Asko Kauppinen

Automated Feedback in a Blended Learning Environment: Student Experience and Development

Nowadays, e-platforms designed specifically to cater for academic writing offer a new range of feedback possibilities for instructors. On our writing courses we use automated feedback, that is, metalinguistic comments generated within the e-platform on skill-building assignments in the form of multiple-choice exercises pertaining to the surface-level features of writing: grammar, punctuation, and citation conventions. In this chapter we explore the impact that automated feedback has on student experience of learning and development of skills pertaining to these features from beginner to advanced courses. Some of the key features of automated feedback which we consider are immediacy, metalinguistic explanations, and links to additional readings and exercises. We suggest that surface-level features can successfully be taught as part of academic writing courses, but the focus should be on improving writing fluency rather than language proficiency. Automated feedback on surface-level features is a particularly successful form of feedback on both our beginner and intermediate courses, but it performs less successfully on our advanced-level courses.

Art for integration: political rationalities and technologies of governmentalisation in the city of Malmö

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.

Building interdisciplinary bridges : MUCH : The Malmö University-Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing as a Process

This paper describes a corpus of writing as a process (MUCH), comprising English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student texts. The corpus will contain a large number of richly annotated papers in several versions from students of different performance levels. It will also include peer and instructor feedback, as well as tools for visualising the revision process, and for analysing the writing process and the peer and instructor feedback. MUCH will make it possible to study how texts develop and change in the course of the writing process and how feedback impacts the process.