Walt Whitman comes to WordPress
There was an interesting piece about students studying Walt Whitman called “Whitman Takes Manhattan” on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site. The article discuses how students from
CUNY’s New York City College of Technology — will explore the Fulton Ferry Landing that Whitman described in the poem and record their investigations on a Web site. Meanwhile, thanks to open-source software, students at three other institutions — New York University, Rutgers University at Camden, and the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia — will be recording their own literary and geographical explorations of Whitman’s work on that same Web site
The Open Source Software in question is Wordpress Mult-user along with two sets of themes, CommmentPress and BuddyPress.
CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. It’s tag line is A WordPress Theme for Social Texts. It “allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.”
Buddy Press is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes that aims to allow members socially interact. I.e., it makes WordPress more of a social media site then a typical blog.
It will be interesting to see how this works out. Teaching an online course I know that many of the course ware systems really don’t do a great job in areas involving social interaction.
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