an abrupt change of course ex. the speaker went off on a tangent

I'm curious how instructors might facilitate constructivist learning through productive digression via in-text social reading prompts, where asynchronous conversation is seeded in context. Perhaps instructors could turn this tension between anchored conversations and productive digression into a reciprocal advantage by encouraging students to annotate with intertextuality in mind, or better yet, have students free-associate on a word/phrase and let their responders go from there. Doing so might foster rhetorical patterns and opportunities for reflexive inquiry if developed in the mid-range composing acts (e.g. blog/discussion posts) that Ugoretz discusses here. That process would also work with a variety of digital artifacts situated in new media discourse.