I would say that it might be worth rethinking “comments” on student blogs altogether – or rather the expectation that they host them, moderate them, respond to them. See, if we give students the opportunity to “own their own domain,” to have their own websites, their own space on the Web, we really shouldn’t require them to let anyone that can create a user account into that space. It’s perfectly acceptable to say to someone who wants to comment on a blog post, “Respond on your own site. Link to me. But I am under no obligation to host your thoughts in my domain.”
from: Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me: Gender and Education Technology
There are a lot of interesting and powerful parts of this post by Audrey Watters but this interests me in all sorts of ways.
Thinking from the pov of a teacher working with primary pupils I’d want the ease of posting comments for pupils to continue, but if that could be done on their own space, with the option for some sort of universal trackback notifying the site commented on it would be really interesting. This of course links in to my reading around POSSE & the indieweb.
The whole post addresses much more important issues and I recommend it highly.
But equally, why couldn’t you say, “Why not”? It may be perfectly valid to hold the point of view shared above, but if implemented I’d say it was a website, not a blog. Surely the entire point of hosting comments on a blog is to allow a discourse to take place – which other visitors can follow or add to if they wish. Expecting visitors to trail around the internet to read other people’s points of view about the post seems to me to be a retrograde step.
Hi John,
Yes, but.
A couple of things, one Audrey is talking about specific abusive comments.
I am ignoring thinking about this difficult stuff and riffing off this bit thinking about the idea of comments being on the commenter’s site but also displayed on the site commented on. I’ve been trying out a few things in this area, Known being interesting and the whole webmention thing. Webmentions, as I understand it would pull comments about my posts from all sort of places onto my comments. I’ve got one or two plugins active here that try this and it has pulled some comments in from twitter.
I am currently finding reading about indieweb concepts and owning your own space pretty interesting.
That makes sense. You’re spot on about the webmentions thing: in this age of microblogging where people find less and less time to craft a considered response on a blog it could be a big deal for kids to know that their blogs were being passed around the various social media platforms. I’d be interested in learning more…
Well I am getting some comments on this blog for a change, thanks;-)
I am just dipping toes in the webmention/indieweb stuff at the mo. Don’t know much, lots of links.
It would be nice to catch up some time John long time no see.