Turnitin will no longer support the Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser starting in January 2013. In order for us to continue improving Turnitin and offering features to help instructors improve student writing, our development team needs to make use of the capabilities in modern browsers. This is part of being a leading software-as-a-service.

Turnitin has released six writing rubrics that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These new rubrics are available now in the Rubric Library if you are affiliated with a middle school, high school, or community college account in the United States. If you are not affiliated with these eligible schools, you can download the Common Core Rubric Pack (.zip) and import the .RBC files into your Rubric Library.

In response to states' adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Turnitin will be releasing CCSS-aligned writing rubrics for grades 9-10 and 11-12. There will be a total of 6 rubrics altogether (2 each for Informative, Argumentative, and Narrative text types). These rubrics were developed for Turnitin by the English Professional Learning Council, a group of educators sponsored by and involving instructors primarily from Saddleback College and the Orange County Department of Education.

Turnitin recently added the ability to add colored highlights with comments to student papers in GradeMark. Instead of only a plain yellow highlighter, you can now choose from five colors—blue, green, yellow, pink, and purple.

Turnitin users will no longer be able to access old version of GradeMark after July 23, 2012. If you are still using this earlier version, we recommend you switch to the current version of GradeMark as soon as possible.

In response to user requests, Turnitin will be making changes to how students can access the digital receipts for their submissions. We plan to make these changes in August 2012. The following are the changes that will be included in the new digital receipt process:

• The digital receipt will be downloadable as a PDF from the student's class homepage and from the document viewer—instructors will also be able to download this PDF digital receipt from the document viewer.
• The new PDF version of the digital receipt will include the submission date and time.
• The digital receipt that appears on the screen after the student has successfully submitted a paper will now include a message explaining how students can access this PDF version of the digital receipt for download and printing.
• The email digital receipt that is sent to students will no longer include text from the submitted paper - the emailed receipt will contain a confirmation message and directions for how to access the new PDF digital receipt.

I recently came across a BBC news article, "When algorithms control the world." The author, Jane Wakefield, suggests that algorithms have gotten so sophisticated and are relied on so heavily in how we interact with our electronic world, that they are bound to fail or takeover if we don't tame them. She's not envisioning a future where machines actually takeover the world like Blade Runner, Terminator, or The Matrix.

Wakefield posits, "Algorithms may be cleverer than humans but they don't necessarily have our sense of perspective."