Using Marginalia

What is it: Marginalia is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text, write margin notes, and quote text. The Moodle version adds annotation to Moodle discussion forums. These features work much as would underlining and marginalia in a book, but unlike a book, they can be searched and used to group related material of special interest. Marginalia also includes a feature that makes it easy to identify the source of remarks copied and pasted from comments in the forum. When you drop a quotation into your own comment, its author and a link back to the original source is added automatically.

How to use Marginalia: Here is the link to the screencasts of Marginalia which shows how it works.

Why use Marginalia: Marginalia is useful in any context where the archive of comments is a resource for the future. In such contexts, users will want to have a record of their reactions and go back and reread the most important passages on selected topics. Marginalia is especially useful for the writing of summary comments that cover a wide range of comments and topics. These so-called “weaving comments” are difficult and time consuming to write. It is helpful to be able to use the computer’s capabilities to capture immediate reactions, to quickly identify and group significant passages by topic, and to quote with attribution.

Pedagogical considerations: Marginalia was designed to make it easier for teachers to participate in and for their students to learn from online discussions. Teachers can make a big difference in the quality of the discussion by introducing concepts from their disciplinary tradition in the course of commenting on students’ contributions. This pedagogical technique establishes a close connection between students’ reports of their own ideas and experiences and aspects of the course content that may be too unfamiliar, difficult or abstract for students themselves to introduce it in their comments. It is encouraging for students to see the teacher mention their contributions and helps to maintain a good flow of discussion, while also keeping the discussion on track. Active participation by the teacher is a pedagogically valid use of the Web for education. Marginalia is there to support this pedagogy. In addition, Marginalia can be used by students to organize the review of material in the online discussion archive and to write weaving comments as assignments, a good learning experience.

The Research: The purpose of the research we are conducting on Marginalia is to discover whether it is really useful for our preferred pedagogy, described in the preceding paragraph. We expect teachers who agree to test Marginalia to try it out for this type of online discussion, explaining it to the students and modeling its use for them. We will provide an opportunity for teachers to play with the software before introducing it to their class.