👋 Hi there, welcome to The Learning Dispatch! Twice a month, we explore creative formats from the world of learning. Created by TeamLogiQ.
One of the most influential readings I did in college was a paper that a Professor shared with me in Business School. Even now, many years later, I keep examining my work under that paper’s lens and I keep recommending it whenever I can. Besides the content, there was one interesting feature about this particular paper: its notes on the margins.
'JBI. Please read this + then see me. First good paper I've seen.'
'Typical horsesh!t... the world in four boxes.' (in reference to a 4x4 graph…)
'P/S Ratio. Buy low, sell high...'
'Entrepreneurs begin with three categories of means. One is true self-esteem...'
These notes made me think of reading and writing as a conversation, an active rather than a passive skill.
Those handwritten scribbles that have existed ever since printed books have existed, called marginalia, is the format we’re exploring today.
📰 What’s the format?
Marginalia: fragments of thought that appear scribbled in the margins of books.
In medieval literary circles, annotations played a key role in how knowledge was shared. Back then, readers often filled the margins around the text of manuscripts with their own notes. These scribbles provided a space to discuss, critique, and absorb insights from previous readers' annotations. However, as print technology emerged, the nature of annotations shifted.
Contemporary marginalia: Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather Notebook”
Nowadays, most readers own their personal copies of books, and the notes they jot down typically stay private. This means that the lively, shared conversations once found in the margins of medieval manuscripts are much less common in the printed world.
This can be disadvantageous because learning through interactions with others is effective.1 Studies have shown that when learners annotate texts together, they engage more critically and comprehensively with the material. This process encourages them to explain their thoughts, question each other's interpretations, and build on ideas, which can lead to deeper comprehension and memory retention.
So what are the features of a collaborative learning experience through marginalia?
🎛️ What are the features?
Joanna Wolfe, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, identified four main functions of annotations:
To facilitate reading and later writing tasks. If you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself;
To eavesdrop on the insights of other readers (by examining annotations made by previous readers of a text);
To provide feedback to writers or promote communication with collaborators (by making annotations while reading); and
To call attention to topics and important passages
Within a community of practice setting, discussions support social learning: learners understand topics more deeply by grappling with their peers’ understandings of the same ideas.
💡 Why does this matter?
In January 2009, Tim Gowers, a mathematician from Cambridge University, embarked on an experiment through his blog. He chose a complex math problem and set out to solve it transparently online, posting updates on his thoughts and progress. Based on the belief that collective intelligence could achieve more than a solitary thinker, Gowers extended an invitation to the broader community, encouraging anyone interested to share their insights. He called this endeavor the Polymath Project.
Just hours after Gowers opened his blog for collaborative discussion, contributions started to pour in from around the globe. The online conversation blossomed and within six weeks, they had collectively solved the problem (it was so successful that it was followed by 15 other formal polymath projects).
The comment section in Gowers’ blog post turned into the equivalent of marginalia: a set of annotations building upon the ideas of each other.
This matters because it transforms what was once a solitary practice into a dynamic and meaningful social learning experience. Learners now function as vital nodes within a research community.
In the world of e-books, marginalia would be purely value-added, appearing and disappearing at the touch of a button. It would be like the option of watching a film with the directors’ commentary — a nice bonus but also easy to ignore. And it would allow a whole new wave of readers to discover the pleasure of the words in the margins. —Sam Anderson
🥁 Exploring an example
When the Head of the Economics Department asked me to teach a course based on Frank Knight’s book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, I got worried. I knew the reading was dense for first-year college students, and I needed to figure out a way to provide a good enough incentive for them to read.
I decided to experiment with a social annotation platform called Perusall. I uploaded Frank Knight’s book, as well as some other readings (including the What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial paper I referred to at the beginning of this post, to go full circle!), and all of a sudden, it happened. The book chapters started to fill out with highlights, questions, references to other readings, and inquiries from learners trying to figure out a difficult text.
A snapshot from the learner’s comments in one of the chapters of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (in Spanish)
Class discussions became much more profound and engaging because learners were not only completing the readings but had also had previous asynchronous conversations about them. It’s one of the classes I’ve enjoyed teaching the most. And the answer was right in the margins :)
🏷 Summary
Annotations, whether in the margins of a medieval manuscript or a modern digital text, serve as a medium for conversation among readers. This interactive aspect of annotations makes reading an active, engaging process. A question that remains open is: What might this look like for learners acquiring practical skills and building projects? Whatever that is, the future of collaborative learning looks promising to me…
📚 Further Readings and Tools
Hypothesis, another tool for collaborative annotations.
How can we tailor our support to meet learners where they are in their learning journey? And what are effective ways to gradually increase challenge levels to boost our learners’ development? Stay tuned for our next edition!
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