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Columns::September 15, 2003
$6.7 million grant will support research that could eventually treat some cancers and Parkinson’s disease
U. of Tennessee administrator will head Georgia Center
Former administrative information systems director is named interim CIO
Rising numbers: Freshman class is more racially, ethnically diverse
South (Georgia) campus
Study by UGA scientists reveals that laboratory rats ‘under the influence’ find it hard to concentrate
Study: Property values increase near greenspaces
Campus Closeup
Administrative Changes
Newsmakers
Rolling out the welcome mat
Campus News
Forum essay
On revising student papers
By Nelson Hilton
Our ever-increasing ability to digitize, store, track and target vast amounts of data in an open format makes feasible an Electronic Markup and Management Application to archive student coursework. The enabling of student “e-portfolios” looms already as “the next big thing” on the educational horizon, and an accompanying computer-mediated repository would create significant opportunities for assessment, research, credentialing and teaching. A modest experiment under way toward such a project invites participation.
While students have long been able to submit assignments electronically to an individual instructor--as e-mail attachments, for instance--the possibility has not been widely popular owing to the incompatible platforms, programs and formats currently used for creating documents. Moreover, to respond to such a submission usually entails reconstitution of the document, preparation of comments in some proprietary format, then a repackaging of the whole for return to the student, not to mention the making of a copy for one’s own records, to be on the safe side. When a new way requires effort beyond existing practice with no greater evident benefit, who can wonder at its unenthusiastic reception?
XML (“eXtensible Markup Language”) and Web-accessed centralized storage change everything. Composed in an open standard not difficult to learn, an XML document can be published in different formats, used by different programs, and ported across different platforms. Comments may be added by those instructors or peers to whom the document authorizes access. Collected and maintained in a very large data storage with appropriate access hierarchy, each document would contribute to an expanding corpus--the more useful, the more used it is--which could be queried on the basis of text and markup, a capability which opens far-reaching possibilities. Such an institutional student coursework archive would form a major resource for assessment, research and teaching.
“Markup” designates the coding convention used in a document to indicate features that are to be treated (“remarked on”) in some particular fashion. It uses regular characters and resides within the document as paired tags in angle brackets, so making a text which is both human-legible and machine-processable. Marked-up text can be mildly disconcerting at first, as in one’s initial encounter with a Web browser’s “view source” display of a page’s underlying HTML (HyperText Markup Language). But for the momentary estrangement of leaving behind our typographic programming (e.g., indentation to mark a paragraph beginning) and learning to compose in XML, one gains a re-purposable, enduring, exchangeable document. To be viable today, writing cannot neglect computer-mediated reading.
XML addresses the straitjacket of the Web-engendering but presentation-limited HTML with a two-fold innovation that, first, enables the creation of whatever content tags may be desired and, second, provides for the transformation of tagged content into multiple presentation formats (Web, print, voice). Data-centric reporting or narrative exposition are equally amenable to XML, and the past few years have seen a proliferation of tag-sets for various concerns, such as MathML or eXtensible Business Reporting Language.
Some members of the English department have been experimenting for the past two years with the design and use of an Electronic Markup and Management Application (see www.english.uga.edu/emma/). In first-year composition, for instance, an assignment might include the student’s tagging of verbs, thesis statements and citations. To compose the assignment, the student might use jEdit, the free, open-source editor the group has helped to develop. In logging into EMMA for the assignment, the student activates a document template coded automatically with necessary identification and tracking information. The editing program supplies context-sensitive help to facilitate tagging and automatically negotiates the document’s upload to EMMA as a draft or final copy. If desired, the submission could be made available for peer review and comment. An evaluator pointing out grammar errors could use comments with active links to appropriate discussion in the online grammar text. In class, different filters could enable an extracted listing of just those thesis statements evaluated as particularly effective, and the class might proceed to consider those thesis statements with the verbs highlighted (via another transformation). Or one might rank by frequency all the citations made for the assignment. With the possibility of participation in many such transformations every
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assignment assumes a life beyond its immediate instantiation and adds data for our collective understanding. Interested readers are invited to contact the developers (emma@english.uga.edu).
Different disciplines would emphasize different tag-sets and particular uses for such an application, but, in sum, where student paper was--essay, lab report, exam, multimedia composition--only with greater permanence, wider usability, and increased yet easier-to-control accessibility, there might EMMA be. In the networked academy, the revising of student papers to a paperless format means more information.
Nelson Hilton is head of the department of English.
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