Tony Hirst pointed me (via an Ajaxian article) to Jack Slocum’s fantastic blog comment environment.
Why is it fantastic?
Three main reasons:
1. It looks good: blog commenting right now is a little haphazard, and looks positively stone-age compared to what we know modern tools are capable of
2. It brings order to chaos: comments can be contextualised ‘at the point of sale’ so to speak, i.e. placed where they are intended. This is exactly the strength of D3E, the Digital Document Discourse Environment of Simon Buckingham Shum and Tammy Sumner (open source and downloadable from SourceForge).
3. It pushes the envelope on interactivity in blogs-as-forums: communities of discourse are very important to the blogging world, but right now a little bit of ‘detective work’ is still needed to ferret out the ebb and flow of conversation, and this will help ease the detective work.
Downsides?
The main one for me is that the granularity of the commentary may become an overwhelming burden, i.e. it may become hard to see the wood for the trees, so to speak. For example, someone’s comment about paragraph 2 may be really important as a rebuttal to someone else’s comment about pargraph 4, and they even miss each other. But time will tell, and I daresay future iterations will adress that: this is clearly an experiment worth doing!
What does it have to do with teaching?
Tony Hirst’s “heads up” was precisely so that we could begin looking at this kind of capability to enhance the ebb and flow of discussion/debate in a teaching context, e.g. in the next iteration of OpenLearn. Great idea.
Technorati Tags: slocum, YUI, comment, d3e, discourse, blog.comment, buckingham.shum, sumner
