Rethinking comments

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.