Blog

• Conferences and conversations

  As director of Digital Thoreau and a board member of The Thoreau Society, I'm helping the Society experiment with opening access to, and broadening the conversation around, the proceedings of its Annual Gathering, as I explain here.

• A workflow for grading and assessment in Google docs

  In 2002, I stopped accepting papers and began requiring all students to send me their writing by email. Over the following decade, I developed and continually tweaked a workflow through which I corrected errors, responded to ideas, and made suggestions for stylistic improvement using Microsoft Word's editing and commenting tools. In my comments, I also incorporated hyperlinks to the writing guide that my colleague Celia Easton and I had thrown up on the web — using Netscape Composer for the first iteration — a few years earlier.