About the software: Lynn Gordon and Guy Carden have been developing and testing interactive Windows software for studying traditional English grammar in Click2Learn Toolbook II. This software contains complete course materials for interactive exercises for a one-term, college-level course in traditional English grammar. Earlier versions of these materials have been tested for four years in English 255, a one-term course at Washington State University. The exercises range from relatively mechanical tasks like identifying noun phrases to advanced analyses like constructing analysis trees for complex sentences. A complete working copy of the software can be obtained by request on CD-ROM. To request a copy of the CD, e-mail gordonl@wsunix.wsu.edu or write by regular mail to Lynn Gordon, English Department, WSU, Pullman, WA 99164-5020 (U.S.A.).
These materials showcase the use of ToolBook scripting (about 100,000 lines of OpenScript code) to construct highly interactive exercises designed to teach technical analysis skills to students with limited technical background. The current materials are aimed at college and university students, but the same analytical engine could be used to construct materials for high school or middle school students.
About
the Demo:
A subset of the materials are available here for
download as a demonstration. It contains
five modules selected from a set of exercises on traditional grammatical
analysis of English which have been field-tested in English 255 in Washington
State University.
This demo may be of interest to two groups of people:
1.
People interested in teaching or learning grammatical analysis or introductory
syntax.
2.
People interesting in seeing how
Toolbook's
OpenScript language can be used to create highly interactive exercises in areas
like decision flow charts, argument construction, and tree-structure analysis.
The exercises in this demo do not form a self-contained
teaching tool. They are samples from a larger course that includes lectures and
class discussions as well as the interactive exercises. Unless you have
technical training in linguistics or English grammar, you are likely to find the
graded exercises too difficult. I recommend beginning with the practice
exercises, and using the "Get the answer" command under the
"Hint/Answer" menu. Once you've studied a few sample answers, you can
begin to fool around and test the interactive features of the exercises.
Installation of the Demo
The demo comes in a self-extracting zipped archive. After downloading the archive (Grammar.exe), double-click on that file and it will extract the files to c:\Grammar_Demo. Double-click on "Setup" in that directory, and follow the on-screen directions. The installation creates two directories, C:\Program Files\Grammar and C:\Program Files\Asymetrix\Shared Tools\TBSystem.
After the installation is complete, you can start the program by double-clicking Demo.exe in c:\Program Files\Grammar.
Deinstallation of the Demo
If you delete the two directories, C:\Program Files\Grammar and C:\Program Files\Asymetrix\Shared Tools\TBSystem, you will have completely removed the demo program.
Hardware Requirements
for both the CD and the Demo
Windows 95 or 98 or Windows NT (Sorry, no Macintosh
version available.)
486/33 or better
8 MB RAM (preferably more)
20 MB free hard disk space
VGA or better graphics
Troubleshooting
-- Display problems
The display window is set to standard VGA resolution (640 x
480). It has been tested with a number of video cards and drivers, but we
continue to find systems where the window does not display properly.
a. If the display problem is serious, try using the Windows
Control Panel to reset your display to the most generic VGA driver available.
b. If you are losing the bottom of the display window, use
the "Toggle Scrolling" command in the demo's "View" menu to
scroll up and down and see the full display.
-- Scripting bugs
If you encounter an error in my scripting or data entry, you
are likely to get a ToolBook dialog box headed "Error" and
saying something like "No handler for..." In many cases, if you click
"OK" or "Cancel" in this error dialog, you will be able to
continue with the demo. In other cases, you may need to exit and restart the
demo, or even restart Windows or reboot.
Copyright and licensing info
The
demo and the CD
are all copyright © by Lynn Gordon. You may use these materials freely for
evaluation, which might include testing one or two exercises with a class. If
you wish to use more than two exercises with a class, you must contact me
directly and get my permission.
You may make copies of this demo for colleagues to evaluate,
as long as you copy the complete demo, including all copyright information.
The ToolBook runtime files that accompany this demo
are all copyright by Click2Learn,
and subject to Click2Learn's
licensing
agreement, which is quoted in the demo.
back to top
