While I have been aware of hypothes.is and its potential in education for crowd-sourcing global notes on an online document, I hadn’t had the opportunity to participate in a ‘live’ note taking session before. And this week I had my first experience! Spoiler alert: I Ioved it.
I felt quite nervous and vulnerable since I was participating remotely and I didn’t know any of the other contributors. I felt vulnerable because I was about to submit some quite irrational and immediate responses to a document and there were real people reading them. But putting all that aside, I read the Copenhagen Letter as part of Maha Bali’s class and contributed my notes.
The document is a sort of open letter to corporations and invites signatures of those who stand in solidarity with its views. I personally found it a very provocative piece. It reminds me about privilege and access – it is in English and it demands knowledge of contemporary issues of information technology.
Later on in the day I returned to the letter to view the other comments that had been made and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. Certain terms and phrases drew lots of attention. Some of the contributors shared similar viewpoints. Some provided links to other sources of information. Suddenly a simple webpage has become a rich source of shared knowledge and experience.
With hypothes.is, this document really has come alive.
