1650 was closer in spirit to the time we live in now than it was to 1450. The change was so enormous …but what was also clear is that there was never a moment where everybody said, “Oh I get it. This is what the printing press is going to do. Well let just do...
Category: writing
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We should be connecting students with real audiences
Upcoming travel and events December 3-5 – International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands February 3 – Virginia Is for Learners Innovation Network, TBD, VA February 25-26 – Missouri Educational Technology Leaders CTO Clinic, TBD, MO March 10-13 – Central & Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Annual Conference, Budapest, Hungary June 8-9 – Roanoke County Public...
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Is computerized essay grading groundbreaking?
the study’s major finding states only that “the results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items.” A paragraph on p. 21 reiterates the same thing: “By and large, the scoring engines did a good [job] of replicating the mean scores for all of...
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A concatenation of glittering vagaries
Robert Shepherd says: One cannot tell [how sophisticated the Xerox automated essay grader] is from the marketing literature, which is a concatenation of glittering vagaries. But even if one had a perfect system of this kind that almost perfectly correlated with scoring by human readers, it would still be the case that NO ONE was...
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Jump in a bowl of excellent teaching practices
Vicki Davis says: Sometimes people ask me why I write and teach. Part of me has to write – I feel made to do it and to not write would be like asking me not to breathe or be me. But I also know that all the research I have to pour into my writing...
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The dangers of a single story
Nadia Behizadeh said: If a child does not perform well on [one timed large-scale assessment essay], there will be a single story told about this student: he/she has below basic skills in writing, or maybe even far below basic skills. Yet this same student may be a brilliant poet or have a hundred pages of...
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Academic publishing in two sentences
Time it took my article to appear in print: 3 years. Time it took this blog post to appear online: 5 seconds. [P.S. Not trying to pick on JSL; they’re great. This is an issue endemic to most of our print publications in higher education…] ADDENDUM: Time it took to edit this post four times:...