There is a spectrum of technologies floating around to help teach and understand writing. Because of my interest in technology for teaching writing, I’m doing a little research to think about how to proceed. Of course, the most obvious step would be to check what mods and plugins might exist for moodle in this area.
Spell Checkers – These are now buit-in to wordprocessors, search engines, blog software…even my phone!
Grammar Checkers – Close on the heels of spell checkers
Word Choice Evaluation – A tool used only in education
Word Counters – OK, only in my mind is this related….
AWE – automated writing evaluators
Computational Linguistics – More a field than a type of software
Semantic Web Technology / Informational Retrieval – Both a field and a type of software
Natural Language Processing – More a field than a type of software
Who uses thes technologies?
SPAM filters - When they evaluate email for spam, they use some sophisticated tools like they look for the use of capital letters and the word free and an exclamation point in the title. Also, words like “male organ enhancement” and “drugs” and “friendly lonely ladies”.
The Intelligence Community - Who wants to know? They’re looking for terrorists by checking if they … use words …gosh, I don’t even want to joke about it. Are they checking for words like falafel?
Search Engines & Google - They seek to find out if one web site that is linking to another is relevant. They do this by word counting and matching and checking out what neighborhood you are living (linking) in. My point is that the search engines are very lame here and are seeking to do much better. For instnace, Microsoft in June bought a semantic search engine called Powerset for perhaps a hundred million.
Translaters - All those cool-oh automated translaters are seeking to find and communicate meaning. Check out the google link to translate, Babelfish, Language Weaver, etc
Everyone - Microsoft Word is constantly correcting our spelling, highlighting repeated words, and showcasing that there might be some missing punctuation.
The Educational Community - Wouldn’t it be nice if our grading of essays was automated? What if there was some intelligent feedback? This is my area of interest. Consider these efforts:
Another view of this world would be by technology which I’ll get to later….(bag of words approach)
