In pursuing a line of inquiry or research, scholars need to identify and engage with what others have written about a text or issue. This academic move asks that writers read closely and attend to context, and that they make fair, generous, and assertive use of the work of others. ¹

Ways WordPress can be used to “engage with the work of others” might include:

• linking directly to other online resources
• writing blog one or more blog posts as part of an ongoing analysis of a work or issue
• maintaining a public journal over the duration of a topic or issue study
• using a WordPress blog/site to enter into a community of discourse (for example, a student may end up getting one of their posts or pages “linked to” by other sites)

The point of engaging with the work of others is to move beyond what has been said before. Scholars respond to gaps, inconsistencies, or complexities in the literature of their field and anticipate possible counterarguments in order to provide new evidence or interpretations that advance clear and interesting positions.

Using a publicly accessible, openly published WordPress site, students can enter into ongoing conversations and communities on the web. Faculty may also decide to create and shape a WordPress site focused on a particular area or topic, and then assign their students to contribute as active editors – writing and collecting content, addressing comments, etc.

In order to best contribute to their fields of inquiry, scholarly writers need to develop an awareness of the expectations and concerns of their intended readers. These expectations include not only appropriate and effective support for an argument, but also conventions of acknowledgment, citation, document design, and presentation of evidence.

Faculty and students can use WordPress to develop and design complete websites – not just blogs. By accessing visuals, making web design decisions and placing multimedia in context, students learn to also consider the visual aspects of their work, as well as its impact on their audience.

Students critically read scholarly work about their topics of interest. Depending on the field, this research may include locating sources, questioning methodology, examining evidence, identifying social or political contexts, or considering the implications of an academic work.

A WordPress site can serve as a space to “pull together” various elements of student research. For example, students using social bookmarking tools such as delicious or Diigo can include their most recent bookmarks on their WordPress sidebars. Students may also add RSS feeds from other web sources to their own sites, or re-post relevant content (videos, images, etc).

NOTE: as an example of using RSS feeds, I’ve included a feed from CIT’s blog on the sidebar to the right.

Academic writers re-read their own writing and share work-in-progress with colleagues in order to reconsider their arguments. Students learn how to become critical readers of their own prose through responding to one another in classroom workshops, seminar discussions, or conferences.

Use WordPress to facilitate the workshopping process by:

• publishing posts privately, or as drafts (see image below)
• using blog posts to collect comments on drafts
• using student-developed blogs as a drafting space before publishing on the larger, public class blog/site

Students are asked to rethink their work-in-progress in ways that go beyond simply fixing errors or polishing sentences in order to extend, refine, and reshape what they have to say and how they say it.

Students can use WordPress to collaborate on and revise drafts of work. Students can also open their posts and pages up for commenting from their peers. WordPress can also be used as be used as a central place to link to other collaborative editing technologies, such as Etherpad and Google Docs.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has recently developed a custom WordPress theme called “CommentPress” – designed specifically to enable advanced annotation and workshopping of documents using WordPress alone.

As a final step in preparing documents for specific audiences, students are expected to edit for clarity, proofread for correctness, and make effective use of visual design.

Student development of WordPress sites can increase their experience with visual editing, design and communication. Students can make choices about individual site design, media and connections to other web resources. Above all, WordPress is a flexible web publishing platform – meaning that the tool encourages the ongoing development and revision of texts, even after they’ve been “published.”