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Gradecasting

Will has an interesting demonstration up at Weblogg-ed: a screencast feedback session on a piece of student writing.

One of the things that strikes me right away about this is how a potentially "overwhelming" amount of teacher markup is made in this process to look not like the proverbial "bleed" but rather itself a process. I've had a couple of different experiences with recorded audio feedback (both receiving and giving) on pieces of writing, but this seems like a different process entirely. The advantage of audio is that it allows a body to present much more nuance than marginal comments generally allow, but pairing it with the actual markup creates almost a "behind the scenes of teacher feedback" effect that I imagine would be very productive.

One of the things that I still struggle with is the whole writer/reader orientation. I know what I think about what I write, but I still sometimes grapple with understanding how a piece of my writing will unfold for a reader, and something like this really gets at that notion--it concretizes the experience of reading a piece of prose that develops over time.

I like it. That's all.

Comments

Collin, I saw this too and thought it was way cool. Kind of takes Elbow's old "movies-of-the-mind" thing to a whole new (literal) level, you know?
-Deb B.