SHRIMP

Academic reading often presents students with challenges. It goes beyond simply understanding the content of a text and involves, in addition to critical thinking, the extraction and contextualization of relevant information.

SHRIMP helps students learn and practice academic reading and better engage with scientific texts. The tool implements scientific reading techniques in a digital environment and enables collaborative learning.

You can log in using your university credentials via this link and use SHRIMP directly. Please click on "Login via your university" and select "Georg-August-Universität Göttingen". In SHRIMP, you can be granted access to create Pods (reading/learning units).

What is SHRIMP and how can I use it?

SHRIMP is a tool particularly suited for collaborative work with academic texts. It adds an interactive layer to digital reading and transfers the core techniques of critical engagement—annotating, commenting, discussing, and linking—into the digital space, enabling collaborative learning.

These techniques are especially important for working with texts in the humanities and social sciences and are implemented as follows:

• Annotating: Texts can be annotated with private notes. The annotated text passages and associated comments are visible only to the individual user and are not shared with other users.
• Commenting: Comments are publicly visible; this allows for asking comprehension questions, linking additional information, or creating learning paths.
• Discussing: Students can collaboratively work on texts, exchange ideas about specific passages, and engage in discussion with one another.
• Linking: Text passages can be tagged with keywords. This allows them to be connected with broader concepts or key ideas. Texts become structured, and recurring concepts across different texts become visible.

Possible Use Cases

Collaborative Reading
To prepare for a session, students can read the text and exchange with each other. By sharing their knowledge with fellow learners, comprehension questions can be clarified and technical terms explained in advance.

Text Work
For preparation and follow-up of a session, instructors can use the commenting function to assign text tasks (reading questions) that students complete independently. The responses of others remain hidden until the student has answered the question themselves.