Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia
Actually, the Sony Reader will read doc -- it automatically converts it to rtf.
I'm an academic and I do receive essays via email and the electronic Blackboard system. A new problem is that some students submit coursework in docx. This will require conversion. (And some colleagues have had difficulty with this.)
I prefer to print the essays, so that I can put ticks and comments directly adjacent to the relevant paragraph. I've got colleagues who make comments on a pc and email/print them. This may well work for some topics, but I'm not convinced that it's the best for all types of essay. I teach philosophy and often have essays consisting of detailed analysis, where it is important to highlight exactly which step in an argument is debatable.
Also, I like to correct grammatical errors and typos. This is quickly done on paper but could take a lot longer if I were to note and correct each one in a separate document.
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Our students will also be submitting through Blackboard. We are striving for a paper-free system so are trying to avoid printing anything out. I agree there could be potential difficulties with linking comments to certain parts of a (long) document, and moderators might have problems if they need to to side-to-side comparisons of essays (unless they use 2 e-readers of course...). My current idea is to try and bid for a number of different e-readers to evaluate their suitability (rather than x number of the same model).