This is not a rant.
We’re all back to the classroom now, and for me that means back to Moodle postings. I am a fan of Moodle postings. For those who don’t use the system—Moodle is an open-access classroom software that enables any number of communications and tasks, among them the establishment of “forums” for student discussion of readings. I use these forums as springboards for class discussion, so I tend to require one Moodle forum post per week, with the reassurance to students that I am looking for their spontaneous thoughts and questions about the readings, not for a finished argument or essay.
Recently, noting yet another yawning crevasse between my idea of literate orthography and my students’ spelling in their Moodle posts—and having eliminated an epidemic of dyslexia as the cause—I asked in class whether there was a spell-check function on Moodle. “Oh,…