Category: Teaching

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The end of one short term, the beginning of another, and an “open learning” invitation

We have two short (7.5 week) terms here at EMU during the summer, and today I’m wrapping up the first one.  I have been teaching a couple of sections of English 121, aka “freshmen comp,” and it’s been interesting.

My two sections were made up of students far from the typical demographic of that course with only a handful of true “First Time in Any College” students for fall and winter terms, though the low number of FTIACs is more typical of the spring/summer terms.  I had several students who thought they were about to graduate but they had somehow managed to not take one of the only universally required courses earlier– usually because of transfer issues.  I had several ex-military folks and a couple of unemployed/underemployed and (approaching) middle-aged and older folks attending to finally finish a degree.  I had a number of high school-aged kids who are attending EMU through the Early College Alliance program, which means my youngest students were somewhere around 15 and my oldest was (I think) about 65.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately because I’ve had a number of recent “what are you people teaching in first year composition?” encounters with others at EMU in the last couple of weeks.  Under the best of circumstances, it’s an impossible class, really.  It’s bad enough that we assume that students can take a single course in a single semester in their first year of college and in this course, they can learn everything they will need to learn about writing clear, “correct” prose and research skills for the rest of their college careers.  The idea that I can teach and students can do all that in 7.5 weeks (instead of 15) is ridiculous.  I tell students throughout the term that I wouldn’t take my course if I was in their shoes because it’s too much work crammed into too small of a segment of time.

But for the most part, students rose to the challenge, and in an interesting and unexpected way, I think the diversity of the students made for pretty pleasant groups of people in both classes.  I once again used RiP!  A Remix Manifesto as the framing device/topic for the term, and students found a lot of great things to write about.  One thing that’s always nice to see is when a student begins the class knowing almost nothing about whatever it is they decide will be their topic of research and they end it still enthusiastic and a whole lot more knowledgeable than when they started.  So it’s all good.  It’s not enough (it’s never enough), but it’s a good start.

Oh, and another thing I did this term this term was I incorporated a bunch of readings from Writing Spaces.    The results were generally good but mixed– and I mean that as a good thing, because not everything can work equally well in all situations and because I assigned a lot of these readings based on the abstracts and/or titles.  There are definitely some pieces in there I’ll be using again the next time I teach fy comp, which could be as soon as this fall or as late as– well, who knows.

But I am turning around and starting up another class for the second part of the summer term in just a few days.  Beginning on July 2, I’ll be teaching a 7.5 week and online version of English 444:  Writing for the World Wide Web.  This is a course I created shortly after coming to EMU back in 1998 and I’ve taught it now at least a dozen times in different formats and versions.  I’m very much looking forward to what we’ll be doing this summer especially after learning from some of the less than smart choices I made in trying to include HTML5 coding last term.  Ain’t doing that again, and the same goes with this “Content Management Strategy” stuff, though for different reasons I might come back to in a different version of the class.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far into this post and you’re interested in joining in on the upcoming version of English 444, feel free.  I can’t give you MOOC-like badges or actual credit or grades or anything like that, but since I spent a fair amount of time over the last couple months bitching about the overselling of MOOCs and open learning and all the like, I figure the least I can do is invite people to see how I do things.  Seriously.  Sign up if you want to comment, or just read along on the site.

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MOOCs and “Prior Learning Assessment”

More in the series of “the summer of MOOCs” articles and posts here:  Inside Higher Ed has an interesting article, “Making It Count.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are not credit-bearing. But a pathway to college credit for the courses already exists — one that experts say many students may soon take.

That scenario combines the courses with prior learning assessment — a less-hyped potential “disruption” to traditional higher education — which is the granting of credit for college-level learning gained outside the traditional academic setting.

Here’s how the process could work: A student successfully completes a MOOC, like Coursera’s Social Network Analysis, which will be taught this fall by Lada Adamic, an associate professor at the University of Michigan. The student then describes what he or she learned in that course, backing it up with proof, in a portfolio developed with the help of LearningCounts.org or another service, perhaps offered by a college.

There’s also this handy flow-chart:

This isn’t a bad idea in theory and maybe even in practice.  It kind of reminds me of the old days when future lawyers went and studied to take the Bar Exam without needing to go through that pesky law school business.  I believe this is how Lincoln became a lawyer.

But it doesn’t take much to spot some potential problems, too:

  • “Credit for prior experience” is essentially the formula used by diploma mills to justify their fake degrees– the “PhD in life,” so to speak.  So until that well-deserved bias is overcome, getting actual college credit from an actual college will be tricky.
  • The problem with prior experience is you have to actually have prior experience.  I of course do encounter students at EMU who come into classes I teach with a lot of worthy prior experience.  Just the other day, a new grad student asked me if she could get college credit for her prior experience as a teacher (the answer was no).  But for the most part, the reason why students come to college in the first place is they don’t have prior experience.  So while some combination of MOOC/prior experience thing might be useful for adults returning to college after years in the workplace, it isn’t going to be too useful for most of our students.  And by the way, it’s the younger, more traditional college students who are going deepest into student loan debt.
  • What exactly would this credit “count” for, anyway?  Take the example of the course mentioned in the introduction:  that Social Network Analysis course looks like it might be pretty cool, but what exactly would we count that as at a place like EMU?  It probably wouldn’t correspond to anything in the Written Communication major, and I don’t think it would count here as a gen ed class.  So at best, someone could transfer this class as just “credit,” and any transfer student can tell you that that’s not very useful.
  • Even this article says that the process someone would have to go through to make MOOC credit count might not be worth it, “that students might decide it’s easier to retake an equivalent course at a traditional college than to seek prior-learning credit for a MOOC.”
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“Haven’t we said this before?” A blast from the past about correspondence courses, fwiw

For some reason while I was at the gym this morning (maybe because it’s been a while since I had time to go to the gym, maybe because of other things I was reading, maybe because all this MOOC and other online education stuff has been on my mind), I thought about a minor project/presentation I gave back in 2001 at the Midwest Modern Language conference as part of a “special section” for computers and writing.  The talk was called “‘Haven’t we said this before?’ What the History of Correspondence Courses Teach Us About the Promises and Problems of Online Distance Education Courses.”  In brief, the talk (and I include it all after the jump for anyone interested) was my response to David Noble’s critique in Digital Diploma Mills and also an article in Mother Jones highly critical of online education.

Much of my argument– which was meant to suggest that correspondence courses way back when weren’t great but they weren’t horrible either–  was based on my reading of a 1938 University of Michigan MA thesis by Anthony Matulis about U of M’s correspondence study programs way back when.  I still remember that project, looking through very old and largely abandoned texts about correspondence schools.  It was kind of fun work; I might try to go back to it.

Anyway, I thought I’d share it here, for what it’s worth.  I think the analogy between classes by mail and online classes is still relevant, and I think it might be useful for some of these “MOOCs are going to save and/or transform higher ed as we know it” to recall that people said the same thing about correspondence courses 100-some-odd years ago.

Continue reading ““Haven’t we said this before?” A blast from the past about correspondence courses, fwiw”

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Udacity joins Pearson in skipping this whole pesky “education” thing (and more complaining about MOOCs)

A couple months ago, I had a post here about how I see “education” working as a combination of learning, teaching, and credentialing.  In that post, I pointed out that ventures like Coursera are at this point PR vehicles for the elite universities because they are offering “courses” to the masses but they would never actually accept these courses as credit at said elite universities– in other words, there’s no way the University of Michigan is going to accept a certificate or badge of completion as credit toward one of its degrees, even if students pay for the privilege.  However, as I also pointed out in that post, that doesn’t mean less elite institutions like Ivy Tech aren’t willing to count these things.

Well, now Udacity is doing the same thing.  To quote from their blog:

Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Pearson VUE, a worldwide provider of testing services. Students may still complete a Udacity class on our website as they always have. And now, students wishing to pursue our official credential and be part of our job placement program should also take an additional final exam in a Pearson testing center. There are over 4000 centers in more than 170 countries.

I came across this news via George Siemens’ elearnspace.  Siemens, who is a Canadian researcher/teacher about technology in education and who has been a pioneer of Massive Online Open Courses, is critical of this move.  He sees Udacity as essentially “selling out:”

Udacity is recognized as an innovative model of learning in the future, but, in order to gain legitimacy, decides that a connection to the established testing system is more important than blazing a new trail. This connection serves to reinforce the existing educational model rather than to continue the path of creating a new one. As Udacity creates similar connections to other education companies and organization, it quickly becomes apparent that the network being created is one of validation and lockin, rather than innovation and a new vision for learning. You can’t do much innovation if your point of departure is blocked by existing testing and assessment models.

True enough, but I guess I’m more cynical than that.  I see Udacity as merely “buying in:”  that is, I think the unspoken goal of Udacity, Coursera, and other comparable projects has always been to leverage the assessment industry and generate “cheap credit” that might be applicable at less picky colleges and universities.

Now, I do appreciate the fact that entities like Udacity do extend some opportunity to education to the rest of the world and that comes across in Udacity’s press release.  Still, if you follow the money, I don’t think Udacity and Pearson are in this to extend opportunity to people in Sri Lanka.  No, I think the goal of these entities is to compete in the higher education market in the U.S., Canada, and maybe some of Europe, and specifically, to compete with the “lower half” of that market:  for-profit universities, community colleges, and (probably) opportunity-granting regional universities and colleges.

Incidentally, Siemens also has a really good post on his (and his colleagues) vision(s) of MOOCs, one that I would argue is at odds with corporate model that is all the rage as of late.  Go read it, but basically, Siemens’ vision of a MOOC strikes me as about community and connection, with an emphasis on student-centered learning and on the value of making things and student contributions to the learning process, as opposed to the “sage on a stage knowledge delivered from the elite leaders to the unwashed masses” model of the Coursera/EdX/Udacity/et al of the world.

I still don’t think MOOCs are the future of education, at least on this continent and as long as the credential of the college degree is so important.  Or let me put it this way:  I will believe in the viability of MOOCs and open education when that young person applying for an entry-level job in the Federal government or for the Bank of America or “insert your major employer here” with a “non-degree” series of badges and certificates from various free/low-price online entities wins that position over a young person with a bachelors degree from a traditional university.

That said, I’m all for the MOOC model that Siemens is talking about.  I don’t know if they are educational per se, but they are certainly great opportunities for learning and teaching, and maybe someday we can figure out a way to make them legitimately “count” for something.

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One last Bonk post for the road

I’ve pretty much reached the end of my MOOC experience in Curt Bonk’s “Empowering Learning Through Community.”  As my previous posts suggest, I haven’t exactly been wowed by the possibilities of MOOCs based on this experience.

I don’t really blame Bonk, at least not much.  His course and materials were introductory/basic, so I didn’t really get a whole out of the class.  But that’s more my own fault regarding expectations about what I might have been able to get out it.  Bonk provided some solid advice and materials that I think would be a useful place to start for someone who has never taught online before who wanted to know a bit about “best practices” and the like, and if we ever pull together a graduate course/program about teaching writing online at EMU, I can easily imagine returning to this stuff.

None of Bonk’s materials are particularly earth-shattering or innovative though.  And interestingly, as I think is pretty clear with the videos on his YouTube channel, the “production values” of these lecturers are pretty poor.  That strikes me as a bit of a problem or at least weirdly ironic.

As for the whole MOOC thing:  forget it.  Sure, it’s possible for someone to learn something from a MOOC like this or the efforts from Harvard, MIT, U of Michigan, etc., etc., but you can learn a lot from the history channel or even the food network.  Heck, I learn a lot about cooking from FoodTV– and maybe I can even earn badges for it!  And then there are these things called books.  It seems to me that those are the original massively open tool for potential learning, tools that allow “students” to interact with the material in any way they see fit and at the time of their choosing.  When you factor in the costs and technical restraints of online courses, massive and otherwise, seems to me that books are still a better deal.

It’s weird that MOOCs are getting as much press and attention as they are right now, frankly.  Just over five years ago, there was a controversy here at EMU about a faculty member in my department teaching these online classes with 100 or so students.  I blogged about it here; the problem of this made national news because the idea that you could actually have an online class worth anything with that many students was back then considered ridiculous.  Most of the best practice studies I saw back then said that online classes functioned best when enrollment was capped at around 15-20– not unlike face to face classes, by the way.  So why is it that now anyone thinks that a “class” with 1000 students– even a free class– would all of a sudden be a good idea?

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Some random thoughts on the supposed collapse of the university as we know it

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but as I head into what (I think?) is the end of the Bonk MOOC and after collecting a bunch of links on this, I thought I’d offer some random thoughts on the end of higher education as we know it.

Throw a brick out a window and you’re liable to hit an article like these:

I could go on, but you see the point.  Now to my random thoughts:

  • In a global way, I think Aaron Barlow says a lot of what I would say in this post and this post on his blog One Flew East.  As far as I can tell, education has been in a state of revolution that potentially eliminates the teacher since Socrates and Phaedrus talked about the dangers of literacy.  Books, print, cheap publishing, etc. have been available for learning without teachers or interaction with others for a long time, but as Barlow points out, “Only the rare person is a true autodidact.”
  • The fact that most of us (including me) lack the ability to intensely self-direct our learning (and I for one lack the crazily internal motivations for doing almost anything) is the key in understanding why both Thiel’s foundation and these various no credit MOOCs are basically a waste of time and/or a PR stunt.  Sure, if you hold a national contest attracting the best and brightest young people in the country and offer them $100K to develop those ideas, those folks can probably get away without having a college degree.  Sure, there are people– especially in the IT world– who are more or less self-taught and could be where they are without a college degree.  Sure, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college.  But the fact is most of us aren’t like that, and most of us are not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or (insert your other anomaly genius name here).  Most of us need something a lot closer to a classroom and degree experience to succeed.
  • Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the popular press was running a bunch of articles about how it turns out that lecture hall discussions were bad and it was the interaction between students and teachers that fostered learning?  Wasn’t the whole “reversed classroom” thing the main topic of discussion just a few months ago?  So why on earth is an online version of a sage on the stage now seen as the solution?
  • Show me anyone writing for mainstream media that college is a waste of time and money and I’ll show you someone– that same writer– who has a college degree, and usually a college degree from a fancy-pants institution.  It’s the same argument I have about the coming revolution in digital scholarship:   I’ll agree that publishing in fixed manuscript form is over as soon as these folks publishing books about digital scholarship and the end of print start getting recognition for their actual digital scholarship and that work alone.  I think the days of printing on paper are numbered, sure.  But words in a row– even when those words in a row are about multimodality or digital rhetoric or what have you– aren’t going anywhere.
  • A few years ago, I did a project on correspondence schools in the late 19th and early 20th century, and a number of years before that and as part of one of the last classes I took in my PhD program, I did some research on elocution and the “home learning” movements of the 19th century.  Classes conducted via the postal service were a particularly big deal in the midwest.  William Rainey Harper, who has a community college named after him in the Chicago area, said in 1885 “the day is coming when the work done by correspondence will be greater than that done in the classrooms of our academies and colleges.”  Makes me think I should go back to those scholarly projects.
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Week 2 of Bonk Online: What color is your learning parachute?

I don’t mean to be too snarky here, but this week’s topic in Curt Bonk’s “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success” is “Addressing Diversity and Learning Styles.”  I have little patience for “learning styles,” and someone posted to the online discussion a pretty good video from someone named Daniel T. Willingham at UVa on why “Learning Styles Don’t Exist:”

I’m not sure it is as clear as Willingham suggests here– I don’t think that is as simple as “good teaching is good teaching” for the same reason that the claim “good writing is good writing” is clearly not true.  It depends on context and purpose and audience.  Having said that, Willingham makes a good point that some things require visual learning skills and others require auditory learning skills (just to use one dichotomy here), and that’s that.  Maybe some people are better at remembering images versus words, but that isn’t about a learning skill in the sense that you can’t use audio stimulus to teach about images and vice-versa.

The other thing that struck me about Bonk’s model of learning of read/reflect/display/do (R2D2– get it?  Ah yes, of course I appreciate a good Star Wars pun!) is this has nothing to do with online pedagogy per se.  In other words, to the extent that this model of learning is true (and it frankly borders on being just common sense to me), it’s also true for face to face learning, too.  So, what’s unique about this in the online context?

More interesting for me tonight is “5 Things I’ve Learned From MOOCs About How I Learn” from Audrey Watters.   Peers do matter– and the level of conversation in Bonk’s class varies widely, as you might expect with 1200 or so people participating– lectures blow, and teachers matter.  And last but far from least, there’s this:

5: The platform matters. Last week Lisa Lane wrote about her decision to “leave an open class,” namely Curt Bonk’s “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success.” It’s not the professor or the material that prompted her decision, she writes.

“It’s the classroom. I wanted to attend to see the new CourseSites from Blackboard, which is being touted as Bb’s “open” LMS. Maybe it would be innovative! A new LMS. I’m always very interested in learning management systems, and what they can do.

“Well, it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.”

All of my online teacher has been facilitated with some combination of eCollege and my own wordpress installations of different flavors, and lately, I’ve relied on wordpress for the “meat and potato” parts of the classes– posting stuff, hosting discussions, etc.– and used eCollege for the gradebook function.  So my experience with Blackboard is quite limited.  

That said, I can say with some authority that Blackboard really really blows.  Knowing what I know now, I cannot imagine who could possibly be happy about using this set-up– well, other than instructors who have been forced to use it and who don’t know anything different.  Maybe Bb is dramatically easier on the backend for IT people to administer or something, but other than that, I cannot for the life of me figure out why any institution would voluntarily choose it as a CMS/LMS platform.

Can anyone help me out and answer the why question on this one for me?

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Week 1 of Bonk Online: Motivation

Week 1 of  Curtis Bonk’s Massively Open Online Course about teaching online is all about motivation.  The main article assigned/discussed was the chapter “Well Leave the Light on for You:  Keeping Learners Motivated in Online Courses,” which is from a book called Flexible Learning in an Information Society. It’s really more of an article about things teachers can do to try to foster motivation, which (as anyone who has lead the horse to water only to watch him not drink knows) is not the same thing as students fostering motivation in themselves.  It’s basically advice on setting an engaging tone (including “ice breaker” activities), giving feedback (which I agree is a huge deal in online teaching), making sure students are engaged in meaningful ways, fostering choice and curiosity, valuing peer interaction, etc.  Though as I typed that sentence, I’m not sure what of these things are really all that unique to online (versus face to face) teaching.

In any event, I think in a very general way, Dennen and Bonk have fine ideas here.  There is no doubt that a big part of the problem of online pedagogy is teachers not recognizing the ways in which the online experience is different from the face to face experience of teaching in some really unexpected and interesting ways.  I think what Bonk is saying here can at least get teachers to begin to think about these differences.

But I don’t think he’s really addressing student motivational problems here, or at least he’s not addressing the problems I see.  In my experience at a public “opportunity-granting” university, a lot of courses are offered online to a population of students who don’t have the maturity or the “buy-in” to higher education generally to take the next self-disciplinary motivation to succeed in an online and largely self-guided class.  Simple example:  at EMU, we don’t teach first year writing classes online because the students we have in our program– especially the traditional freshmen– need to first learn how to routinely show up in person to class, how to complete assignments independently, etc.  And given the high drop-out rate of students in online versions of these classes at other places, I think we’re right about that.

I also think that when students don’t succeed in online classes it is often because they have misguided or flat-out bad motivations, self-guided or otherwise.  In the upper-level and MA classes I teach online, I see this all the time– or maybe a better way of putting it is I see students who don’t succeed online as often having a misperception problem.  Often, when students don’t succeed online:

  • They struggle with the technology in a way that is very difficult to address (and they often grossly overestimate their technological abilities in the first place), no matter what we try to do to help;
  • They nderestimate the amount of self-discipline it takes to get to the online class and participate, complete exercises, etc. (in that sense, an online class is a lot like buying an exercise bike:  it only does you good if you can motivate yourself to ride it every day); and /or
  • They bite off more than they can chew based on other classes that they’re taking and/or their complicated lives.  Show me a student who is taking 18 credits, working 40 hours a week, tending to an ailing parent/spouse/sibling, and/or at home with a newborn baby who thinks that her or his “problems will be solved” by taking an online class and I’ll show you someone who drops out or fails.

So I don’t know if this is missing from Bonk’s essay per se and I think his basic advice to help teachers new to online teaching is sound.  The point I’m getting at is when students don’t succeed in online classes, it is more often than not largely because the student wasn’t ready for the class and/or otherwise in over their head.

As for the MOOC experience so far:  it’s so-so.  A lot of the comments/posts by others are pretty good.  There’s certainly as much worthwhile stuff there as say the WPA-L or Tech-Rhet mailing lists– which is to say there is a lot of not worthwhile stuff too, but that goes with the territory.  It doesn’t really feel like a class in any meaningful way to me– more like a mailing list or blog discussion.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing; it’s just not the same as actually taking a class.

And so far, I think the Blackboard CourseSites stuff blows chunks.  Makes me appreciate eCollege, frankly, and that’s saying something.

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Getting started with Bonk’s “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success”

I’ve been teaching at least some of my classes online since 2005 and I’ve been using various other online tools (what I’ve heard described as “blended” learning, whatever that means) for a lot longer than that.  But I’ve never taken an online class before, and I haven’t exactly done a lot of studying of online pedagogy, certainly not from the perspective of education scholars.  So when I read about Curtis Bonk’s Massively Open Online Course about teaching online, I figured what the heck?  I signed up.

It’s very very early, of course.  The class technically doesn’t start until Monday.  But there are already a couple of things that give me, well, pause.

First, there’s the introductions part of the class, which is basically 1200 or so different people posting a message that says “hi, my name is…” with not much other interaction.  How could there be, really?

Second, Bonk posted this introduction that comes across to me as, well, goofy:

I’ve been known to make a few attention-getting and goofy videos for my online classes too, but there sure seems to be a lot of props here.  But hey, who knows?  Bonk has a fist full of articles and books on online pedagogy and somebody must think he knows what he’s talking about or he wouldn’t be doing this at all.

Third, I think Bonk signals here a bit as to what Blackboard’s interest in this whole MOOC thing is all about.  As Bonk explains in this video (at about the 9 minute mark), week 5 is going to feature the folks from Blackboard coming on the site to more or less explaining all the “cool” Blackboard tools we’ve been using.  Now, I don’t know if this is what’s going to happen, but it sounds like the angle here is Blackboard is going to try to sell us on Blackboard, sort of like the way that textbook companies try to sell faculty on their textbooks and other products.   Which again makes me think that this whole MOOC thing is mostly a marketing stunt.

Skeptic that I am, we’ll press onward.

 

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Welcoming our robot grading overlords

Well, no, not really– but I thought that post title might be provocative, sort of like writing essays in a way that tricks the grading software.

There’s been a lot of discussion on things like WPA-L and elsewhere about “robo-readers,” as this New York Times piece sums up well, “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously” and this further discussion on Slashdot. The very short version is it turns out that machines are just as capable of scoring writing that is completed as part of standardized tests– things like the GRE or SAT or other writing tests that ask students to respond to a very specific prompt.  Writing teachers of various flavors– the WPA-L crowd in general and Les Perelman from MIT in particular– are beside themselves with the wrongness of this software because it’s not human, it can be fooled, and cannot recognize “truth.”

Of course, ETS and Pearson (two of the companies that have developed this software) point out that they don’t intend this software to replace actual human feedback, that they admit this is not a way to check facts, and the software is not a good judge of “poetic” language.  And I’ve also seen plenty of humans fooled by untruths in print.  But never mind that; writing teachers are angry at the machine.

Now, I mostly (though obviously not entirely) agree with my WPA-L colleagues and Perelman, and, as I wrote about in my previous post, I’m not a fan of education that eliminates teaching and minimizes the opportunity for learning simply to jump through a credentialing loop.  So yes, I would agree that taking a batch of first year composition papers and dumping them into the robo-reading hopper to assign grades would a) not work and b) be bad.  Though again, it also appears that the people who have developed this software have the same position.

But let’s just say– hypothetically, mind you, and for the sake of argument– that this kind of software and its inevitable improvements might actually not be evil.  How might robo-grading (or maybe more accurately automated rating) software actually be “good?”

For starters, if this software is used in the way that ETS and Pearson say they are intending it to be used– that is, as a teaching/learning aid and not a grading tool per se– then it seems to me that this might be potentially useful along the lines of spellchecks, grammar-checks, and readability tests.  Is this a replacement for reader/ student/ teacher/ other human interaction in writing classes of various sorts?  Obviously not.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful to readers, particularly teachers during the grading process.

Let’s face it:  the most unpleasant part of teaching writing is grading– specifically “marking up” papers students turn in to point out errors (and in effect justify the grade to the student) and to suggest ideas for revision.  It is very labor-intensive and the most boring part of the job, as I wrote about in some detail last year here.  If there was a computer tool out there that really would help me get this work done more efficiently and that would help my students improve, then why wouldn’t I use it?

Second, I think Perelman’s critique about how easily the machine is fooled is a little problematic– or at least it can be turned on its head.  It seems to me that if a student completing some standardized test writing is smart enough to out smart the machine– as Perelman demonstrates here— then perhaps that student actually does deserve a high grade from the machine.  It’s kind of like Kirk reprogramming the “no win” Kobayashi Maru test so he could win, right?

Third– and this is maybe something writing teachers in particular and writers in general don’t want to accept– writing texts that are well-received by machines is a pretty important skill to master.  I know that’s not the intention of this robo-reading software, but my writing teacher colleagues seem to suggest that this is not only an unnecessary skill but a particularly dangerous one.  Yet there is an entire web business called Search Engine Optimization that is (in part) about how to write web pages to include frequently searched keyword phrases so that the results appear higher in search engine– e.g., machine– results.  The keywords and structure of your monster.com resume can be half the battle in getting found by a potential employer who is using searches– e.g., machines– to find a match.

Anyway, you get the idea.  No, I don’t think we ought to turn over the teaching/grading function in writing classes to machines, and I don’t think a robo-grader is going to be able to look into the soul of the writer to seek Truth anytime soon.  But I think the blanket dismissal of and/or resistance to these kinds of tools by writing teachers is at best naive.  It’s probably more useful to imagine ways these tools can help our teaching practices in the long run.