About two months ago I was spending quite a bit of time talking with Brad Kozlek about how we might more fully explore CommentPress ... we had great conversations, but as the holiday approached it sort of slipped into the background. Much to my surprise I saw a great post by my friend Alan Levine that has gotten me excited once again ...
Leave it to CogDog to make amazing use of the CommentPress theme for WordPress -- and to do it in such an interesting and meaningful way. He worked with what looks like a couple of people to take WordPress MultiUser and integrate it with CommentPress to create a community based publishing engine ... at least that is what I'll call it. The paper is well worth a read, but the geek in me is fascinated by the implementation of the technology. With WPMU it is so easy to instantly create a new blog and by adding the CommentPress plugin it appears trivial to create a site that supports multiple documents that are easily organized and commented on. What is so interesting is that it automatically seperates each paragraph so comments are maintained within this small context. It appears to do an outstanding job of keeping everything in a very readable and structured model.
CommentPress is a WP theme dreamed up by the folks at the Future of the Book ... from their webstite:
CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. This site is presented in "document" mode.
I can think of dozens of ways this could be used in education ... and now we have a killer example of it to show off. Anyone care to share some thoughts on this?