petergault
commented
10 years ago Comment from Ryan Muller:
I'm friends with the founder of http://lightsidelabs.com/ which does machine assessment of writing. The core technology is open source Java (repository) but the company is building an API. Let me know if you want me to set up a meeting.
After completing an exercise, a student is instructed to write out 5 sentences using the grammar concept correctly. There are a number of things we can do with this exercise:
1. Apply NLP to the Sentence We can apply a basic "sanity check" to a sentence to make sure it is written as a semi-logical sentence, and importantly, that the student actually used the concepts at hand.
2. Peer review After students write out there paragraph, they are then given another students paragraph, and they can either comment on it, or perhaps add their own take on the writing?
3. Story prompt writing. Give students a few sentences from a story, and ask them to write a paragraph that imitates that style. One of the central questions here is whether the free writing should focus on having students write whatever they like or whether they should focus on using the grammatical concept at hand. The goal is to find a happy medium between the two. One way of getting students to use the grammatical concept they are learning is featuring a passage that uses that concept. For example, for irregular past tense verbs, you can feature a paragraph that has a variety of past tense errors.
4. Fair Use Content We could look into using commercially available works. There is a clause that those works can be re-used for commercial purpose under certain educational purposes. Given google's recent success with the google books lawsuit, the question of copyright is certainly up in the air.
5. Word Bank Function One way in which we could communicate using certain grammatical concepts is by having a word bank of words, and the students have to incorporate all of those 10 or 20 words into their writing. This may be how we make sure these concepts get covered.
6. Collaborative Writing Exercise Have the students collaboratively write a story. This may be tricky to do. We could, for example, give each sentence an introductory clause, and students take turns filling in the rest of the sentence. Students could take turns writing paragraphs, with one student driving and the other student acting as passenger. A necessary thing here is doing research in current collaborative writing exercises.
7. Decoding a problematic paragraph This free-writing exercise can either be sent back to the teacher to be reviewed, or it can just be an optional exercise to encourage students to write. Make this the kernel of the process of becoming a better writer (taking an actually bad paragraph of a student, break down the problems, and then learn how to become a better writer).