(via Lilia) Mark Bernstein warns against the dangers of comments as evidenced in the most recent flame war involving Dave Winer:
Weblog comments incite duels. Duels are bad for society. We should all forego comments and return to carefully blogging responses — including responses we disagree with, but excluding responses we cannot tolerate.
Interestingly, the comments on Lilia’s post make for some good thinking, which is what my thinking on this is. I can’t imagine this site without comments, or not being able to comment on other’s sites. (There are a few people in this community who don’t allow comments and I find that frustrating at times.) I’ve only had one bad experience with comments in the past three years and that was from some very sensitive MAC user who took me to task for a pretty innocuous error. I got over it.
I think the value of comments far outweigh the potential for abuse. Now in a classroom setting, there obviously needs to be a watchful eye. But I love having other people’s opinions (when they feel like sharing them) right there with the original post.
While Trackback is nice, I haven’t found it to be especially accurate. But I have been thinking how good it would be for students to keep all of their own comments in their own spaces and then be notified of other’s feedback using Trackback. At least then all of their work, including their feedback to others, is in one space. I have found keeping track of that stuff to be pretty difficult.
But bottom line, to me, comments are what help make blogs such interesting tools to use in the classroom.
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