Why Email Is The Perfect Way To Teach Writing
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
By the way, this is a great solution to the much-discussed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254) problem of effectively dealing with plagiarism: imagine if it were expected, as part of your class, that you engaged your professor via email while writing assignments. There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place. Imagine all the students that could be guided to correctly cite and re-use sources if their professor had just headed it off at the pass instead of running it through TurnItIn and groaning at the fallout. I couldn't agree more with the benefits of this dynamic, more interactive teaching method for writing.
It also makes me wonder if he would be interested in having students share their works-in-progress via Google Docs--he would be able to essentially peer over their shoulder as they type and comment. Or would that be going too far?
I fear you give too much credit in that respect. This does not mean you could not lift passages out to integrate with your work without a professor being any wiser. It might make copying a complete text a little harder, but even there it wouldn't be hard to integrate some deliberate errors, let him catch and then revise. Finally, it would do nothing at all to stop you from hiring someone else to write it for you as long as you could either pay that other person to participate in the e-mail feedback or you were willing to do the revisions yourself.
Feedback on writing is not reducible to rules or use cases, so I don't think a software solution is possible but I stand to be corrected.
Made me think of learning to code... in some ways, coding provides this - we get tireless responses and immediate informative feedback each time we compile or test our code. Of course not all elements of good coding are evaluated by automatic metrics such as compiles, passes tests, or isn't too slow). but still.
Edit: I just mean that particular bit of it, by the way. Overall I totally agree, better feedback and faster turnaround are crucial for effective learning, and there was a complete lack of both at my university. I got the marks for my coursework in one unit a few days before the exam for it - over three months since the lecturer, already late, posted to the forums that they would be releasing the marks "next week". Yet if I had turned the coursework itself in one second late, I would have gotten zero.
Aside: It would be incorrect to say that my university's methods did not cause rapid and effective learning to occur - but I don't think I learnt the lesson they intended.
My 6 year old son just asked to check the email account we set up for him, there are over a hundred messages from relatives.
Email FTW.
I correct English on a language exchange site for fun. But it doesn't take long before I start to look at it as a chore, and not much fun. He does it for a living, all day, and comes back for more!