Hyperlinks in Grademark rubrics

We've been rolling out Grademark this academic year and we're still in the business of creating our rubrics within the system. A rubric is a table that a marker clicks inside to select the performance they wish to award the assignment under scrutiny. Technology has affordances and constraints, what it enables and what it denies (I was enjoying Peter Goodyear's (2006) comments recently about how impoverished online meetings are compared to face-to-face). On the one hand, the rubric cell will 'only' allow us to use up to 1000 characters of text. This is quite a bit but not enough for what we wanted to do with it recently. On the other hand, a solution was to use hyperlinks, because the rubric does allow very simple html. Frustratingly, hyperlinks within the Turnitin assignments were disabled for some reason, and so I didnt imagine that they would work in rubrics. The question then is, how best to exploit such linking?
I was trying to see if I could go for deep linking to a section of an online version of Price and Harrington's  'Critical thinking and writing for nursing students'. Sadly, I do not think that the permanent linking, that includes a redirect for Shibboleth login will work for this book. But there may be other resources, or our own Confluence-powered Student Handbook that could hang around for long enough to make the effort of hyper-linking Grademark rubrics in this way worthwhile. Come to that, there's no reason to think that the developers behind Grademark will be so kind as to continue to allow html in rubrics so you could go to all that effort of enriching them and come in one day to find none of the links worked any more (check this twitter conversation I had with Turnitin).

Goodyear, P. (2006). Technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 83–98. doi:10.1080/01580370600750973

  Price, B., & Harrington, A. (2010). Critical thinking and writing for nursing students. Exeter: Learning Matters Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/EBookView/S9780857255877/S126

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Yes Peermark

Since my involvement with the Evidence Based Practice theme for the new Bachelor of Nursing began I have been disappointed that we've been pretty conservative with some of our assignments. But I now think there is a serious danger of missed opportunity here when we could do something more innovative and engaging, better for students and staff.
I'm thinking of http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/products/peermark
We already have this at Cardiff University, it is an extension of Grademark and Turnitin. We are in process of rolling Grademark out to all our programmes following the biggest UK pilot of the system. I want students to anonymously mark one (or more) their peers' assignments, with a right of appeal to the academic who would normally perform the 1st marker role. I am asking for this because, for the first time in about ten years, I have been engaged in 'proper' marking (for our PGCE programme). You probably think I want to avoid the task. Actually I have realised again what a powerfully generative learning experience it is. I find myself incredibly motivated to check my own understanding, root about in the literature, and come to a conclusion I feel I can defend. This is why markers are able to stay current with the topic they teach and assess. It seems immoral we should continue to keep all that intrinsic motivation to ourselves. Since we have already adopted Grademark, Peermark is within easy reach. If we can find a way to do this for merely the students' first assignment, we should.
The workflow would only need to be adjusted slightly. Bring the deadline for submission a week forward, giving students a week to mark one of their peers papers. Peermark has a sophisticated answer to the issue of non-engagement by the students (see their FAQs):

Reviews written for papers in a PeerMark assignment can be graded after the PeerMark assignment's due date. To grade an individual review click on "Edit Grades" at the expanded student's list of reviews. Then enter a score on a scale of 0-10 for the individual review. The average score (as a percentage) for all the reviews a student has written will be calculated and applied to the total point value for the assignment (e.g. if a student was assigned two reviews and received a 5/10 for one review and a 7/10 for the second review, the student would receive 60% of the total points possible for the assignment as a default final grade). Click "Save Grades" to save the review scores that have been entered. To edit the final grade for a student's PeerMark assignment after entering grades for individual reviews, enter the preferred score in the Grade column to the right of the student's name before clicking "Save Grades".

University of Glamorgan have been here already (of course!): see this poster. I love the quote, 'sometimes I feel I do not have enough knowledge to mark my mates'. That is the critical moment of realisation which should prompt the individual into active learning. It is not a negative, as presented in the findings, but a major positive.