Last week, I mentioned giving feedback to the faculty member you are working with. We all remember those painful peer-review sessions we often endured with our writing where we didn't receive any meaningful suggestions or assistance in the writing or creating of a piece. We want to make sure that we're giving our faculty the best advice about their assignments, turning it into a conversation and benefits the faculty member and ultimately their students.
Unsurprisingly, much of the work done on peer-review involves the writing classroom, so while much of this advice is directly towards classes like freshman writing, we can still work to transfer those lessons into our interactions with faculty. The first site, Becoming a Better Writer by Helping Other Writers, could easily be re-titled "Becoming a Better Student by Helping Other Students (albeit indirectly through the intermediary of their instructor)." So it doesn't roll off the tongue, but you get the idea. The second site, from the University of Anglia, is a much more in-depth resource, targeted towards professors, but the focus is on assessment and learning, in part through peer-review.
Now, a caveat. There is a very real potential power imbalance between you, the student beta-tester, and the faculty member. It is not a straightforward peer-review situation, but I will be working with you and the faculty member to ensure that the structure of the interactions remain collegial and one of mutual respect. You are bringing your expertise and experience as a student to these interactions, one that is valuable and will be valued.
So, once again using Slack in order to have asynchronous discussions about our readings and activities. We will also be using Hypothes.is to annotated the readings we're going to be doing over the week.
Next week, we're going to be putting it into practice! And to help us get ready, we're going to spend some time collaboratively developing an evaluation framework for our prodess. This will be a series of important questions or features you want to be looking for while beta-testing the assignment in question. We'll refine this framwork as we work our way through that first series of beta-testing!