February 4, 2012
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Blaise: Free, Open-source Software Provides Paperless Support for Writing Courses
By Rahul Simha, Sean Hanlon, Michael Gaiman, Jared Kiraly, and Eisuke Arai
Blaise is a software/hardware system designed to support writing programs. Students write papers using the Blaise editor—a simple text editor—and submit them electronically to a back-end database. Instructors download student papers from the database onto a tablet PC and then use pen-like electronic markup to grade the papers. These papers are then returned electronically to the students. Because modern writing programs emphasize working through drafts and peer review, Blaise maintains multiple drafts for each assignment and also supports multiple graders. Furthermore, the back-end database allows students to maintain long-term writing portfolios and enables institutions to track and collect data for assessment of writing programs. Blaise is free, open-source software available from the Blaise Web site: www.blaise.gwu.edu. Because it is written in Java, Blaise can be used on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
First Things First: What Is Blaise?
Computers and Internet technology have made their presence in the modern educational institution. Universities and schools both use back-end databases for records and are increasingly using computers and Internet applications in the classroom itself. In addition, related technologies such as PDAs, projectors, and smartboards are helping transform the way courses are conducted.
One relatively new and growing technology is the tablet PC, which unlike regular PCs is based on a pen-like interface: users use a pen on a touch-sensitive screen to point-and-click as well as to mark up documents. This electronic pen has appealed to users in a wide variety of applications, both for its distinctive use as well as for the simple convenience of doing away with keyboard and mouse. The pen-like interface is also a natural for grading term papers—an instructor who must grade a Microsoft Word document, for example, prefers to print and mark up with a real pen rather than type laboriously into the same document with a differently colored font.
Recognizing the value that tablet PCs can provide, and the fact that no free open-source product was to be found in the marketplace, we decided to develop Blaise, a complete software system for writing courses. Blaise is named after Merlin’s eponymous scribe in the legend of King Arthur. In consultation with George Washington University’s writing faculty, we added features to support modern writing programs.
Blaise consists of three mutually compatible software packages. The first, the Blaise Editor, is what students use to compose their papers; it is a simplified editor with some standard editing features such as justification and font style (bold, italic). Students also use the Blaise Editor to electronically submit their papers. Because Blaise supports multiple drafts, the Editor offers views of previously marked up drafts, each of which could have been graded by multiple instructors. The second component, the Blaise back end, is a standard relational database that stores papers submitted by students and graded papers uploaded by instructors. The third and signature component, the Blaise Grading Portal and Grader, is the software that runs on the tablet PC and is set up to incorporate both pen based mark-up as well as keyboard driven input. We describe each of these in detail through an example in the next section.