Peer Review Recap

The first assignment of the ENGL328 class was to invent our own writing technologies, without the use of any tools such as pens, pencils, paper, computer, basically any sort of technology. We then had to write a 5-6 page essay of how our invention process went, what we learned after writing text without the use of technology, and connections to class readings as well.

Once the essay was finished we were to submit it online to Google Docs. I have never used this before, but felt it was very easy to do. We were placed in small groups of 3, which I liked, and then share our essay with the people in our group. I thought it was cool that we could share our docs with whomever we wanted, rather then with the whole class. I never peer reviewed someones paper online, I have always done so with a hard copy. I felt like this was much better and easier to use. There were a lot of tools available to use (such as spell check, word count, thesaurus,etc.) in which I wouldn't have readily available with a hard copy in front of me. I felt like I was able to say what I wanted in the documentation much clearer then I would have on a hard copy trying to scribble and point weird arrows everywhere. I also liked that I was able to get feedback from two different people, and see which comment was from whom, so if I had any questions about it, I was able to ask that person.

The only issues that I had with using Google Docs, was that because it was live, I was confused if the person has already reviewed my paper, or were in the process of reviewing it. I felt like that was hard, but once I learned that if a person just reads the doc, it will tell me it's reviewed by that person, when this necessarily isn't the case. Now that I know this, I will need to have a little more patience waiting for my reviews from my peers!