Eric Baber's blog

Interesting. Just got the following e-mail on one of the lists I'm on. Basically, Microsoft has brought out a web-based tool that allows users (e.g. learners of English) to past or write in text, and it offers corrections based on web-searches to establish possible errors and corrections thereof in the text.

It doesn't seem to work very well though; I entered the text "This sentence lots of mistakes contains. Wonder I how good this worked. " and it returned no offers of corrections. Hum...

"Members of this list may be interested in the prototype web-based
writing assistance service for ESL learners that has recently been
launched by the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft
Research. The MSR ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest
corrections for a set of common learner error patterns that are not
currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office
products, and tries to help users judge whether the proposed
modifications really are better by displaying actual writing examples
returned by a web search.

The MSR ESL Assistant service can be accessed at
http://www.eslassistant.com. The service is free and no registration
is required.

Further information about the project can be found on the team
website at http://research.microsoft.com/Projects/msreslassistant and
project updates will posted periodically on the team blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/eslassistant.

The service is still very experimental. We are hoping that both
learners of English and TEFL/TESL professionals will take a look at
it and will perhaps even find it useful. We look forward to feedback,
and are especially interested in hearing from educators who find ways
to incorporate this service into their instruction."

Thanks to Cleve Miller for this one.

Google has announced the release of Lively, a 3D environment, sort of similar to Second Life. The good thing about it is that it doesn't need a humongous download to operate and works from within a browser; this means that people can create their own rooms and embed them in their website or blog (as long as the blog engine allows iFrames, which mine doesn't, so I've set up a room here). The drawback is that it's still clunkier than Second Life, and only works on Windows. It's still in beta, though, so hopefully it'll go cross-platform at some point.

I very much like the idea that it's browser-based and significantly easier to use than Second Life.