One
of the things we’re working on at UTS is the development of analytic
techniques to support students in their writing practices. I’ve been
trying to think about the variety of tools available in that space, and
possible categories (or a taxonomy) of these. For example, we have: *
Tools that support the structuring/planning of writing through writing
frames * Writing platforms, both to support particular types of writing
exercise or genre, and just general writing spaces e.g. blogs,
collaborative writing, etc, e.g. medium, wordpress, quoll * Surface
(syntax, format, spelling, grammar) * Critique (i.e., giving effective
critique, or peer/self assessment) * Shallow semantic (word clouds) *
Deep(er) semantic (concept coverage, LSA/LDA, ontologies) * Deep
(rhetorical structure, cohesion) * Genre targeted (self-reflection,
factivity, creative writing) * Collaborative (authorial integration, )
But of course, tools don’t fit into these categories (or any set of
categories) in a 1-1 way, for example obviously machine learning tools
can be used on any given set of features from the above tools, and
‘Quill’ is about critique (students identify problems) regarding surface
features (the problems are to do with grammatical errors). There are
also distinctions between tools that are designed to face educators vs
end users vs researchers, and that are task specific versus general. One
thing of interest with a number of tools is that although they appear to
be doing interesting things, there’s very little information regarding
their methods or the association of the indicators shown to users and
the desired outcome (e.g., learning). Anyway, I have been collating a
number of these tools into the presentation embedded below (I’ll update
it as I find more – and please do get in touch with any things I’ve
missed).