Blog Commenting Evolves

So the cool news here is that the CommentPress project that’s been spearheaded by the folks at The Institute for the Future of the Book is about to evolve into something that I think will be greatly useful for educators using WordPress blogs in their own practice or with their students. For the uninitiated, CommentPress is currently a WordPress template that allows readers to leave feedback not just on posts as a whole but instead on each individual paragraph in the post. That in iteself has creates all sorts of potential, but it does mean making an entire blog capable of doing that, which you many not always want. So here’s the news: in the near future, the CommentPress functionality will be released as a plugin, meaning bloggers will be able to select individual posts to have paragraph level commenting without making the whole blog subject to that.

Just off the top, that creates some cool possibilities for student feedback on each other’s posts and for deconstructive feedback on teacher provided models in terms of writing instruction in general. And it also enhances the idea of “connective writing” in that I really think we need to help our students use in their practice. Personally, I can’t wait to install it here so you guys can really pick apart my ideas.

Finally, if you want to participate in a pretty interesting experiment using CommentPress, check out the new book “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Gamrs and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto fame. Here’s the teaser:

Expressive Processing is the name of my forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press. Now is the time, in traditional academic publishing, when the press sends the manuscript out for peer review — anonymous commentary by a few scholars that guides the final revisions (and decisions). As Jeff Young reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, we’ve decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Noah, who is a professor at UC San Diego, is asking readers to do an open review at the paragraph level using CommentPress. It’ll give you a chance not only to get a read on what looks to be ain interesting work but to experiment with this new blogging tool as well.

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