A stitching template has been created for students who are interested in presenting their work in a web page. It is based on the Gibbs model of reflective writing and has been made for the Introduction to Online Communication & Technology module, although the template could be used for any module.

The starting point (critical incident) was a student's draft stitching that used an alternative to the usual essay format. Constructive criticism showed that the layout was complicated to get right in a Word document, although I could see the possibility for presenting as a web page. A promising tool seemed to be the KEEP toolkit, which is based on Plone technology, supported by the Carnegie Foundation, and can be fun in a geeky kind of way. It is free. I first constructed a test page, using the draft stitching. The next step was to use what I had discovered about creating a useful layout to make a template.
http://www.cfkeep.org/users/baltr/stitching

I posted both the test page and the template to the learning community in FirstClass. The web page (snapshot) could be downloaded as an archive. More experienced web page creators could use the archive (zip) as a template, less experienced users would find it easier to work in a KEEP account, and complete beginners would probably want to throw a brick at me :-)

Initial responses have shown me that some students are excited enough to consider trying out the Keep toolkit. I think I'll see if I can post the html code into a blog entry - for this I think I will use one of my other blogs.

The 2008-9 cover sheets, provided in the Appendix D of the module guides, requests a list of file names for the module portfolio. This has been a learning episode for some students, as the file names need to match the files uploaded. A typical list from the first module, Investigating the Work Setting, is shown below:

Although acceptable in the first semester of the course, an improvement would be to use the conventions suggested in the guidance for presentation of work for assessment. The conventions derive from suggestions by the external examiner, who sees work at levels 2 and 3 of the course.

Most spelling and keyboard errors are easily dealt with using automated spell checkers and I'm always a bit surprised when undergraduates haven't used them. Faculty guidance suggests that at Level 1 every error in a student's written work should be pointed out but by level 3 undergraduates are expected to deal with errors independently.

Assessment takes into account the standard of written English and although the BA Learning, Technology and Research degree promotes the exploration of audio and visual media, despite all encouragement most undergraduates fall back on Word documents to present text-based reports. A few still do not use the integrated grammar and spelling check, perhaps because they have left no time to check their work before the deadline. More serious is the problem for those who have checked, but failed to recognise some commonly mis-spelt words which would not be automatically detected.

effect/affect fare/fair their/there cited/sited where/were

Looking for online advice from universities, I was surprised not to see more as its a very common problem. There's a good site called Spelling Tips from Students and others, from Middlesex University. I'm not surprised that this is a lively area, and a good example of user-generated study support.

The FirstClass client spell check options can be set via the Preferences menu.