Sustainable development requirements are often regarded as adding a layer of cost to production of goods and delivery of services. This perception can result in the dilution of sustainable development goals. To address this concern, it is necessary to improve both the methods by which sustainable development is achieved and the validation of its long-term benefits. Identification of better and more quantifiable indicators of value and progress are clearly linked to achieving sustainable development. This article explores the way that International Standards can help government agencies and development organizations to make sense of information communication technology and the way they can be used to improve and report outcomes. Standards can help ensure that innovations and processes are interoperable, reliable and secure. Blockchain standards will improve blockchain's reputation as a useful layer of technology for tracking and auditing data, exchanges and transactions, making it an invaluable tool for achieving transparency and trust in sustainable development programs.
Research into the teaching and assessment of student writing shows that many students find academic writing a challenge to learn, with legal writing no exception. Improving the availability and quality of timely formative feedback is an important aim. However, the time-consuming nature of assessing writing makes it impractical for instructors to provide rapid, detailed feedback on hundreds of draft texts which might be improved prior to submission. This paper describes the design of a natural language processing (NLP) tool to provide such support. We report progress in the development of a web application called AWA (Academic Writing Analytics), which has been piloted in a Civil Law degree. We describe: the underlying NLP platform and the participatory design process through which the law academic and analytics team tested and refined an existing rhetorical parser for the discipline; the user interface design and evaluation process; and feedback from students, which was broadly positive, but also identifies important issues to address. We discuss how our approach is positioned in relation to concerns regarding automated essay grading, and ways in which AWA might provide more actionable feedback to students. We conclude by considering how this design process addresses the challenge of making explicit to
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.