electro-textual

Whenever i glance over the shoulders of anyone on a computer in this place, i see red lines where they shouldn’t be.

Microsoft word telling people, “You’re wrong!”

“Neighbourhood House” gets a big red wiggly line.

Which for literacy students is frustrating, and for an anti-imperialist language purist like me is infuriating.

How hard is it for a tech department to set the default language to Local, ie Australian English??! Why should the tech department have to do it anyway.. microsoft knows everything about us, and we’ve told windows exactly where in the world the computer lives.

How hard is it for Word and Publisher to get this information automatically from Windoze??

Very very hard, it seems.

So how much more frustrating when i discover the same issue on my own computer.. and realise that i can’t even blame the tech department! It’s me who manages the errors on this machine.

Oops.

Now i genuinely can’t work out how to tell microsoft Publisher to set the default as Australian English.

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..and the other thing i hate (rant, rant, rant).. those green “grammar” lines. Some tech-head from microsoft telling our language and literacy students what good grammar is.

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Grrr.

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So how did your word processor irritate you today?

For the first stage of our project evaluation (the “flexivet” project for flexible delivery in ACE), we had paper-based evaluation forms. This was fine.. until i realised it meant i would be the one to input the data into a spreadsheet. Yawn.

So i’ve set up a form at google docs.. which inputs directly into the spreadsheet. We’ve embedded the form on the student wiki, and linked to it from all over the place.

Delightful!

Just a couple of problems..

1) Several students don’t realise they haven’t fully completed the form.. because the big red “You Haven’t Finished Yet” sign appears at the TOP of the form, a couple of scrolls up from where they submit. So all that feedback gets wasted.

Made a note near the “submit” button to let people know. Hope the language is accessible enough for English as a second language (ESL) learners.

2) Can’t seem to delete test responses from the hidden internal records that the google form is keeping in the background. Yes i’ve deleted test rows from the spreadsheet.. but they seem to stay in memory. Hmm.

Anyone have the answer to this one (2)?

English spelling is probably the worst nightmare of anyone involved in adult literacy – teachers and learners. The biggest challenge for any learner is to find out how they can learn: which strategies might work for each individual. i like spelling games, but i’ve yet to find the perfect example.

Recently Larry Ferlazzo reviewed a small program, “Take on the Teacher” ..it’s an interesting idea, with mixed results:

• => This one has a highly visual interface which is potentially engaging,
• => however it’s a strange characterisation of the teacher at the board (why pretend the visitor is challenging a teacher, when we are clearly taking on a computer program?)
• => and you’re right.. spelling programs need both audio and context (either visual or the classic “in a sentence”). Without context, words can have multiple meanings.. or be meaningless.

i was caught out on the word “baul”. i managed to select this word correctly as the incorrectly-spelled word.. but i was unsure if they wanted me to write “ball” or “bawl” as the correct version. Given that “tantrum” was in the list, i chose “bawl” (to cry loudly).

Wrong! Says the “teacher”. Surely a teacher would have more insight and flexibility than this machine script.

Dear reader, do you have any favourite screen-based spelling games? Applications that are less faulty than “take on the teacher”?

thanks and kind regards, michael

Links:

• Take on the Teacher Game, c/- someone in the UK (Scholastic? very hard to find their front page from this game)
• Larry Ferlazzo on “Learning Games“