A few weeks ago, I had a good experience using a new educational-technology tool. I also had a bad experience using a new educational-technology tool. Actually, they were the same experience and the same tool.
Anybody who has spent any time experimenting with educational-technology knows exactly why that is not a contradiction in terms.
The tool in question was the online annotating program Hypothes.is. Most historians I’ve heard talk about Hypothes.is seem to use it only as a way for students to annotate primary sources, but I had my students use it as a means to critique each other’s papers. First I asked students to post their research paper prospectus on a blog or on Scalar (another really interesting educational technology that I’ve been using). I set up a common Scalar page to serve as the class syllabus, and put links on it to all the students’ papers. They each had five prospectuses to read and comment on over the course of a single class period.
