I have written many times in this space on CommentPress, which is a theme for the WordPress blogging system that allows for reader comments to be made at the paragraph level.

One of the problems with CommentPress has been that it’s not been upgraded for quite some time.

However, I discovered this week that the person who led the development of CommentPress for the Institute for the Future of the Book, Eddie Tejeda, has just released a completely overhauled version of CommentPress called “digress.it.”

The goal behind the system, as they state it, is “turning a document into a conversation.”

The major advantage of digress.it over CommentPress is flexibility.  There are several different “looks” available, and blog owners can add a variety of features to the right-hand sidebar.

I am using it for my American Lit course this semester, which you can check out at http://usapetal.net/wpmu/eh226/.  You can also learn more about digress.it at their website.

I’m not sure how I missed this, especially since I subscribe to his blog, but I stumbled upon Dr. Wesch’s latest video this morning (which is now almost 6 months old…).

This French video shows what may be on the horizon with eBooks.

This video from a dean at SMU makes some interesting (and extremely valid) points about teaching with computers.

To see the video, click here.

from: http://chronicle.com/media/video/v55/i42/bowen/?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The PETAL Website has been moved to http://usapetal.net.

The PETAL Blog can be found at http://usapetal.net/wpmu/blog.

Please update your bookmarks. You can subscribe to the new blog by clicking where it says RSS Feed in the black bar above.

I have long been an opponent to the commodification of education, but I saw this blog post this morning and thought it might make for an interesting discussion.

The original post can be found here: http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/04/should-students-be-treated-like-customers.html

Should students be treated like customers?

From Mike Sansone:

I once asked a teacher what would happen if they treated their students like customers, with a design philosophy of customer experience in mind. The teacher was taken aback. She said the day she treats her students like customers is the day she would lose control of the room.

At that moment, I knew she was standing on the line of irrelevancy — and about to cross over. The reality is, she should have been looking for ways to share control rather than try to own it alone.

Hmmm… reminds me a bit of this Robert Fried quote.

In other news, student enrollments in more-personalized choice options such as charter schools, virtual schools, alternative schools, and home schooling continue to rise…

What do you think?

In a recent post, I shared a poem that I’d recently written about facebook, and part of the poem was specifically about facebook as a teaching tool. I also posted the poem on facebook and emailed to a few interested friends who aren’t on facebook.

Six people commented on the poem in facebook and about the same number commented by email. About two-thirds of the commenters were educators, but the comment that stood out was from a former student of mine. He had taken my English class last fall, and something he said really struck a chord with me.

Oh, and seeing you on here has made the “Dr.” in front of your name look not so big when it comes to talking to you.

The defense rests…