However it might be that we are a long way from electronic examination yet. I made an enquiry of a person here at the ANU who does research into examiners’ behaviour and her response has given me pause for thought. While there is no specific research on the reading of electronic theses. “We do know that some examiners read them on long plane trips, in bed or at the equivalent of a ‘place at the coast’ for weekend. We also know that they often/ even generally read in fits and starts over week or more. They read in the order of: abstract, acknowledgements, intro, conclusion and refs, then start back at the beginning. They take notes – mainly to themselves – as they go. Many tag pages with post-its to return to. Most read with a pen in their hand.”

This indicates it is important to consider the *client* who in this case is the examiner. What do they want? How do they work? There is no point developing a range of fabulous tools if they do not fit with the working processes in place. I am considering undertaking a small research project to try and establish the answers to these questions – our solutions might be for a non-existent problem.

Now this is not suitable for examination, out of the box as the comments are in the open, but it could possibly be used for earlier stages of thesis writing, such as getting supervisor comments. A candidate could use the ICE template, post to a word press ‘blog’ periodically, with each new post creating a new entry for comment by the supervisors and potentially peers.

You could make the entire blog private so that only authorised users could read it. For single install WordPress blogs, I like this plugin:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-sentry/

WordPress has some privacy features built in, too. You can make certain posts password protected or private to only logged in users.