We’ve installed digressit, a WordPress theme that “allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with digress.it you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.”
digress.it is a great tool for inviting discussion and critique around one or more texts with obvious pedagogic uses. Here’s a demonstration site with a single text open for comment and discussion. It took less than 30 minutes to set up and add the text, ready for review and comment. Existing blogs can use digress.it or new blogs can be set up, specifically for a course where a number of texts are discussed.
To set up digress.it, just activate the plugin. There are further options under the Appearance panel.