For years I've wondered how to get students to reliably submit something I think of as standard text. Not html or mime documents that will display differently according to what I view them with, but the modest expression of concepts using the 128 characters (mostly upper- and lower-case Latin alphabet, puncuation, digits, and special symbols) of the ascii format.
This becomes particularly maddening when all I want is a few dozen characters --- say the URL of a website. How can I make sure that the URL isn't hidden deep inside the html formatting of somebody's favourite email app?
Something that works 95% of the time is to ask for the URL to be in the Subject: line of the email. This line is forced to be in plain text by the mail software. Sure, a few students will still ignore the instruction about the Subject: line, but most submissions will be in plain text.
My next challenge: how to communicate that the useful URL for a blogging site is the public address, not the address that the blog author uses to modify the site.
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So that's why we had to submit via email. I thought it was more so that you could verify whose SLOG was whose (by matching with email addresses).
Would a basic HTML form (using GET) work? I think it restricts input to ASCII. Or at least it converts input to ASCII.
URL problem: Tell students to click on the "View blog" button; there should be some kind of variation on that button in all popular platforms. Then tell them to copy the URL of the site that opens. Presto!
I completely understand that kind of frustration, you'd expect university students to be able to follow a simple instruction as that.
I do not mean to sound condescending as I'm a student my self, one of them, but...come on...
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