Peer Review Recap, Part Deux

I enjoyed the wiki assignment thoroughly. The concept of easily sharing writing examples with a class should be expanded to more of the education system. I think it would really help students to cooperate and give better constructive criticism through the peer editing format.

I loved the advice that I was given on my paper. There were clear suggestions on what I could do to make my rule more understandable. I had one comment that I hadn't really stated or created my own rule. Maybe I didn't, but I understood that I could rephrase a rule from Williams or Strunk and White. What I did was paraphrase an idea from Williams and condensed it into a simplified rule for organizing paragraphs in (mostly) my own words. The comment made me raise a concerned eyebrow and a little red flag; I'll mostly likely go back and try to edit the essay so that my rule is clearly spelled out. My goal will be to leave no room for doubts as to my intent. I made a few minor comments and corrections on the essays I edited, which were great for the most part. I read some really good papers that had everything organized and was super-easy to follow and then I read some that needed a bit of polishing to finish. I tried to be helpful and offer as many suggestions as I thought appropriate, but the exposure to a variety of writers really brings out the differences. Some of the pages on the wiki hadn't been updated with the student's essay, and some essays had to be hunted down from the wrong locations. It was a good experience, though. Being able to see other students' corrections is great for checking my own opinion against the group's. I can test myself as an outlier or as just going with the flow.

If I were to do this project for another class, I could make a few suggestions to better streamline the process: There should be more uniformity in the naming of the pages, or instead of having the essays under a students own wiki page, just add the essay under the home page with the title of the rule as the page name.

The wetpaint site is fairly intuitive, which is great. The formatting is slightly off, which isn't so great. The feeling of the general wetpaint environment isn't the same as a true wiki website with searchable articles. Wetpaint behaves more like a regular webpage with frames set up for a navigable sidebar of the entire website. This worked fine for what our classes needed, but for larger projects or more people it would just collapse into confusion with so many pages. It did allow for the simple editing of our essays, and the thread posting under the essay is great for long comments and corrections instead of writing them right into the bottom of the essay. Between this and googledocs, I'd still probably use Google because of the realtime updating of the text. Googledocs is more flexible with the editing, and the formatting isn't nearly as messed up.