OpenEssayist: Feedback and moving forward with draft essays

OpenEssayist: Feedback and Moving Forward with Draft Essays

Professor Denise Whitelock

The Open University, Walton Hall,

Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK

[email protected]

Talk Back

• Checking understanding by ‘talk back’

• Summaries in OpenEssayist

• Key words = key ideas

• http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/safesea/

DMW BUiD January 2014

OpenEssayist: What it tells you

• The system’s focus is to present summaries of your own work in different ways, to encourage you to reflect constructively on what you have written.

• In other words Open Essayist tells you from its analysis what are the most important or key points in your essay. You can then think about whether that was what you intended to emphasis in your essay. If not then you can make the appropriate changes.

• A very important aspect of the OpenEssayist system is that it will not tell you what to write, or how to rewrite sections of your essay, or even what is correct or incorrect in your essay.


OpenEssayist: A tool for reflection

• Different views with distinct roles presented

• The purpose of this feedback is to encourage you

• to reflect on the draft text you submitted,

• to help you consider how your essay is organised,

• how the key terms are being used across the essay

• how they combine to form a cohesive discussion.


ESSAY

GRAPHICS

ANALYSIS

OpenEssayist: How it gives feedback

• Three aspects of your essay are analysed by the system:

• the structure of the essay (which paragraphs constitute the introduction, the conclusion, the discussion sections, etc.),

• the key words and key phrases of your essay (which are the most important words and phrases, the ones that are most representative of your essay's overall meaning)

• the key sentences of your essay (which are whole sentences that are most representative of your essay's overall meaning).


Key Sentences

• Do you think OpenEssayist identified the parts of your assignment correctly?

• Did it find the introduction and conclusion and main text?

• If not, why do you think that happened?

• Is anything missing from your essay?


Key Words

• Are you surprised about any of the words in the top row?

• Do you think some important words are missing?


Overview

• All the analyses i.e. keywords and summaries are shown on the main text

• The results of individual analysis are shown together

• Note where key words and key sentences appear in your essay


Think about the structure of the essay

• Think about whether the key words identified by OpenEssayist are the ones you need to answer the question in your assignment. If they appear in the introduction, are they helping the reader to understand that this is what you are going to be writing about in the main text?

• Are the key words in the conclusion similar to those in the rest of the text but provide a summary of your answer?

• Can you pick out the three biggest words or phrases?


How to use OpenEssayist (1)

• Use the system as a resource, as part of your writing process.

• A “draft” must be at least 500 words long. Submit as many drafts as you like.

• Take time to explore the different views of the system’s analysis. Some views might be more familiar and useful to you than others. Some views might become useful only after you have encountered other views.

• Once a draft has been analysed by OpenEssayist, you can access any of the views at your own time and pace, according to your needs.



• There is no silver-bullet

• Any of the system’s many views might give you some ideas for revising your draft.

• Don’t just focus on what the system is saying about the draft but also look for discrepancies, between what you thought you wrote and what the system is telling you.

• Is there anything missing from the key words?

• Are they distributed where you expected them to be in your essay?

• Are there key words in your conclusion and introduction?

• Are the key sentences revealing the main points that you wanted to make in your essay?


Hints when using the system• Do you agree with OpenEssayist that these sentences are a good

summary of your assignment?

• Are any important ideas that you want to convey missing from this summary?

• Are there lots of sentences in the summary that are about something that you think is unimportant or irrelevant to your assignment?

• Do you think there are important themes in your assignment? Are they mentioned in your draft?

• Do you think the introduction section as recognised by OpenEssayist is about the right size, or has OpenEssayist go it wrong?

• Do you think you should try to lengthen the introduction? Or the conclusion?

• Is your draft long enough? Too short?DMW BUiD January 2014


• Take notes on your thinking while exploring your draft and its analysis. Use the in-board notepad for that purpose.


Issues to consider (1)

• To be able to use the system fully, we recommend that you use a modern browser, such as Firefox or Chrome (any recent version) or Internet Explorer (version 9 minimum).

• OpenEssayist offers very limited support for editing your draft online. Use your own word processor, and then copy and paste the text in the provided form in OpenEssayist.


Data Collection

• Collect different types of information:

• log of your activities using the system,

• the drafts you might have submitted for analysis,

• the results of these analyses,

• Any comments you might have made using the in-system report tool

• Interviews

• Data collected is anonymous and for the sole purpose of the research project (with the exception of the self-help forum which is obviously a space shared by your tutors and other students).


Tweeting

• Follow or interact with the SAFeSEA twitter account @TheOUSAFeSEA.

• Hash tagging may be use #SAFeSEA.


Education

OpenEssayist: Feedback and moving forward with draft essays