Three blog add-ons proposed to boost writing

Jack Dougherty, an education professor at Trinity College (CT), has launched a website aimed at collaboratively envisioning and building a powerful creative tools. Quoting from the website, “The goal … is to introduce the combined power of three collaborative writing tools … and open up new possibilities for innovative pedagogy and scholarly communication.” Dougherty proposes to start with the ubiquity and relative ease of WordPress as a blogging platform and extend its functionality via three plugins:

1. Commentary – Digress.it will allow readers to share comments on specific paragraphs of a text. Followers of the Horizon Report may have seen this in action. The NY Public Library has another example at their Candide 2.0 site.
2. Bibliography – Zotpress gives blog authors access to their collections of bibliography entries at Zotero. Among other functions, you can display items in a blog post or link to collections.
3. Publication - Anthologize, a plugin in the early stages of development, helps assemble and organize blog posts and other content, then export the product as a PDF or  ePUB for online distribution.

This could be a potent combination! The site appeared at the end of spring semester, so it’s not surprising that only a few folks have registered comments. Personally, I was inspired to check into Digress.it — I think there are many faculty who could use it in a course. You can read more about Jack Dougherty and his project at ProfHacker.