WSBlog Bedtime + Best Biblio's and PFs

Eight years I plugged away at chronicling, filtering, modelling, showcasing, recycling, reflecting, and reviewing in posts for students on the Writing Studio Blog (WSBlog). During that time, I learned a lot about blogging with students, and there have been several satisfying advances in Blogger blog affordances as well, for example the advent of pages, and the threading of comments on posts.

Blogger renamed widgets gadgets, and baked many new ones in, which made them easy for casual bloggers such as English-as-an-additional-language learners to use. The link roll on the WSBlog has grown to almost a page in length, and the label cloud, to almost a page and a half (actual size). Embeddable external-source gadgetry like Cluster Maps and Flag Counter indicate[s] that the WSBlog had over 7,000 (perhaps not unique) visitors in the four years up till November 2014, and that there have been well over 18,000 page views since August 2010.

Though I'm relatively certain that those aren't the largest numbers in the blogosphere, they're large enough to reflect on with a certain degree of satisfaction. Regrettably, however, RSS services that colleagues and I had adopted to concatenate feeds of independent learner blog entries for inclusion in our teaching blogs went the way many free or inexpensive services do, and workarounds never quite made it back to the stage of single feeds to display posts from multiple blogs in now standard RSS gadgets–so much to do, and so little time to do it.

Before I put the WSBlog into suspended animation (from which it might snore itself awake from time to time), I'd like to do one more little bit of showcasing–this time not for students in successive cohorts, but rather for those in classes which finished meeting last month. They sat exams on January 28, 2015.

To wrap things up for now, I'd like to point out to class members and their near-peers a few of the best bibliographies–modified APA-style lists of books that individual students reviewed, and the most reflective portfolios (PFs) in pages that students added or linked to their blogs.

• Students, please remember that if you aren't logged in to your university accounts, Google documents and spreadsheets stored on the university site will be invisible. 

• Please also note that for the PFs themselves, the writing before, between and after the iframes was more important than the activities and progress represented within the iframes.

Without further adieu, ...

Best biblio's (book listings):

1. Takahiro's, 
2. Nana's, and
3. Rina's (includes a good first go at a movie listing, too); and 

Best PFs:

1. Misaki's
2. Miri's and Nana's (tie), and
3. Kazuyo's.

Many thanks to all!

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More Practically Perfect Predecessors' Portfolios

As you are developing your own portfolios, I'd like to ask you to do the following. Please:

1. View the slides in the presentation embedded below, 
2. Follow the instructions on slide two and slide three, and 
3. Review the portfolios that you find via the links on slide four. 

Then please return to this post, and add a comment explaining which of your predecessors's portfolios you think is the best from each section (§1A and §1C), and why you think so.

Thank you in advance for you cooperation.

__________
Note: This post reuses and revises text from a previous post (Practically Perfect Predecessors' Portfolios, 2013.07.13) with the original author's permission.

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A Rack of Start-up Labels

Between the hash marks below is a set of labels to add to new posts on individual blogs:

/////

books, brainstorms, drafts, essay prep., essays, fiction, free-writing, graphics, links, media, movies, non-fiction, outlines, quickposts, reviews, revisions, typing, websites

/////

(Source: The Writing Studio Blog, Start-up Labels, 2012.04.22; ...
[used with author's permission])

Some of the labels are required. For example, on book reviews, you will need to use at least three labels during 1st semester, including: "books, ...," PLUS, "fiction, …," OR "non-fiction, …" AND "reviews, …"  (all comma-separated values without quotation marks or ellipsis). You are welcome to use other suitable labels for book reviews as well, such as genre labels like "adventure, ..., " "history, ...," or "romance, ...," as long as they suit the content of your [book review] posts . 

For instructions on using the other labels, please see the Labels and Link Lists page.

Now, to jump-start your own label collections, please:

1. Add a labels gadget to the sidebar of your blog, then
2. Copy and paste the labels between hashmarks in the list above into a new draft post on your own blog;
3. Entitle the new draft post, "My Start-up Labels" (in title case without quotation marks);
4. Copy and paste the same labels into the Labels field on your draft start-up labels post; and
5. Publish your start-up labels post on your blog....

Once you've published your start-up labels post, with those labels in the label field as well as [in] the body of the post, the labels will show up in your Labels gadget. Later, when you label new posts or re-label previous posts, you will be able to quickly choose appropriate labels for required and other posts, rather than typing them all in [by hand].

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A Few Command (⌘) Combo's for Macs

In this post, I'd like to point out a few Mac keyboard commands that may speed up your browsing and editing. To use them, hold down the command (⌘) key and press the second key once.

Browsing: Stop and refresh:

⌘ + "." (a period–without quotation marks) = stop loading

⌘ + R = Refresh or Reload

Those two commands may be useful if:

• a webpage you're opening doesn't open as quickly as it should, or 
• a document or webpage you're viewing may have changed recently.

Editing: Select, copy and paste:

⌘ + A = select All

⌘ + C = Copy selection

⌘ + V = paste here

In general, you can use the similar commands on other operating systems that have a control (ctrl) key instead of a command (⌘) key.

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VocabKitchen: Awesome Vocab. Profilers!

http://vocabkitchen.com/Default.aspx

VocabKitchen's Academic Word List (AWL) Vocabulary Profiler (beta version) is already awesome! It quickly highlighted, listed, and sorted on- and off-list vocabulary in sample texts. It also was "dictionary enabled," which means you can get Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online definitions of almost any words by double-clicking on them (not a name like Tanaka). Though the percentages of on- and off-list words for the first sample I tried didn't add up (7% + 101%, respectively), text and highlight colours were easy to read on the white background.

VocabKitchen's General Service List (GSL) Vocabulary Profiler (beta version) performed similarly well on the same sample. Highlighting, listing and sorting was speedy, but again the percentages didn't add up (see below). It's still a quick, cool, easy-to-use tool. However, VocabKitchen's choice of tint for highlighting words in in the GSL 2nd 1K (RGB: 48, 152, 204) offered slightly less background-to-text contrast than had the AWL Vocabulary Profiler's on-list colour (especially when used on a grey heading bar), and the location of the sort button in the GSL-beta profiler differed for off-list words.

VocabKitchen's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Vocabulary Profiler was available in both a beta and a regular version. The main differences seemed to be that 1) the CEFR-beta version was "dictionary enabled" like the AWL-beta profiler, and 2) the CEFR-beta version also provided an Export to Word function. Nevertheless, background-to-text contrast, at least for B1 level words and corresponding headings (RGB: 249, 154, 0), seemed a bit problematic.

On the CEFR-beta display, VocabKitchen avoided the low-contrast problem on grey header bars by using a shade close to black (RGB: 34, 34, 34). Something closer to black (0, 0, 0) might be even better!

VocabKitchen (also in beta), please keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to trying out the Social Reader Tool. In the mean time, I'll strive to cut down on off-list words–at least on this blog!

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PaperRater Grammar and Spelling Check

"PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing" (About PaperRater, ¶1, 2014.03.04).

Screen snapshot of graphic on the PaperRater site

This post frames a comment that I posted today on the Digital Mobile Language Learning blog (Writing Tools for the Self-directed Learner Part 2, 2014.01.19), after trying out PaperRater, which provides, among other free services:

• Spelling and grammar checks,
• Style and word choice analyses, and
• Readability statistics (PaperRater: Features).

After trying a Google+ post that was too short to ... [get] feedback on many of the categories, I gave Paper Rater (PR) another spin on a working paper I ... [had written] a while back. The whole paper turned out to be too long for free assessment, so I cut the sample back to the end of the first section: 719 words per PR's count, 777 per Microsoft® Word 2008 for Mac. 

PR results, as Dan [Ferreira] suggested they would be, were quite interesting: 

+/- The spell check flagged one word apparently broken in the PDF from which I'd copied the sample, but also returned a false positive on the word conflate.  

+ Grammatical analysis revealed no errors. 

+ The numerical score for inappropriate word choices was, I guess, low (0.998). 

+/- The feedback on style in the web display focused mostly on sentence length (the longest: 53 words), but mistakenly indicated that more than half of the sentences were passive. I checked by hand, but found only one passive clause–in a quotation. 

-/+ Though the feedback on style in the PDF output was different, focusing on transition words, the PDF included general tips for using such words. 

+/- The vocabulary score seemed high (96), yet the feedback included only a subset (9 of 20) sophisticated words counted. Paper Rater did not mark such words in the sample. 

The numeric grade from the auto-grader bore a note to the effect that it was "based on [a] college grading scale," which was followed by a stronger one indicating that PR "does NOT examine the meaning of your words, how your ideas are structured, or how well your arguments are supported" [(Auto Grader, NOTE, ¶1)].

All in all, PR looks like it's worth asking students to try, as long as they can grasp its limitations.

I'm looking forward to trying it out with students soon.

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Schedule for the end of the semester

Below is a recap. of the schedule that I announced in class on Wed., Jan 22.

Fri., Jan. 24th: due date for –

• Bibliographies, 
• Portfolio Elements (PEs: including Book Reviews and Essays), and 
• Portfolios (PFs) per se.

Wed. Jan. 29th: Exams on special schedule (one-hour time periods)

Fri., Jan. 31st: Last day for blog posts (other than Book Reviews and Essays) and peer-to-peer comments

Sat., Feb. 1st: due date for January Proto-Portfolio (PPF) entries.

If you have concerns or questions about any part of this schedule, please spell them out in comments on this post at least 24-48 hours before the dates in question.

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Check out the eBooks @ KGU!

The link below is from the KGU Library site, eJournal[s]/eBook[s] page. It's supposed to point to EBSCO Host listings of a number of Macmillan LanguageHouse ebooks in the university library, 63 as of Oct. 2013 (KGU Library, 電子ジャーナル/電子ブック, 電子ブック).

• http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?profile=ehost&defaultdb=nlebk

However, Mr. T. informed me that "you have to be on our wireless or be using a computer hooked up to the KGU network" (personal correspondence, 2013.11.15). So the next time you're there, I suggest that you check it out.

If you find there are more ebooks (from more publishers) on the EBSCO host list, please post a comment to let everyone know how many (and which publishers) are currently listed.

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Prep. for exams in §§ 1A § 1C

At the end of class yesterday (July 10), one of your classmates asked what she could do to prepare for the exam on July 24. 

I told her, as I had told students who had asked earlier (about early exams for students heading overseas) that some previous exam items are accessible online in my Slideshare presentation library, which in turn is accessible from a gadget in the Writing Studio Blog (WSBlog) sidebar. That gadget, which is quite a ways down the WSBlog sidebar (currently on the right), looks like this:

All of you are welcome to review previous test items on Slideshare, as well as your predecessors' responses to them on the Writing Studio Blog. Please keep in mind, however, that:

1. Not all previous exams are in that library;
2. New exam items _will_ be different; and
3. Exam formats may vary.

To find out more about previous exams in Writing III (and IV), it also would be a good idea to speak with your predecessors in person. Then I suggest that you share what you learn from them, and prepare jointly for exams with classmates or peers in §§ 1A or 1C. To get started, please tell your classmates and peers about this post!

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