Company Information & History

Founded: 2000

Founder: Dan Doernberg, former Founder (1983) and Chairman of Computer Literacy Bookshops, Inc., for many years the world's largest chain of computer and electronics specialty bookstores. The company, based in Silicon Valley, was sold in 1997 and went public 18 months later. Co-founder of Peer-to-Peer Communications LLC, a publisher of computer history books. BA degree from Duke University.

Organizational Structure: Fairness.com is legally an LLC but run as a self-funded public interest organization. Our only revenues are at-cost charges for work done to add requested features (e.g. for the University of Virginia, educational R&D firms, and individual school districts).

History: Work began July 2008 on a prototype called CriTweak (Critique and Tweak) with grassroots political uses in mind. The initial application was built around a searchable Fairness.com online archive of all the public speeches, position papers, and debate transcripts from candidates Obama and McCain. The software took longer than expected to write and we finished just before the election (see this PC Magazine article), too late to have any impact.

An academic committee at the University of Virginia heard about NowComment's and saw its pedagogical and collaborative potential. After a successful pilot Spring 2009, UVA integrated it into its Sakai Learning Management System (LMS), and NowComment has been a core teaching tool supported by the university ever since. Other early adopting instructors were at CUNY, Davidson College, Duke University, Emory University, Ithaca College, Lewis University, University of Central Florida, and the University of Wisconsin.

It should be noted that NowComment has no customizations specific to education (i.e. nothing in it about courses, students, or teachers); it's a general purpose tool that can be used “out-of-the-box” by any group for essentially any application involving groups of people wanting to discuss and analyze texts, images, and/or videos together.

EdTech Bloggers on NowComment

“What makes [NowComment] so useful to teachers is that it allows for others to not only add comments on the image, but also permits threaded discussion of the comments as well. Inside of NowComment further references like documents and web links can be appended for deeper reading...There are lots of features that you don't have to use until you need them so don't get put off by the apparent complexity. It is not hard to use... It is free. Frankly, that astonishes me.”
— Terry Elliott, Impedagogy

“Unleash the power of introverts and host vivid discussions using NowComment, a free and easy-to-use online discussion tool with a wealth of features!...Yes, there are many other tools available for collaborating and discussing texts online (hello, Google!), but NowComment is particularly useful for moderating and organizing online discussions.”
— Rebecca Bogard, Differentitech

“NowComment, my new fav provides a cross-platform tool for encouraging online conversations centered on a specific document, image, or other piece of evidence....Google Docs can do this sort of thing but NowComment provides a ton of features that aren't available with Google. It's specifically designed to encourage conversation. I especially like the ability to tag comments, sort comments, and because NowComment is web-based, I can use it full featured on tablets and iPads....This seems like a powerful tool for encouraging document analysis.”
— Glenn Wiebe, History Tech

Sample Uses

Higher Education

• University of Virginia — UVA was piloted our prototype in 2008 and since then instructors have used it regularly in courses ranging from Old Testament to BioMedical Engineering. Its Education School's “Teaching with Technology” course uses NowComment both as an instructional tool and as a model of online discussion “best practices”.
• Hunter College — Roberta Kilkenny has used it the past four years in her Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies courses.
• Baruch College — Biographer Carl Rollyson uses NowComment for intensive 1:1 interaction with students in his online-only courses. He chooses to make his course documents public so his journalism students become accustomed to their writing being public. Sample: discussion of a Sylvia Plath / Ted Hughes love triangle.
• College of William and Mary — Used in the Japanese language department (NowComment accurately renders foreign character sets, diacritical marks, and mathematical symbols).

K12 Education

• Fremont High School (Oakland, CA) — Students in Johanna Paraiso's English class enthusiastically engaged in their initial NowComment experience, making almost 800 comments on a 2200-word short story.
• Reading Central Elementary School (Reading, OH) — Julia Rumpke uses NowComment a few times a year with her 2nd graders.
• American School Foundation of Guadalajara — Andrew Plonka used it for weekly English language practice for his AP English< students.
• Loma Linda Academy (Loma Linda, CA) — History teacher Bettesue Constanzo gives her high school students current events articles to discuss every Monday.
• New Directions Middle School (Bronx, NY) — Paul Allison (NYC tech liaison for the National Writing Project) uses NowComment's 2-field comment design to have his students practice dialectual note taking.
• WestEd (educational R&D non-profit, $140M annual budget) — used NowComment for a very successful 6-month professional development course on Assessment for 2000 educators.

Last updated August 25, 2016

NowComment is a project of Fairness.com LLC, PO Box 6970, Charlottesville, VA 22906-6970