About Eli
Eli was invented by writing teachers for writing teachers. It was invented by Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Michael McLeod, all faculty in the Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures department at Michigan State University and researchers in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center. The first version of Eli was designed and built entirely in-house at the research center in response to a challenge they were facing in teaching a series of business writing modules. The core challenge: how to foster (and teach) more review and revision cycles than current technologies and time allow.
Where Other Writing and Review Technologies Fall Short
Most writing software includes only limited review functionality. Review is seen only as a means to create the next version of a text. The “track changes” functionality in Microsoft Word, for example, only tracks direct edits made to a document and the original author can choose to “accept” or “reject” them. This can indeed contribute to the evolution of a text, but how does an editor know if her edits were used? How does an editor know if the comments were useful, and if not, how to make more useful comments/suggestions in the future? These are questions writing teachers ask. Most writing software – even software that includes review features – aren’t designed to help writers learn to be better reviewers.
The Power of Review Data
A screenshot of the review result in the original Eli prototype built at WIDE.
This absence left WIDE without a solution for preparing writers to be better reviewers, which forced them to build a tool of their own. Eli, their solution, thinks of review as an important and distinct artifact related to but separate from the texts they respond to. When building this understanding into Eli, Mike, Jeff, and Bill found that they could build a compelling picture of the writing process that they never anticipated:
- One review could be comprised of many texts
- Writers could offer direct feedback on reviews they received
- Qualitative responses in the forms of helpfulness ratings for feedback
- Quantitative responses in the form of direct responses to the writer of the feedback
- Teachers could use real-time data about the status and progress of a review to intervene in the writing process
- Peer feedback could be stored side-by-side with drafts and revisions, giving a thorough picture of the review process
Evidence-Based Learning
Most importantly, the dramatic amounts of data that could be gathered using this tool allowed the researchers to engage in a new kind of teaching that simply wasn’t possible for writing teachers before: evidence-based learning.
Built on Innovative Scholarship
The WIDE Research Center has done extensive work to develop the philosophies and methods behind review and Eli. They have produced scholarship to support their ideas as well as filed for patents on a number of the proprietary components that drive Eli.
William Hart-Davidson, Michael McLeod, Christopher Klerkx, and Michael Wojcik. 2010. A method for measuring helpfulness in online peer review. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 115-121. DOI=10.1145/1878450.1878470 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1878450.1878470
US Patent Application 61313106, “Social Writing Application Platform,” William Hart-Davidson, Michael McLeod, Jeffrey Grabill. Filed March 11, 2010.
US Patent Application 61313108, “Systems and Methods for Tracking and Evaluating Review Tasks,” William Hart-Davidson, Michael McLeod, Jeffrey Grabill. Filed March 11, 2010.