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Introduction Word length and phrase length influence the ease of reading and understanding of a given text. Short words are usually more common (Zipf's law). Short sentences require less abstraction ability to understand. The readability analysis could be useful to make a text better, augmenting its accessibility. Why have we developed this? The readability index tells us how easy a given text is to understand. A well-written text is effective, easy to understand and quick to read. This index helps us understand the text's complexity in order to better schedule the activities of translators and revisers. More than ever, written information, especially in the Internet, must be direct and well structured. This analysis can help achieve both goals.

there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)

he is not trying to grow his audience any longer, he says.

The problem of why good classes fail has become a bit of an obsession for me lately. I visit several colleges and universities every semester to talk to faculty about teaching and learning, and everywhere I go I try to sneak away for just a bit and slip into the back of an unsuspecting class just to see how things are going.