Via Twitter just moments ago Joss Win posted a link to a version of Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society” that has been made available via digress.it. Deschooling Society is available elsewhere on the web, however this is the first time I’ve seen it accompanied by the option to engage in discussion as well. Importantly the discussion framework that is being used here is particularly powerful.
Digress.it is a plugin for WordPress that supports discussion at a far finer level than is traditionally available on most blogs. Rather than limiting conversations to a single field at the bottom of a post, digress.it “lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.”
I don’t necessarily see this model being applicable to all blogs and blog comments, however there are definitely instances where the model would be very handy.
Collaborative peer review and solicitation of feed back are two uses that come to mind. The Australian Federal Government, for example, recently launched a Consultation Blog, which uses a similar framework based upon the Comment Press theme. Their aim seems to be to subject papers and policy documents to as rigorous a feedback process as possible at as granular a level as possible.
The opportunity to engage in highly specific, in-depth conversations is relevant for other use cases as well – such as fine grained analyses, discussion and debate.
For example, a document available to the public domain or shared under Creative Commons license could be posted to a course blog and used as the focal point for an exercise. In the case of particularly long documents you could even allocate different sections to different groups. Then at the end of the discussion you’d have a single post (or persaps a small selection of posts) that contained the thoughts and opinions of an entire cohort of students, with the granular level of the discussion meaning the comments were organised into topical chunks.
In the case of both Digress.it and Comment Press, a Comment Overview panel is displayed to the right of the content and is kept in view no matter where the reader is in the screen. This serves to keep the discussion right up front the whole time.
Of course, the same affordances (more or less) are available with most web pages via Diigo. I plan to do some group readings of the kind you discuss above this semester using Diigo, and will let you know how it goes.
Ah yes that's true. That's one of the aspects of Diigo I haven't really experimented much with yet to be honest – in fact I'd completely forgotten it exists. Thanks for reminding me!
The fact you can access the option merely by installing the toolbar plugin for Firefox rather than setting up a custom WordPress blog makes it much easier to set-up. Plus you can use it in conjunction with any website, can't you? Definitely an option worth considering – that's for sure.
Thanks for pointing that out – I'll be sure to take a closer look.
Digress.it also supports a community component that allow sites to enroll their project on the digress.it community site for others to find.