The COMARKER Development Blog
Working Towards Solving the Problem of Marking Essays
The COMARKER™ Development Blog
As teachers of academic writing we wanted marking essays to be easier on ourselves and our students. COMARKER is our solution. COMARKER makes it easy for instructors to make comments on written documents. COMARKER remembers our comments and shares them with every marker using the system, so we never again have to type the same comment twice, and our wisdom grows through collaboration. Already we see the power of collaboration making our own marking easier. This blog records our challenges and our progress as we develop COMARKER for everyone.
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Last week Brian Panulla, one of our Flex developers, flew up to Vancouver from Portland to meet with us about something we have been talking about since the summer: creating a a document standard for rubrics and a program that allows teachers to create, edit, and share those rubrics with their colleagues. The meetings were a resounding success, one of the several that have come out of the OpenEd 2009 conference in Vancouver last summer. In two days of meetings we hammered out the requirements, some user stories, and the basic architecture. Brian will begin iterating later this month, and if all goes well, we will have a working prototype in about two or three months.
More sophisticated prototypes are to follow
The rubric module will not just be for users of COMARKER™, but for teachers everywhere to create and share their rubrics. Of course, rubrics built with the new system will be fully interactive in COMARKER™, but since we are all about mass collaboration, everyone will be invited to share.
In developing the design of our application, we looked closely at other education sites, but more eagerly at successful RIAs like YOUTUBE and FACEBOOK. We felt that COMARKER’s generic appeal would work best if it broke away from currently available education sites and focused more in the zone of SOCIAL NETWORKING.
To capture our design perspective you need to take a look at our application, on which we have spent two years already. Your treatment of the commercial pages should prepare users to encounter the COMARKER application; thus certain design elements should be similar, if not exactly the same. In particular, color-palate choices should harmonize with our core metaphor.
When we describe the application as stripped down, we mean that we have avoided textures and stuck to basic tones. Most of our design critiques of the application resulted in REMOVING elements that were not ‘necessary’ and simplifying processes to make actual work smoother and easier. We aimed for the site to be visually attractive but simple, which of course is the most difficult of all tasks. Your approach to the commercial pages should be similarly ‘practical’ and minimal, and at the same time harmonious with the application.
COMARKER appeals to teachers. Now, I suspect that when most people think of teachers they think of aging (failed) intellectuals upholding dusty traditions, forcing children through dry textbooks toward state-imposed examinations. But COMARKER appeals to teachers, and teachers don’t see themselves as others see them. Instead, try to think of teachers the way they think of themselves.
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