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. To learn more about this activity, please follow this Website Reviews link at the top of this page.

I want the reviewing process to be crystal clear, so if something doesn't make sense to you, please let me know. I will revise the instructions appropriately.

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.

This website was created and is maintained by Dave Sullivan.
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