So I e-mailed Matt Haughey. Here’s his response:

I would definitely suggest MovableType (www.movabletype.org). There is a way to post only short excerpts, followed by a [MORE] link and a way to do comments inside a page (it defaults to comments in a popup, but dig around, it’s possible to do them in-page). The comments are semi-anonymous, but hopefully the students will stick to posting under the same name (or choose to set a cookie to do that for them).

If you wanted to go whole hog, I would suggest the scoop engine, from http://scoop.kuro5hin.org. It’s a massive multi-user system that is much like metafilter, but offers much more in terms of ranking, rating, even letting the audience choose what floats to the front page, based on quality rankings. It’s a serious application, and I’ve never tried installing it though.

> (ME) Second, (and if you’ve gotten this far I’ll be amazed!) I’m doing and article on weblogs in the classroom for English Journal and I was wondering if I might send you a couple interview questions. I am really juiced by the possibilities of all of this stuff and I want to share the news.

Yeah, sure, go ahead and send me some questions. I’d be happy to answer them for your article. Matt

Pretty cool! I’ll get back to him with some questions tomorrow. I really like moveable type, and when I get some time after the yearbook is done, I want to look into it more carefully. The things that worry me are setting up individual accounts with it and the anonymous comment system. I really need that to be identifiable.