We’ve installed CommentPress, a WordPress theme that “allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.”

CommentPress is a great tool for inviting discussion and critique around one or more texts with obvious pedagogic uses. Here’s a demonstration site with a single text open for comment and discussion. It took less than 30 minutes to set up and add the text, ready for review and comment. Existing blogs can use CommentPress or new blogs can be set up, specifically for a course where a number of texts are discussed.

To set up CommentPress, just activate the theme and click on CommentPress Options, to choose document or blog mode.