RapGenius clone?

May 2, 2013 12:08 PM

I am trying to build a blended learning web-app for a professor to replace his Blackboard-based discussion forum. I think a great model is RapGenius's annotation system. Do open-source clones exist for this? Any out-of-the-box tools I can quickly hack together to mimic RapGenius's annotation system?

Basically, the professor posts a snippet or passage from an article to a message board on Blackboard to spark discussion for his class outside of lecture (students are required to post replies to say 5 out of the 15 or so articles he posts). It is a clunky set-up and everyone involved hates it. I think RapGenius would be perfect for this, but the prof doesn't want to use that site specifically, for obvious reasons. Branch.com is a nice alternative, but RapGenius seems to fit the purpose better. Medium.com's comment/notes/annotation system is also close. Any ideas of how to quickly put together something like this? Thanks!

posted by shotgunbooty to Education (2 answers total)

Harvard just had a conference on new annotation tools with a helpful list of participants and their projects. Some of those folks might have software to share? iAnnotate was another recent conference -- again, not sure how many of those products are available yet. Hypothes.is, for example, is still in development I think.
posted by lillygog at 8:39 PM on May 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Random follow-up, in case it helps, I just learned about Pundit which is an open source "generic web-based semantic annotation tool".
posted by lillygog at 9:28 AM on May 8, 2013 [1 favorite]