CCE: Commenting on CommentPress

As promised in earlier comment: I first learned about CommentPress from this post on Dan Anderson's blog I Am Dan. Anderson describes a project undertaken by his first year seminar students to annotate "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" integrating text, commentary, and video clips. The video reflection he provides on this assignment is fascinating on a number of counts, certainly pedagogically but also from a technological perspective (esp. to someone like me whose first experiences of technology were sliderules and computer punch cards).

I did a little research to find that CommentPress is "an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine," developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. I'm no techie, to say the least, so it took me a while to figure out (and I'm not sure I have the terms right--feel free to jump in, anyone) that you need to have wordpress installed on yr own server in order to be able to install CommentPress directly.

However, again surfing around semi-aimlessly, I discovered yesterday that edublogs has added CommentPress as one of its themes (take 2 minutes to sign up for a blog, go to presentation from the dashboard, and CommentPress is one of yr options for a theme). Feel free to check out the test blog I set up to see what it looks like and play around with commenting options. Comments are attached at the paragraph or whole-text level. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Word's comment feature and the publishers' web-based tools I've used all allow commenting at word/phrase level as well; on the other hand, perhaps for someone like me with the tendency to "micro-mark" (my old proofreader's habits dying hard) the paragraph limitation would be a good thing. And I still do have that preference for reading on paper rather than the screen, which opens up another kettle of fish/can of worms (pick yr cliche).

So, what do you think? Ready for that paperless peer review??