OpenEssayist: Feedback and moving forward with draft essays
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OpenEssayist is a reflective tool designed to analyze draft essays by identifying key points, structure, and key phrases to help users understand and improve their writing. It encourages users to critically evaluate the effectiveness of their drafts and guides them in organizing and refining their work based on the system's feedback. Users can submit multiple drafts, access various analytical views, and consider discrepancies between their intentions and the system's output.
OpenEssayist: Feedback and moving forward with draft essays
- 1. OpenEssayist: Feedback and Moving Forward with Draft Essays Professor Denise Whitelock The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK denise.whitelock@open.ac.uk
- 2. Talk Back • Checking understanding by ‘talk back’ • Summaries in OpenEssayist • Key words = key ideas • http://www.open.ac.u k/researchprojects/s afesea/ DMW BUiD January 2014
- 3. 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. DMW BUiD January 2014
- 4. 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, • how the key terms are being used across the essay • how they combine to form a cohesive discussion. to help you consider how your essay is organised, DMW BUiD January 2014
- 6. 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). DMW BUiD January 2014
- 8. 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? DMW BUiD January 2014
- 10. Key Words • Are you surprised about any of the words in the top row? • Do you think some important words are missing? DMW BUiD January 2014
- 13. 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 DMW BUiD January 2014
- 15. 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? DMW BUiD January 2014
- 19. 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. DMW BUiD January 2014
- 20. How to use OpenEssayist (2) • • • 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? DMW BUiD January 2014
- 21. 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
- 22. How to use OpenEssayist (3) • Take notes on your thinking while exploring your draft and its analysis. Use the in-board notepad for that purpose. DMW BUiD January 2014
- 23. 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. DMW BUiD January 2014
- 24. 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 insystem report tool • Interviews • Data collected is anonymous and for the sole purpose of the research project (with the exception of the selfhelp forum which is obviously a space shared by your tutors and other students). DMW BUiD January 2014
- 25. Tweeting • Follow or interact with the SAFeSEA twitter account @TheOUSAFeSEA. • Hash tagging may be use #SAFeSEA. DMW BUiD January 2014