Invited Talk – @billhd at @LiberalArtsUT
Our own Bill Hart-Davidson will be giving an invited talk about Eli Review on September 28 at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. From their website:
The Department of Rhetoric and Writing will be hosting a lecture given by Michigan State University’s Professor Hart-Davidson on Eli Review, an online peer review and writing support tool that he helped to invent. The lecture will be held in Parlin 104 at 3pm on Wednesday, September 28.
And here is the abstract Bill prepared for the talk:
Work on the software service Eli Review started nearly ten years ago at the WIDE research center where I was studying the way people who must communicate well to be successful at work continue to learn on the job. While investigating the changing nature of work in digital environments, our team saw strong parallels with the challenges we faced helping students learn to write in our own classrooms. Eli represents our effort to bring what we learned about knowledge workers and organizations back to the classroom. We built a resource that uses the computational and networking capacity of a digital learning space to provide feedback to teachers and students in real time. The result is a chance for peer learning, a difficult process to monitor in real time due to the way it is distributed in time and space, to be more explicitly evidence-based and effective.
Today, Eli is used around the world and across the U.S. in K-12 schools and higher education. Early in 2016, we celebrated the 50,000th active learner in Eli. Our work to improve the service continues, with recent efforts including the use of machine-learning algorithms designed to enhance the feedback instructors and students see. Our efforts in this area represent a deliberate contrast with those creating automated grading, plagiarism detection, or text generation systems. We remain strictly focused on building the best learning environment we can, providing computational resources to enhance and extend our inherently human capacity to learn from one another.
Additional details can be found on the Department of Rhetoric and Writing events page.
