Rebooting Revision: Leveraging Technology to Deliver Formative and Summative Feedback

2. Defining The Digital Feedback Protocol

Advancements in technology and the rise of the “app”—short for an application built to optimally function on digital devices—affords English professors an array of tools to call upon to assess the writings of their students. However, today, writing is much different from what it was when many of our professors were in college. Now, most college papers are written on a computer, not paper; essays are now turned in via e-mail, not attached by paperclips and plopped down on a desk at the beginning of class; peer reviews are managed using collaborative digital technology like MyReviewers, not in small groups; and conversations between professors and students are increasingly conducted via voice-over-Internet-protocols like SKYPE, not the old twentieth century mode of the telephone. Moreover, because technology is affordable and easily accessible to most, devices like Apples’s iPad have changed how we access textbooks and how English departments across this nation are experimenting with knowledge transfer and adaptive learning technology. Indeed, even the very idea of what constitutes text has changed. Concerning textbooks specifically, in the past textbooks were bound objects of static information complimented by two-dimensional images, but today’s digital textbooks are haptically responsive, multi-modal, and to an increasing degree customizable. Professors can use technology, when soundly selected and cleverly employed, to better assess the writing abilities of, and promote good revision practices among, their students. But what is a digital feedback protocol? And how do English professors manage such protocols amid a constantly shifting backdrop of new technologies?