Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

MicroCommenting

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Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

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Comments

  1. bcarrera says

    Potential also to post a lecture before class, allowing students to post comments, questions that can be addressed during class

    Peer-editing as well comes to mind

  2. Christian Long says

    As a soon to be “English Teacher Geek”, I am grinnin’ ear to ear on this one, Will! Must, must, must get a new site to install this theme at some point. A bit visually confusing on one level — part of me wants to see the entire piece as a whole rather than ‘notecards’ for each chapter, but overall the value is strong. Can the theme show both versions? Strengths either way. But thanks for putting this out there for us to consider! Cheers, Christian

  3. Christian Long says

    (Part 2)

    Ah…just realized that the “if:book” folks have created a side-by-side post/comment template after considering pros/cons of the example you showed us. I stand corrected!

    Thanks again for pointing us there! Cheers, Christian (with sheepish grin)

  4. Gary Stager says

    Whoa! Short attention spans will only get shorter.

    Annotations are a good thing for teaching writing and even helping explain a text. Martin Gardner’s Alice in Wonderland is a great analog version and Bob Stein’s (Voyager) Expanded Book Toolkit from the late 1980s is the digital predecessor.

    This will however be even worse for conversation.

  5. Joe says

    You might also like this commenting system:
    http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter06/

    Comments are available for each paragraph of the book in the left margin. A small balloon callout identifies the comment count for that block of text.

    For example, the first of twelve comments reads “That next-to-last sentence is really awkward. Here’s how I’d put it….”

    It’s a technical book (warning) but interesting in that it’s community based and edited.

  6. Jordan Frank says

    Paragraph commenting is a facility built into the core of the Traction blog/wiki platform from the very beginning (well before 2.0 was in our vocabulary). See feature page with screen shots. Paragraph level comments are a much more natural way to interact with information. Imagine a list of questions? or an issue raised with various alternatives proposed to fix it? The responses belong in context, not 10 page lengths down the screen. Take a look at any e-mail thread and see how people interact in the text with their replies.

  7. Jim says

    Hi Will,

    If you are interested, we are running a multi-user WordPress install at the University of Mary Washington and are playing with this theme (which is very, very cool). Feel free to contact me if you want to give the theme a drive around the block.