by Donald
Rumsfeld. However, the actual implementation of the public notes feature was so
under-publicized and sloppy, however, that today very few people know that they
can publish notes for the whole world to see. Thus, much like Hypothes.is, Kindle
Notes is an all-or-nothing annotation solution that doesn’t leave us much room
to negotiate the privacy of students.
Unhappily for
Amazon, the problems with using Public Notes in the classroom don’t stop there.
As Ruth
Franklin points out “In order to view Public Notes, according to Amazon’s FAQ, you have to
be using the latest Kindle model, running the most recent version of the
software.” The tool itself remains clunky and resistant to improvement, even
when Amazon doesn’t have to do it themselves. When another service, Findings,
created a plug-in that turned off the conservative sharing settings on the
Kindle to allow users to quickly make all their annotations public, Amazon
promptly had
them served with a don’t-make-us-sue-you-cease-and-desist. No doubt
frightened by the rumblings of the litigious giant, Findings ended up
discontinuing its service and moved on to a new product, Instapaper, which has no Amazon sync.
Ultimately, Kindle Notes fails as a classroom tool, but probably also as a tool
in general. I predict that it won’t be around for very much longer.
Tiara
Like eComma, Tiara
is the fruit of academic, rather than private-sector edtech, labor, and it
actually designed for L2 annotations. Unlike eComma, Tiara works in your
browser with no server setup required. Unique on my list, Tiara is the only
tool I test at that is totally teacher-centered: students cannot gloss texts or
comment on them. While many of the features of Tiara, such as its multimedia support,
put it above some of the other offerings I tested, the website in which it is
embedded is, to put it politely… a time capsule. The first time I tried to
gloss a text with Tiara, I quit halfway through the process out of frustration
with the clunky interface. With a little love, and probably a lot more grant
money, Tiara has the potential to become a useable classroom tool. In its
present condition, however, it will positively frighten your millennial
students.
Genius.com
Perhaps the tool
on this listed with the most unexpected origins, Genius.com caught me off guard
with its ease of use and the obvious dedication of its user-base, a force not
to be underestimated in the world of edtech. Genius.com began as Rapgenius.com,
a forum for rap fans to annotate their favorite lyrics. Quickly, the need for
those with first-hand knowledge of the meaning of the lyrics – including the
artists themselves in some cases – generated the need for a system that gave
greater privileges to those with savoir-faire. Rapgenius answered with a
comment-karma and upvote system not unlike that of Reddit, and soon the
annotation system had evolved into something that teachers wanted to use:
Genius.com was born. While still in the early phases of its development as an
educational tool, Genius.com gets a lot of basic annotation features exactly
right. And who knows – telling its origin-story might even be enough to draw in
a few students.
Subtext
An
iPad-only solution, Subtext certainly knows its market. After many months of
offering free service, the company has announced that it will be moving from
freemium to “premium only” at the cost of $3 a student. If your school happens
to have iPads and wants to increase the cost of instruction for some reason,
perhaps Subtext is the right tool. Subtext looks very nice on the iPad, and
provides an attractive reading experience that many of the browser-only
alternatives do not. Perhaps the most interesting feature was the ability to
browse websites in the app and then convert them automatically into a
distraction-free book format. For all its expensive features, however, Subtext
also misses the mark on embedded media and ease of use.
eMargin
As
if seeking to prove the adage that “less is more” eMargin is designed to please
those students who want essential information – by which students typically
mean just text – quickly and without any hiccups. Compared to the browser
plug-ins Ponder and Hypothes.is, eMargin manages to hold together a more stable
interface without downloading anything on your computer. Just as slower
page-load times on eCommerce have been directly correlated with fewer sales, I
suspect that the student use of a web-based hypertext gloss may be negatively
impacted by slower load times for repetitive operations. If you think your
students will agree – eMargin might get you to trade multimedia capacity for
stability and speed.
Google
Docs
For the same
reason that I addressed Kindle Notes, I think its important to talk about the
feasibility of using Google Docs for hypertext glosses. Students and faculty
are generally already familiar with the format, and the comment system allows
for extensive, albeit crowded, annotations.
Many of what I
believed to be limitations of Google Docs, upon closer examination turned out
not to be non-existant. To start, there is indeed a way to add voice
recordings to a Google Doc. Likewise, if you need a downloaded record of
annotations, you can download Google Docs as Word documents with the comments
as part of the markup layer. From there, you can print or save the documents.
Alternatively, you can download a Google Doc as an HTML file to get the gloss
as footnotes. However, comments are anonymized in both these processes.
The
main drawbacks of Google Docs were not things I could find a concise way to
note in my feature wishlist: first, when multimedia content is embedded in the
document, it shifts the text around it, and second, it is possible for students
to “resolve” and thus dismiss each others’ comments, on purpose or
accidentally. While the latter issue can be resolved by tracking through the
document revision history, Google Docs is unique in that it is the only tool I
studied which could potentially allow one participant in a discussion to
silence another.
Curriculet
The strength of Curriculet is its built-in reader accountability mechanisms. Put another way,
Curriculet operates on a paradigm that is entirely different from the other tools
on this list, in that it allows teachers to ask direct questions and get
responses from students. Student annotations are always private, however, so
teachers looking to get an idea of the thought processes of their students will
have to do it the old-fashioned way – by asking. In keeping with what I believe
to be sound pedagogy, I personal prefer Curriculet’s feedback-centered model to
the more inert annotation model of most of the tools on this list. Whereas with
many of the other gloss tools listed here, I would simply assign a holistic
grade to students who “sufficiently” glossed a text – and it would still be
unclear what to do with the student who glossed last and had nothing to say –
with Curriculet I can make sure that I get a built-in homework assignment out
of the reading. Further, Curriculet’s data analytics mean that I can transfer
this information directly into grades or simply into a diagnostic to guide my
lessons. While Curriculet is not as stable or as fast as eMargin or as easy to
use as Google Docs, it is the clear winner in terms of a hypertext gloss tool
with the vast majority of features that I want as a teacher.
Conclusion
Given the variety
and complexity of some of these tools, a reasonable question remains: is this
worth it? Do these tools really outperform paper and pencil solutions to
annotation? Why shouldn’t I simply gloss a text in Microsoft Word using the
comments utility and then print the marginal notes? The much-maligned office
copier has its faults, but it hasn’t ever deleted student work or forced me to
call IT in the middle of an activity on Jules Verne. I believe that a quick
summary look at the tools I’ve just described can give us a direct and
irrefutable answer: these tools are worth it not just because they still have
that brand-new smell – paper straight from an a copier smells pretty good too,
if you ask some people. These tools are worth the trouble it takes to learn
about them because hypertext glosses are an evidence-based improvement to L2
reading. Let’s review how they accomplish this: first, they provide more and
different layers of information than a paper gloss; second, they can be hidden
in order to minimize distractions; and third, they can be easily edited by the
instructor in order to reflect revisions or to adapt to the needs and
proclivities of different groups of students. While some of the tools we looked
at grant us more affordances, these three are commonly shared by all hypertext
glosses.
I hope that this
final project is of practical help to instructors seeking to create a community
of L2 readers as well of theoretical interest to those intrigued by the
purposes and affordances of this exciting – albeit belated – technology.
