A Word from the Director

I have written both in the PETAL Newsletter and Blog about CommentPress, which is a new blogging software system that works with the popular WordPress blogging system.  The value of CommentPress for higher education is that it offers promising possibilities for enabling students to interact with texts and with each other by dividing the computer screen in half vertically, with the original blog text on left half of the screen and visitor (i.e., student) comments on the right.

The advantage that CommentPress offers over other blogging systems is that instead of having all comments accumulating linearly at the bottom of the page, CommentPress allows you to make comments “in the margin,” next to the paragraph of the text to which the comment pertains.  The system also allows a level of “threadedness” to the discussion, where commenters can reply to each other and related comments are displayed so that their logical connection is apparent.

CommentPress in My Classes

I have been experimenting with CommentPress this semester in the British Literature course I am teaching.  Since we have been reading a lot of poetry in the class and most undergraduates are usually a bit afraid of poetry, I have been putting up one or two poems from each week’s reading into CommentPress and having students post comments or questions before the class period we plan to discuss that poem.

This has demonstrably elevated the level of class discussion about those poems. Because students have not only read the poems but have also written in a public space about the poem and read their classmates’ comments on the poem, they come to class better prepared for the in-class discussion. In addition, I come to class with a better understanding of where they are in their understanding of the poem.

I have also used more conventional threaded discussions this semester (and in the past), and the quality of the online and in-class discussions has been markedly better in the weeks that we’ve used CommentPress than in those where we used threads.

Click here to view my class's CommentPress site.

CommentPress in Dr. Sue Walker's Classes

Dr. Sue Walker has also been experimenting with CommentPress in her poetry writing course this semester. She has been using blogs in her poetry classes for some time, but she had always used conventional blog systems, where she would post the assignment in the blog area and students would then post poems and comments in a long, linear string that was almost impossible for anyone to make sense of.

When she asked me about a month ago how she might make more effective use of blogs or other technologies in her class, we decided that we would try CommentPress. We added all of her students to the system as authors so that they can each publish their poems as individual blog posts. Then, the other students (or anyone else) can post comments and pose questions in a contextually relevant and logical way.

As of this writing, there have been 40 blog entries and 153 comments posted on the site.

Dr. Walker is so excited about its effectiveness that she has asked me to set up a CommentPress site for her composition class so that she can have them post their essays and receive constructive criticism from her students.

Let me know if you are interested in trying CommentPress with your classes.

Click here to view Dr. Walker’s poetry class’s CommentPress site.

Return to Newsletter Home