Uses of a private “virtual margin” on public threaded discussions: An exploratory lab-based study

Threaded discussion environments are commonly used to support educational dialogue; however their interfaces do not directly support the private work that students do to interpret and prepare responses to public postings. We examine the use of a private “virtual margin” added to an existing threaded discussion environment via a proxy server architecture. This margin area provided users with their own private writing space adjacent to the public space, allowing persistent annotations both on individual posts and indexes to posts. Unprompted uses of the system were examined in an exploratory lab-based study. Four graduate students completed an assignment designed to be authentic to typical course work, in which they reviewed a set of posts made by other students and developed at least one new post that would contribute to the group’s understanding of the course material. We discuss the unprompted uses made of the virtual margin during participants’ completion of this task, and discuss what these uses suggest about the potential for private marginalia to contribute to students’ learning via public threaded discussions.