Testimonials
...U.Va. faculty members are helping public interest organization Fairness.com to test and develop NowComment, a web-based tool that allows dozens of students to comment on individual sentences in a text, which can help the professor then generate more in-depth discussion during class time.
University of Virginia President's Report 2009-10 (January 2011)
http://www.virginia.edu/president/report10/
"For the last three months, subgroups of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars from the International Society for Scriptural Reasoning (SSR) have used NowComment to study one another's sacred literature. NowComment has given us a new capacity to share scriptural commentary and analysis with one another in the cyberspace equivalent of a face-to-face discussion. The results have been very exciting and productive."
Professor Peter Ochs (UVA)
co-founder, Society for Scriptural Reasoning
NowComment worked well to help the students in my Italian literature survey course prepare for discussion of assigned texts in Italian. I had the students enter comments into NowComment [in Italian] before class; even without specific instructions the students naturally responded to one another's comments as they made their own. This online social interaction primed them very effectively for in-class interaction. I also projected the NowComment webpage during class discussion so the students could see the text integrated with everyone's comments. NowComment worked reliably, and the students didn't need any training to use it.
Jessica Otey (Duke University)
Italian 113: Introduction to Italian Literature III
"The software was excellent. The quality and quantity of the student's comments on the speech were outstanding, much better than I expected; their ability to see and respond to each others' comments in context was the best part. They were very enthusiastic about the software."
Prof. Brian Balogh (UVA)
Policy History: Tradition and Legacy (PPOL 701)
"as a professor teaching 100+ students, it gave me a sense [of] student understanding and personalities that I would never had otherwise obtained, and as a consequence, I feel like I know my students better and can teach them better."
Professor Jennifer Burns (UVA)
Intellectual History of the United States from 1865 (HIUS 358)
"I used NowComment software in my British Romanticism class and was gratified to see how easy it was to use. My students were all able to add comments and questions to a common text (in our case, Mary Shelley's introduction to her novel, Frankenstein), producing a whole range of interesting interpretations and points of departure for the class discussion that followed. The students were overwhelmingly impressed by the NowComment interface, and remarked on its ease of use and the ways in which the exercise elicited more thoughtful conversation. Students too shy to participate in class discussion were particularly enthusiastic about the venue that the NowComment exercise provided for their contributions. I plan to use NowComment in future classes as a welcome supplement to our other modes for the group analysis of texts."
Professor Andrew Stauffer (UVA)
Director, NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship)
Romanticism (ENNC 311)