STUDENT RESOURCES
LANGUAGE - WRITING - EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
Below are some great learning resources that I have collected for college writing students and anyone seeking to improve their English writing, grammar, and citation skills.
This page is intended to be a continual work in progress, so please bear with me as I add more "goodies" here over time.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) & WRITING
What is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment analysis uses Natural Language Processing to analyze text and determine whether the sentiment of the text is positive, negative, or neutral. This can help writers convey their messages in the right style or tone.
Sentiment Analysis Tool
Sentiment analysis models generally report two key outputs for sentiment: polarity and subjectivity.
Polarity measures whether the text is positive, negative, or neutral. -1.0 indicates a very negative sentiment, 0 indicates a neutral sentiment, and 1.0 indicates a very positive sentiment.
Subjectivity measures how opinionated or objective the text appears, providing scores ranging between zero to one. 0 indicates that the tone is very objective, and 1.0 indicates that the tone is very subjective (opinionated).
Check Media Bias
ENGLISH GRAMMAR / SENTENCE STRUCTURE / PHONETICS
Lessons:
- Towson University - OWS
Videos:
- SMRT English
Games:
- ESL Games World
ACADEMIC WRITING & USAGE / MECHANICS
Lessons:
- Grammar Bytes! Instruction with Attitude
Videos:
- Writing for College (my YouTube Channel)
Games:
COLLEGE WRITING & RESEARCH
Lessons:
Videos:
- David Taylor - Peak Writing
Games:
- Goblin Threat! - APA In-text Citations
PODCASTS:
New Tech; Old Problems: It's not GPT, It's the Essay, Stupid!
Description: Molded by pedagogical goals, technological advancements, and cultural shifts, the evolution of the essay has resulted in an increasingly challenging landscape for academic integrity in higher education. Although the essay format was originally intended to promote objective assessment and individual development in higher education, the evolution of the essay itself and the impact of emerging technologies such as AI have paradoxically contributed to increased standardization and the evaluation of form over substance, inadvertently contributing to essay writing as a conduit for plagiarism and blurring lines of authorship between student writing and AI-generated text. NOTE: This AI-generated "podcast" was created from an original article that I am currently working on for publication, using Google NotebookLM. Intertextuality and Writing in Higher Education Description: This is a synthesis of two articles by two prominent researchers in the field of plagiarism detection in higher education, "The Ethics of Teaching Rhetorical Intertextuality" (Howard & Jamieson, 2021) and "Rethinking the Relationship between Plagiarism and Academic Integrity" (Jamieson & Howard, 2019). References: Howard, R. M., & Jamieson, S. (2021). The ethics of teaching rhetorical intertextuality. Journal of Academic Ethics, 19(3), 385-405.
Jamieson, S., & Howard, R. M. (2019). Rethinking the relationship between plagiarism and academic integrity. Revue internationale des technologies en pédagogie universitaire, 16(2), 69-85. Prompt Engineering Description: This podcast episode provides a guide on how to write effective prompts for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. It outlines the five key characteristics of effective AI prompts - Task, Context, Audience, Tone, and Specificity (T-CATS) - and emphasizes that clear and specific prompts lead to more informative and relevant responses from AI systems. The document provides several examples of weak and strong prompts, highlighting how improving clarity, context, and focus can significantly enhance the quality of AI output. One of my favorite songwriters, Natalia Lafourcade:
These articles explore the fraught relationship between academic integrity and the use of outside sources in student writing, distinguishing between intentional plagiarism, such as academic ghostwriting or contract cheating, and unintentional textual errors like patchwriting or faulty citation. While intentional cheating can be seen as a serious violation of academic integrity, the authors suggest that unintentional errors should be treated as writing problems that need to be addressed through pedagogy rather than punishment by teaching students to engage with sources rhetorically, understand the context and value of the information, and develop their ability to synthesize information from multiple sources - not unlike this podcast. The authors advocate for a pedagogical approach that emphasizes rhetorical intertextuality, fostering a dialogic relationship between writer, sources, and audience, and helping students develop the skills to use sources effectively and ethically.
BONUS VIDEO!