Joyrite - More essays in less time

The LT-Innovate Summit will bring together all major players involved in Language Technology (LT) such as policy makers, vendors and corporates, experts and investors, enhancing the visibility of the fragmented European LT landscape and establishing LT as a key enabling technology for Europe.

Joyrite will be in Brussels in June.

The LT-Innovate Summit will bring together all major players involved in Language Technology (LT) such as policy makers, vendors and corporates, experts and investors, enhancing the visibility of the fragmented European LT landscape and establishing LT as a key enabling technology for Europe.

Joyrite will be there! 

LAUNCH is hosting a two-day conference focused on education, both K12 and higher ed, kid-centric startups and innovation on June 12th & 13th, 2012 at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View. LAUNCH Education & Kids will showcase how technology is improving education and changing the way we all learn.

This is such an interesting piece by Michael Feldstein that I almost fell off my chair when reading it. What he’s describing is almost exactly what we’re doing at Joyrite. We combine teachers’ strengths with those of algorithms and those of experts and crowds. I often – half-jokingly – refer to it as creating the bionic teacher.

Wish we could have a one-on-one exchange some day.

Scaling essay assessment: exactly what fascinates me, too. 
If you want to go for quality feedback, you won’t be able to cut out human beings completely for a while yet. What I advocate is a hybrid model to alleviate teachers’ work. In this model we make use of technology for the routine part, expert sourcing to offload work peaks to external assessors and crowdsourcing to use massive distribution. The actual teacher will be able to choose for each assignment in which aspects she/he wants to remain involved. How does that sound?

Werkdruk van leraren te hoog door correctiewerk: dat kan ook niet goed zijn voor leerlingen… Bij +Joyrite @joyrite proberen we ECHT wat te doen aan de werkdruk van leraren door ze met goed gereedschap sneller te maken bij het nakijken van opstellen e.d. Wist je al dat een leraar 200-400 uur per jaar kwijt is aan correctiewerk?

So I’m fascinated by bionic technology. Big deal! Don’t you think the best technology is found in ideas intended to enhance people’s lives by taking away barriers and making them more aware or more productive?

The Six Million Dollar man has been the icon I’ve been using for a while now when I’m asked to explain what Joyrite does.  Especially investors tend to ask startups to define themselves in terms of another company or product. MaxClass might say they are the Facebook for schools, for example. But Joyrite isn’t reduced as easily, so I chose to explain us as a bionic eye (find the issues) and arm (write the comments) for teachers in their work to mark essays. Apart from the eye and arm, I also want to show that Joyrite is not about replacing teachers but about helping them help students.

Any better ideas to describe us? Let me know in the comments.

With all due respect for Khan, ShowMe is probably a stronger concept for the future. They’re less dependent on one great content producer but are a real platform. Also: easier model to internationalize.

Grading essays automatically sounds like a silver bullet, but does it solve the problem it set out to? 

In this article the initial angle is that essays are the best way to see whether a student understands a subject. I would call this content evaluation. What most automatic essay scoring services do, however, is help teachers to evaluate students’ writing skills, an important skill by itself. Let’s not confuse the two.

Link to the actual report, which also documents teacher shortages in the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, Germany and the UK. 

@Joyrite zegt: daar doen we wat aan!

De Europese Commissie ziet dat er een lerarentekort is in een aantal landen, waaronder Nederland, Duitsland, Turkije en België. Met de juiste ICT hulpmiddelen (gericht op het ontlasten van de docent) kunnen we daar natuurlijk best iets aan doen!

The Hewlett Foundation are focusing on the right problem (students don’t get enough writing practice due to costs) but they came up with the wrong solution (fully automating essay grading) in their search for a silver bullet. Why not aim at speeding up teachers’ grading by providing them with the right tools? We try at @joyrite but there are others, too.

willrichardson:

A couple of items from the world of writing and assessment have been niggling at me of late.

First, news that the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring a $100,000 competition to create automated essay scoring software that, in theory at least, will do as good or better job of assessing student…

Prima idee, maar is DWDD een goed podium voor technische startups?

alexandernl:

DWDD wil iedere maand 3 tot 5 startups de kans geven hun plan te komen pitchen.

Een enorme kans, maar we leggen de lat hoog! Je maakt de meeste kans als je:

• je plan concreet, duidelijk en snel uit kan leggen. Binnen dertig seconden.
• je plan toelicht met een voor de kijker herkenbare…

Vinod Khosla has finished his series on how technology will disrupt society further, especially in health and education. He’s extremely optimistic in this piece on how technology will partially take over from teachers (although he gives teachers a role for socialisation of students).

I agree with his enthusiasm for improvement but I think he should have talked to more teachers for knowledge on content. I also think we could get more results in the near future by focusing first on teacher-assisting technologies. In the process we’ll learn so much that we’ll be able to create more complete standalone solutions.