Dangerously Irrelevant

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 actually reading the student’s writing and attending to what he or she has to say and how it is said. The whole point of the enterprise of teaching kids how to write is for them to master a form of COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PERSONS, and one cannot eliminate the person who is the audience of the communication and have an authentic interchange.

via http://dianeravitch.net/2013/05/16/can-machines-grade-essays-should-they

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 the data sets.” In other words, all this hoopla about a study Tom Vander Ark calls “groundbreaking” is based on a final conclusion saying only that automated essay scoring engines are able to spew out a number that “by and large” might be “similar” to what a bored, over-worked, under-paid, possibly-underqualified, temporarily-employed human scorer skimming through an essay every two minutes might also spew out. I ask you, has there ever been a lower bar?

Todd Farley via http://www.joebower.org/2012/11/ravitch-should-computers-grade-essays.html.

What the Internet has proven with resounding success is that it can connect writers with real audiences. Any approach at online [writing] education (or offline education, for that matter) that ignores this feature of the Web adds nothing significant to the process.

John Jones via http://dmlcentral.net/blog/john-jones/online-learning-and-teaching-writing

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 that thing.” It was 150 years of chaos and blood shed when people almost literally didn’t know what to think, right. It was perfectly clear that the printing press had broken a bunch of ancient institutions but no one knew what would replace it and you could never replace it even if you did know because those new institutions needed time to mature

Clay Shirky via http://bigthink.com/ideas/14984