Plugin: Use Digress.it on your course blog
July 14, 2011 in Tips
What is digress.it and why use it? from University of Lincoln on Vimeo.
Among the new tools available to course instructors this Fall, Digress.it adds some interesting new features to the standard course blog, namely the ability to use the built-in commenting system as a platform for detailed document annotation or group discussion.
Digress.it is a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. Digress.it is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length.
Several professors will be experimenting with this feature in 2011 as part of our university-funded grant project, but all site admins on clevelandhistory.org now have access to this, and other select plugins. Imagine posting a dense primary source document (without violating copyright, of course) and tasking your students with commenting on, annotating, or translating the document, paragraph by paragraph. Or opening up student (or other) writing to detailed critique and peer review. Or running an online discussion based on a series of targeted prompts. If that sounds like something you would like to do on your course blog (or any site at clevelandhistory.org), Digress.it might be worth checking out.
NOTE: Activating Digress.it adds both a set of new features and a unique theme, designed specifically for annotation, so you might need to rethink the way you organize your site. Be sure to check out the Digress.it options page in your dashboard (Appearance >> Digress.it) to make changes to the default settings.
Visit the “Plugins” area in your site dashboard to activate Digress.it.
Have questions? Drop me a line on my profile page.
You can learn more about the roots of the project at digress.it.
