Enhance Your Learning with Hypothesis: An Interactive Social Reading Experience

Part 1: Hypothesis

Our social reading tool, Hypothesis, allows you to engage in active discussion with peers directly on the page of your course text! Expressing your thoughts to others in this way, and seeing alternative viewpoints in return, will help to deepen your learning on a subject.

At school or university, you may have found yourself scribbling in the margin of a textbook to highlight key areas or note down questions to address later on. This has always been an important technique for active reading and making sense of a text. Hypothesis takes this idea and improves on it by allowing you to do this collaboratively with your peers and your tutor.

Using Hypothesis, you can highlight specific areas of a text and leave comments or questions, which others then respond to, resulting in an online discussion contained within a document. Instead of passively reading a text on your own, and perhaps feeling that you are the only one that doesn’t understand something, you can connect with others to create a shared understanding together and talk about the areas that matter to you. It’s a great way to open your eyes to different ideas and viewpoints that you may never have considered on your own, and have your own thinking challenged. You can even add formatting, links to further reading and images to take the discussion to the next level.

So how can you get the most out of this tool? Like any new tool, practice makes perfect and you will develop your skills as you use it. But you may find some of the following tips useful:

• Be specific about what you annotate – only highlight the area you want to focus on rather than a whole paragraph

• Make sure your comment or question adds something to the discussion

• Use links to reference a source, suggest further reading or show associations between this text and others within the course

• Add images to bring your comment to life and break up the text (but be sure to attribute the creator)

• Don’t just leave a comment and move on, revisit the document to continue the discussion and respond to others’ comments (there is no point in having a conversation with yourself!)

For more tips on how to get the best out of this tool, take a look at these guidelines(Opens in a new window) from the Hypothesis team.

Explore our range of online courses led by University of Cambridge academics, and learn from thought leaders at the forefront of academic research. Visit our website for more information: advanceonline.cam.ac.uk(Opens in a new window).