For CHI 2012: Discussion Forums in the Document Margins
Would you like some feedback on your CHI paper? We’ve set up a site to let people read and comment on it.
On Wednesday at CHI, we’ll be presenting our paper on nb, a discussion forum situated in the margins of documents being discussed. Its original intended usage was for discussion of classroom lecture notes, but we have discovered through our reading group that it is also quite useful for reading, commenting on and discussing research papers. With this in mind, we’re making nb available to the CHI 21012 conference community.
We’ve created a folder on nb for CHI papers; there, you can read and annotate/discuss papers that have been uploaded by their authors. There are currently 4 CHI papers there. The first, of course, is our own paper on nb. We’d love your comments, especially if they arrive before we present on Wednesday morning! If you want to read and discuss, you just register on the site. If you want to make your paper available for comments, please email your paper to sacha@mit.edu and he’ll upload it (yes, this is clunky—the system is currently designed for a faculty member who is uploading their course content, without means for “mere participants” to do the same). I’d like to suggest, since you are seeking comments on your paper, that you “pay it forward”—read and comment on one of the papers already there to balance the hope that someone will then do the same for you.
The paper itself is focused on classroom deployment. Nb has been used in about 60 classes at 5 universites, with several faculty choosing to use it repeatedly. We study a particular successful use of the tool, in a class at MIT where it acquired over 14,000 comments from 100 students. Using both quantitative and interview data, we explain why situating discussions in the margins can work better than the typical separate-forum approach.
If you’re teaching a class, we’d love to help you use nb for it. Contact us!