Machine writing, one of the many new advancements within the last decade. Is it effective? Is it an accurate measurement of one's work? Personally, I do not believe that any of my work has been graded purely by a machine. Of course, all throughout highschool and even in college my writing gets submitted to Turnitin where the statistics of plagiarism is calculated. This obviously has an impact on grading if plagiarism is an issue, however other than that all of my essays to my knowledge have been scored by a physical person.
The article "Humans Fight Over Robo-Readers" offers a lot of insight into this new realm of technology. This article takes a deeper look regarding the argument that machines can grade papers just as effectively as people. It is thought that soon machines will be used to grade student's writing more widely. As a result of this, teachers will be teaching students how to write to the standards that are considered good to the robo-reader. This brings up concerns regarding the impact that this will have on children's writing skills and their learning. I completely agree that this could be very damaging to the way people are taught to write. People will continue to lose the true passion of writing and be taught to write to please a robot.
I experimented with Virtual Writing Tutor. Overall, I felt that the whole experience of it was very impersonal. Having feedback from a real teacher that knows you to a certain extent is completely different than these robo-readers. Technically speaking, the site worked fine and offered some valuable feedback. Personally, I would use this site to check technical things such as grammar and punctuation. I probably would not listen to the other feedback because I do not trust it. It was interesting to see how much information the site could take away from my writing, but I definitely question the accuracy.
I was really surprised to learn that robo-reading is becoming increasingly popular. I understand that technology is changing, but I do not feel that it is something that should be used all the time. It makes me curious to see how this will grow in the next decade and how it will impact students and the way they are taught.
