About peer reviews

Building a website or contributing to a wiki requires a mix of skills. The easiest skills to master are computer-related technical ones, like creating a table of contents for an involved wiki page or building a feedback form that functions correctly. The hardest skills to master come from the need to write well, collect interesting material, create attractive graphics, and organize everything clearly. These skills build quality into your work and make ideas worth reading.

Judging quality is tricky and labor-intensive.  I won't have enough time to give each of you detailed feedback about your evolving website or wiki contributions. And ultimately, I suspect at least some of you wouldn't trust my opinions that much anyway, since I am older and have grown conservative, forgetful, and cranky. Thus, I have decided the best solution is to ask students to review and comment on each other's work. This process, called peer reviewing, has a rich history in academic settings.

Overview of the reviewing process

After you have constructed a first-draft version of your web research area, three other students will review your web area and give you comments about how you might improve your work. And, of course, for this process to work, you will be asked to review three other students' web areas.

General Thoughts About Publishing

Sometimes an author works on a throw-away project. For example, most e-mail messages are used to express a one-shot idea, and it may not make sense to put a lot of effort into writing the ideas with style. Similarly, most writing assignments are also throw-away projects. On a typical assignment, students write papers, turn them in, receive grades, and "round file" their work in wastebaskets.

Unlike e-mail messages and throw-away assignments, business publications typically go through an extensive process of collecting information, writing, reviewing, revising, printing, and publication. This process allows reviewers to provide reactions and gives the author an opportunity to fix errors. Both the reviewers and authors play important roles in improving the overall quality of the evolving document. Reviewers provide an outside perspective about what works well and what needs changing. Authors retain control over the document and change it to meet the reviewer's requests.

This assignment will give you experience on both sides of this process: reviewing to give authors an outside perspective, and revising to adopt suggestions made by reviewers. To make this happen, each peer review activity will ask you to review three other students' work. By carefully selecting who will review whom, I have ensured students will not review each other directly; that is, if Tim reviews Kwong's web pages, then Kwong will not review Tim's web pages.

About blind reviewing

Many areas of publishing, such as academic journals, use a blind reviewing process. With blind reviewing, the author is not told who the reviewers are. With a double-blind reviewing process, the reviewers are not told who the author is, and the author is not told who the reviewers are.

Publishers use blind reviewing processes to encourage people to share honest opinions and avoid bias. We can't set up a completely blind reviewing process with the web technology available to us so we will  have to the best we can to simulate it. To encourage the general benefits that come from blind reviewing, I want everyone to adhere to the following guidelines:

• Maintain a professional tone in the reviews you write. Be diplomatic, but be honest. Constructive criticism is your goal.
• For every thing you find wrong with the site or wiki contributions, try to find twice as many positive things about the site.
• Do not demand changes; rather kindly suggest changes you would make if you were the professional editor in charge of these areas.
• Do not refer to people by name in your reviews. Use the name of their website, their Business username, or their ONID username.
• Do not talk directly with the people who reviewed your web area about their review .
• Do not talk directly with the people whose areas you review about your review or their web area.

If you want to communicate with the people who recorded  reviews about your website, write a new section near the top of your Goals / Sources of Information Page called, "Comments for My Reviewers." In this section you can describe the changes you made based on your reviewers' comments. Also, if you elect to ignore suggestions made by your reviewers, you can explain this course of action as well.

For whatever it is worth, similar rules of relatively impersonal professional behavior are often required in courtroom and arms-length business transactions, such as purchasing real estate.

Recording reviews of other web areas

For this peer review assignment, you will look at and comment on websites created by three other students. This will require you to use judgment and diplomacy to organize helpful thoughts and suggestions for your fellow students. This assignment requires more creative thought and insight than other assignments this term. Most professional careers rely on giving and receiving advice to your peers. Please treat this assignment as a real job-like task.

You will organize your conclusions and recommendations in two ways. First, you will modify a set of Microsoft PowerPoint slides to contain written ideas and numerical scores for each of the three websites.

Watching a video or listening to the radio often has more impact than reading the written word. Since computers now make it easy to record speech and videos, we want you to gain experience recording video files. So for the second part of the peer review process, you will use Microsoft Producer to record three videos -- one video of each website that you are to review.

Step 1: Modify a PowerPoint set of slides

Before you begin to use Microsoft PowerPoint, you may want to look at the sample set of PowerPoint slides Dr. Sullivan created.

Find out which three student websites you should review by looking at your row in the table labeled "Who You Review" in the Student Pages -- Peer Review listing. Note that this page has two 190-row tables, and the "Who You Review" table is near the bottom of the page. Look at these websites. Decide what you like about them and what should be improved. Take notes about your ideas. Then, complete this step-by-step list of instructions for preparing the PowerPoint slides:

• As you work through these instructions, be careful not to put a space in the name "PeerReview" when you create folder or file names.
• Build a folder named p:/classwork/ba271/PeerReview and copy PeerReview.ppt into the new folder that you just created.  
• Edit the slides in your copy of PeerReview.ppt to describe your thoughts about the websites you are supposed to review.
• The second slide in your PowerPoint presentation must include numerical rankings that indicate how useful and well prepared you feel each student's web area is. Here is a scale for you to use in assigning these numerical rankings:
  • 4 points -- An outstanding web area: well prepared and useful to other students.
  • 3 points -- A good web area: generally well prepared and useful, but contains minor flaws in writing or execution.
  • 2 points -- A fair web area: contains substantial flaws in organization or writing.
  • 1 points -- An awful web area: major flaws or missing work make this web area useless to other students.
  • 0 points -- No web files were found to review in this student's directory.
• You are not limited to integers. Thus, you might decide a student's web area deserves a score of 2.5, because it exceeds the 2.0 criteria, but doesn't meet the 3.0 criteria.
• Open your copy of PeerReview.ppt and enter your thoughts into the PowerPoint slides inside the PeerReview folder

Step 2: Recording three video clips

Microsoft Producer is an add-in that supplements PowerPoint. We won't be using much of this program's capabilities this term -- we will use it only to record three WMV, Window Media Video, files from the screen.

What should you do if one of the websites that you are to review doesn't exist? First, look directly at drive V to see if the student might have built a website in the wrong location. For example, did the student build a folder named websight or website2 rather than one named website? Or did the student rename the index.htm file to be home.htm -- this will keep the links on the Student Pages portion of the class website from finding the student's home page. Then, regardless of what you find, record an appropriate videoclip giving the student feedback about where they stand with respect to their project. To do this, you would record a short videoclip about the "Page Not Found" error.

Step 3 -- Publish your work in the proper location

If you completed the previous steps correctly, you should have four files in P:\classwork\ba271\PeerReview:

• PeerReview.ppt
• Review1.wmv
• Review2.wmv
• Review3.wmv

Take the entire PeerReview folder and copy it to your folder inside drive V. Another way of saying this is to copy the PeerReview folder and the four files inside it so they exist in your \\cob-storage\studentwebdata\UserID\PeerReview folder, where UserID is replaced with the UserID that you use to log on to the College of Business network.

To test that your PowerPoint slides and video clips are in the proper location for grading, go to the "Who You Review" table in the bottom half of the Student Pages -- Peer Review listing. Click on your PowerPoint slides link. This should open your PowerPoint slides. If they do not open, recheck your work and fix the problem. Also click on the links for your video files. Once again, if they do not open, recheck your work and fix the problem.

Step 4 -- Revising your web area based on the reviews

After you receive your reviews, consider them carefully and revise your website accordingly. Learning to accept and respond appropriately to an independent outside review is an important -- but difficult -- skill to master. Do your best.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
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