4-skills | Thomas' Work Space

How to compare two MS-Word documents for plagiarism detection

2013/11/14 plagwitz 2 comments

You could start with the document properties
1. some students leave even the author and editing time in. However, author does not prove any wrong doing, a student may have borrowed a laptop, including its MS-word installation, to author a document and submit it
2. It may actually be more of an indicator of something illicit if document properties are empty.
3. Students have likely used the “Document inspector”:
  1. (1): File / (2) Info, (3) view the properties (this document looks like it had its privacy information removed), you can use (4) to view even more.
  2. to remove all privacy relevant information, like so: (5) unfold “check for issues”, (6) “inspect document””,
  3. in the window: “document inspector”, click , you will be given the option to “remove all”personal information:
4. However, removing personal information can be perfectly legitimate, unless something else was assigned. And it does not help plagiarizers cover their tracks anyway, for…
…there is the more substantial “compare” documents feature which (even though it was developed for the legal profession, as blackline) tracks what really counts: content changes.
1. Access it form the ribbon’s “review” tab:
2. point the tool to your 2 documents:
3. make your life easier by selecting on the “review” tab to view only content changes (formatting comparisons is noise for plagiarism detection):
4. You get a handy (here blurred, but still demonstrating the amount of similarity (=black), compared with changes (= blue), between the 2 documents ) overview of (from the left)
  1. list of changes
  2. view of changes in a merged document (which you can save)
  3. original document
  4. secondary (likely plagiarized) document:
  5. The feature is nice, but only moderately intelligent (see the first match, I would obviously not count that as substantially different) and best used with discretion, to make it easier for a teacher to decide how likely it is that these similarities are accidental.
  6. In this instance, even if the teacher questions are not counted, it seems obvious that only minor alterations were made to the original document and many responses, including quite lengthy sentences, are entirely the same.
  7. While this *is* an instructional use, you can find happier instructional uses of MS-Word’s reviewing/tracking changes feature here.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, e-learning, office-software, service-is-assessing, Writing Tags: comparing, FAQs, MS-Word, plagiarism, reviewing, track-changes

How to create screencasts of student presentations for the language learner ePortfolio in the digital audio lab

2013/11/08 plagwitz Leave a comment

Students can now easily video-record their own screens during class presentations – not only when using PowerPoint; instead students could demo a website, like their Facebook page.
Last year, we were limited to PowerPoint’s record slideshow with timing and narration feature, and either send the PPSX (small, but requires the PowerPoint viewer) or the “Save as” video (new in PowerPoint 2010; computing intensive and large file size).
Now with MS-Community Clips, screencasts are
1. minimal effort to create (keyboard shortcut WIN+ALT+R or T; save on desktop; drag/drop into Sanako homework folder)
2. and little effort to distribute:
  1. Students could have uploaded to a Moodle’ file upload assignment (default file size limit: 64MB) or Kaltura file upload assignment (not sure whether there is a size limit). This seems more suitable for assignments with screencasts recordings.
  2. In this instance
    1. Sanako collected the Homework files to the Sanako share,
    2. my langlabemailer emailed them as attachment (so far tested to allow for 25MB attachment size, the equivalent of 7-8 minute screencast, a hefty space to fill in L2! We also established: 45MB is too much… ) to the originating student and teacher, for review, grading –
  3. and – provided it passes muster as an attractive and significant piece – possibly for re-use in the student’s language learner ePortfolio.
In addition,
1. Before the presentations, the teacher easily collaborated on proof-reading the slide decks of individual students, by using the Sanako Remote control screen sharing feature.
2. During the presentation, students followed more closely – which seemed to increase their attention and comprehension -, thanks to audio and screen being shared to them from the presenter, using the Sanako’s “Model student” feature.

How to workaround AntWordProfiler error “Cannot open the file”

2013/11/07 plagwitz Leave a comment

Seems a little bug in this otherwise great program. I started getting this on Windows 7 64-bit with
for all files, no matter which size.
It occurred to me to go to menu: Settings/ global settings / file settings / show full pathnames
Here is what you see: Note the duplicate path to the file.
How did I get there? Seems like you cannot take my usual preferred shortcut and paste the full file path into the browse dialogue.
If I browse to the file and select, the same botched up double path does not appear:
I can then process the file fine.

Categories: corpora, e-languages, English, Reading, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging, Vocabulary Tags: antwordprofiler, word-frequencies

Dead key behavior could be more intuitive in MS US-International keyboard layout…

2013/11/04 plagwitz Leave a comment

…from a good source on writing international characters on the MS platform. After having to explain around dead key behavior hundreds of times, I’d definitely sign the proposed petition to make it more intuitive (= temporarily revive the dead, show something!). The suggestion in the comments to move more languages to full-blown IME’s seems also interesting.

Categories: e-languages, Writing Tags: foreign-language-character-input, us-international

Proposing for a free Moodle audio recorder: Technical options and faculty needs survey results

2013/10/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

Current popular options for a free Moodle audio recorder:

Nanogong is a popular, feature-rich and simple recorder that go entangled in the recent java politics and security scares. Since the company has a non-free offering, chances are higher it will get updated to address these security warnings. It seems the long-term outlook for java in the enterprise is excellent, but i cannot judge the long term outlook for java as a client/in-browse solution.
Poodle which played the 2nd fiddle to Nanogong for most of the time, seems to have caught up to Nanogong based on the above. that it is "server based" – but on theirs, not ours – Poodle has a freemium business model (could be an issue). Does this include the audio compression load? Does this have FERPA implications (and can they be resolved like with Kaltura)?
Paul Nicholls has a number of flash-based popular audio recorder plugins , where record assignment submission seems to have superseded record assignment type for newer versions of Moodle, and assignment type offers student recording, while Record Audio repository complements this with teacher recording (and the same interface; i am not sure i understand which end user setup is required for repository).

In the results of faculty survey on learning needs (sum of 0-centered Likert-scale), I find notable

that teacher recording is considered almost as vital as student recording, and
that most faculty even would be willing to deal with some complexity for the additional learning features that some of these recorders offer (Nanogong especially).

Question_text	Rank
It is important that my students can record their speech in my Moodle course (without need for separate software and file upload).	14
It is important that the setup work that the teacher has to do before being able to assign audio recorder is minimal.	13
It is that the teacher can record her voice in Moodle (without need for separate software and file upload), providing oral instead of written cues or feedback.	11
Simplicity is more important to me than feature richness (controlling volume, limiting the amount of time a student can record, maximum number of recordings, Recordings can be slowed down or sped up , Peer review of recordings).	7
I expect my students to have a microphone connected to or built-in to their home computer.	5
It is important that other media than audio can be "recorded" (video (outside of Kaltura), webcam snapshots, whiteboard drawings).	5

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, Listening, lms, multimedia-recording, Speaking Tags: audio, moodle, nanogong, poodle

How can I configure my PC to write in Arabic

2013/10/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

In Windows past XP, you can just choose – without first installing support for Right-to-left languages – by pressing +R, typing ïntl.cpl”, clicking ”OK”, clicking ”keyboards and languages”and “change keyboard”.
An Arabic keyboard layout that is commonly preferred by Westerners (closer to the phonetic layout of the keyboard) is a separate download: https://thomasplagwitz.com/2013/01/06/imrans-phonetic-keyboard-for-arabic/
A transliterating IME (type on a Western keyboard sounds as you speak, pick suggestions in Arabic letters from a dropdown menu).
1. Popular choices are Google Input Arabic: http://www.google.com/inputtools/windows/
2. Microsoft Maren: offers more, also morphological analysis. Transliteration tool is linked at the bottom of this post: https://thomasplagwitz.com/2011/06/09/ms-maren-morph-helps-read-arabic-web-pages/ .

Categories: Arabic, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Writing Tags: charinput, FAQs, ms-windows

How a teacher can use NanoGong’s plugin for the HTML editor to easily send their own audio to students

2013/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

The rich HTML editor recorder plug-in is supposed to make it easier for the teacher (than other recorders that require the teacher to save to file and upload the file to a Moodle activity). Here is how it can work:
Add an activity which includes the rich HTML editor plugin, e.g. a page.
Click on the loudspeaker icon denotes NanoGong among the editor tools.
A window will open that includes the recorder JAVA applet (you may have to bypass Java warnings):
Click the red record button and speak.
When done, click insert.
Result:
Note, however, that so far I have run into issues actually displaying this teacher-added NanoGong recorder content.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, Listening, lms, multimedia-recording, recording-software Tags: audio, moodle, nanogong

How to use NanoGong in your Moodle course as an audio file recorder

2013/10/17 plagwitz Leave a comment

NanoGong is primarily meant for submitting audio recordings to the teacher and fellow students.
However, it can also serve as a simple audio recorder that can save a recording to a files:
1. accessible anywhere where you have internet access (on a JAVA-capable device. I have not tested NanoGong’s compatibility with smartphones or tablets, though) and a microphone – provided you/your teacher have added a NanoGong activity to the Moodle Course.
2. Might be useful for collecting recordings as pieces for your language learner ePortfolios.
To use NanoGong as an audio recorder: Instead of (or on top of/before) submitting your recording to the course, click the rightmost button: :
1. and you can save your recording to a file
2. ,
3. in a variety of formats (compressed WAV is likely most compatible),
4. including in the different speeds: that you de/increased the playback speed here: .