Web-writing 2.0: Enabling, documenting, and assessing writing online

Trends in the use of the Internet in recent years, collectively coined Web 2.0, have precipitated changes in modes and uses of writing online.Blogs and social networking sites provide new opportunities and incentives for personal writing.This reading-to-write culture requires use and development of language skills.The challenge for language teachers is to extend students' Internet world beyond their first language, to leverage participation in the read-write Web as a learning opportunity for language selfdevelopment, and to find means to link informal and recreational writing with formal and academic writing.There are increased possibilities for moving in these directions with new tools and services that have arisen to facilitate online composition/editing and to assess writing.Browser-based text editors make it easier than ever to participate in online sites.Language tools and services offer automatic assessment of writing, enabling the development of reviewing skills, so essential to improving writing.Finally, electronic portfolios provide a mechanism for bringing together samples of learners' written work, thereby encouraging more global self-assessment of students' language skills. ENABLING WRITING ONLINEOne of the major developments of Web 2.0 is the increase in availability of tools and services that are accessed directly through a Web browser rather than residing on the user desktop.Recently, for example, Adobe released an alternative to its high-end graphics editor, Photoshop, called Photoshop Express, which enables online editing of pictures and graphics, following in the footsteps of services such as Picnik and picture-editing tools provided by networking sites like Flickr or Facebook.This same trend is evident in the large number of online editors to emerge recently on the Web.Most are free services, which are used within a Web browser, and which include OnText, widgEditor, XStandard, and Textile.The editors vary in their features, but most offer basic editing and formatting and not the full feature set of a word processor such as Microsoft Office.Since the editors are browser-based, they are agnostic as to operating system and will typically run in any of the major browsers.The online editors normally save documents being edited to a server, sometimes doing so automatically at certain intervals so that work is not lost.Some offer particular features such as Writeboard's ability to let users subscribe to a document with RSS, so as to be notified of editing changes.The Zoho Writer offers automatic versioning, document templates, and direct blog posting from within the editor.In fact, most of the editors are specifically designed for creating posts to blogs or social networking sites.The fact that the new online editing tools feature WYSIWYG editing ("what you see is what you get") is a result of new features that anticipate HTML 5, the upcoming revision of the core Web formatting language.The two tags that enable word processing-like manipulation of text within a browser are contenteditable and designMode, now supported on mainstream browsers as well as on some mobile devices.Previously text-entry fields in HTML forms could accept plain text only.Unfortunately, not all browsers handle these new functions in the same way, which has made it difficult for developers to create rich text editing plug-ins that work universally.This is also true with support of the onpaste function, which allows rich text to be copied and pasted into a text editing window with all of its formatting intact.This is particularly a problem when copying from Microsoft Word due to proprietary markup tags.A feature that users expect to find in text editors, reliable undo, is inconsistently implemented in the online rich text editors, again because of differences in support among browsers.