In theory, living in the web world would lead to improved writing skills. After all, most of the communication is done through e-mail, discussion boards, instant messaging, and chat.
Most instructors of online courses point out that in many cases, just the opposite has occurred. Instead of fully formed thoughts supported by plausible evidence, the average paper becomes a sketchy affair written in a kind of e-mail-ese that consists of rants and choppy, disconnected thoughts, non-standard spelling, and pseudo-plagiaristic “borrowing” that manifests as unreferenced segments of online articles copied and pasted into the body of a paper.
Continue reading ‘Grading Standards for Writing Assignments in an Online Course’
Archive for July, 2003
The war over file swapping and privacy is heating up just in time for the start of a new school year.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has subpoenaed Loyola University Chicago and obtained the names of several students at Loyola, alleging that the students are involved in illegal file trading. Making good on its promise to pursue individuals for copyright infringement, the RIAA said it is using provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to discover identities of students at several colleges and universities. The RIAA has also sought names of individuals accused of violations from other Internet service providers. Continue reading ‘Cops and Robbers — File Swapping and Privacy Issues Heat Up’
Back in the spring when Macromedia announced it was buying Presedia, the question I had was how they planned to make it less about Microsoft and more about Macromedia. Continue reading ‘It’s a Breeze — The World According to Macromedia’
Archimedes said, “Give me (lever and) a place to stand, and I will move the world.” It seems that today’s equivalent dictum could very well be ‘give me an Internet connection and the world will move me.’
As much as I would like to concentrate here on the power of love, which is the first cause underlying the following true story, I will focus more closely on computers and education. Real life has provided a lucid example that illustrates how a computer with an internet connection has become not only a powerful and fundamental learning tool but has partaken in a little girl’s overall motivation to learn. There are many easily discernable motives in our story, all very human and all very touching. However, if it weren’t for the Web, our heroine’s life would have taken a different direction.
This is the story of a four-year-old girl who fell in love with Harry Potter. Continue reading ‘MYTH OF SISYPHUS –The Web as a new lever within. A true story’
GETTING STARTED
Developing your “Previous Work” section with web-based research forms the cornerstone of this approach to writing research papers.
Continue reading ‘Research Paper Writing Using Web-Based Research as Cornerstone, Part I’
English spelling has a checkered history (or should I say chequered?). A few weeks ago I did a write-up about a great little spellcheck tool that you can install on your machine and use to spellcheck webforms - so much writing online happens via webforms these days, without the ability of the word processor to intervene. Continue reading ‘Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Spelling’
In the Beginning
If you’re like me, you may have been wondering why Airlines can take your reservations over the phone via a speech recognition engine but, at the same time, people keep saying the technology has a ways to go before it will be anything useful. The reason is that speech technology is a broad field and some areas are maturing rapidly while others lack the sophistication we would like to see. Continue reading ‘Speech Recognition for Learning — Coming to a School Near You Soon?’
Here’s another time-saving piece of software - D. Brent Herring’s HTML Calendar Generator. I first found this software a couple years ago when helping some departments on campus who wanted to add calendars to their webpages - nothing fancy, just static webpages that they would update with upcoming events. But nobody wants to build 12 tables with 365 cells to make a year-long calendar. That’s what D. Brent Herring’s nifty little calendar program takes care of for you. And it’s free - although there is a link to his Amazon wish list if you are feeling generous (I sent him a CD - because this program has saved me lots of valuable time on more than one occasion!) Continue reading ‘HTML Calendar Generator’
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