~~~ ongoing thanks to Committee for Applied Instructional Technologies, the Office of Instructional Support and Development, and the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, without whom, not! ~~~
I m a g i n
i n g
~~~ ongoing
thanks to Committee for Applied Instructional Technologies, the Office of Instructional
Support and Development, and the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, without
whom, not! ~~~
|
10 m. Nelson Hilton |
10 m. Ron Balthazor |
10 m. Alexis Hart |
10 m. Christy Desmet |
 Bob Cummings |
 Angela Mitchell |
ubique Jason Rosenberg |
<paragraph>
The University now makes the strategic assumption that<quotation>[t]he revolution in learning, teaching, research, service and communications created by information technology has already begun to transform both the practice of and planning for higher education. It is anticipated that higher education will change more over the next decade than it has over the past millennia. <source>[www.uga.edu/strategicplanning/part3/9.html]</source></quotation>Undergraduates recognize already that writing today differs far from the undertaking it was prior to the information technology revolution; they enter the University assuming that research is done on the Internet and text is processed on a <subliminalpriming nucleus="engcomp">computer. Documents are "engineered" as much as "Englished," and, increasingly, composed</subliminalpriming> of bits of multi-media content. 'Grammar,' the organizing of grammata, 'letters,' demands a new kind of programmer. But while word processing is now the norm, we have thus far lacked tools to deal with digital documents across their life-cycle. For much the most part, it is still "papers" that are due. Emerging technologies which utilize markup languages enable a fundamental shift in the very nature of the production, examination, and distribution of text. Moreover, markup serves to relate the heretofore incommensurate structures of narrative argument and database, with profound implications for our conceptions of the organization and articulation of knowledge. <thesis>The combination of databases and XML markup we are working to create would facilitate peer revision, enrich individual and longitudinal textual analysis, and enhance pedagogy generally throughout the program and the university.</thesis> Most text in the coming generation, even academic writing, will be electronic, and the degree to which it will be useful to the reader will in good measure be a function of its markup.
</paragraph>
The 'paragraph mark' represents an early instance of mark-up. Originally it was just a line, |,drawn in the margin of continuously running text parallel with the line in which a new concept began. From one it became two, ||, then added the memnonic suggestion of a reversed 'P.' The mark in a manuscript told the typesetter to indent, creating the convention which is almost invisible to readers of print. The computer, our new typesetter, has also to be told how to format, hence the '<P>' tag in HTML. Note that this particular tag involves both presentation or format and the structure or description of the argument. In an environment of many formats (print, variable resolution monitors, artificial speech) it is the adequate representation of latter which ensures the ability to export a document. As Dmitry Kirsanov puts it: "descriptive markup reveals the immaterial soul of a document so than any program or person can then conveniently incarnate it into a body of choice." 'Generalized Markup Language' (GML), developed by Goldfarb, Mosher, and Lorie, at IBM in the late 1960s begat Goldfarb's 'Standardized General Markup Language' (SGML), which was recognized by the International Organization for Standardization in 1986 as ISO 8879:1986. SGML is notoriously user-unfriendly ("Sounds Good! Maybe Later ... "). In creating graphical hypertext browsing in 1992, Tim Berners-Lee used SGML to develop a tiny subset called 'Hyper Text Markup Language' (HTML) whose basics could be learned by anyone in an hour. But no sooner did the WWW arrive as the killer-app in 1995 than astute users realized that HTML's almost exclusively presentational orientation was a tremendous limitation to computer exchange and searching of data. Hence 'eXtensible Markup Language' (XML), designed to be the 20% of SGML that is used more that 80% of the time.
narrative+database, presentation+description
The ability to 'extend' markup to whatever document features may be of interest joins with the power of the computer to create the possibility that all student compositions could participate in a combined searchable and variously retrievable corpus. Such a possibile corpus, which would include a user's ability to share a document for peer editing, submit it for evaluation, revise and resubmit it in response to evaluation, and maintain it in a user-specific portfolio, raises ("non-trivial") issues for the management of such a system. Issues of security, authentification, levels of access, redundancy, search time, and display options are just some of the concerns for the management side of the application.
The key point here is that EMMA is an ensemble, a suite of technologies working together to create an application whose overall possibility is greater than the sum of its components.
