Getting interactive

Now that students can create blogs in the site, you have the ability to foster dialogue within your class. The easiest way, of course, is simply through commenting. Students have the rights to comment on assignments, and on teacher and student blog posts. However, students might also want to reference other pieces of content in their work. In this section, we will set up a mechanism that will keep track of when one post within the site references another post within the site. This way, people can see when exchanges are occurring about different posts, and it provides another way (in addition to comment threads) for people to hold discussions within the course.

These ideas (including tracking student responses to assignments) are covered in more detail in Chapter 13, Tracking Student Progress.

Seeing who's discussing what

Within the site, we will want to see who is discussing what posts. In web parlance, this is referred to as a backlink. Fortunately, the Views module comes...