Using Google Docs for Peer Reviews

Last week, part of our assignment involved using Google Docs to give peer reviews on the first drafts of the three other groups’ midterm papers. This of course was less of a priority than completing our own midterm, but nonetheless it was something that had to be taken care of. The group primarily used Facebook, as we have used for all previous assignments, to complete this one. In fact, all of us communicate for the most part on just one message thread when working on assignments. This way, all important information pertaining to our assignments is readily available in one place.

Posting peer reviews for the other groups is probably the part of last week’s homework assignment that we spent the least amount of time on. This was unfortunate, but I believe it was necessary in order to spend the most amount of time possible on the most important part of the homework assignment, which was completing the final draft of our midterm sales letter.

The process of writing and posting reviews for the other groups’ sales letters was probably a little more disorganized than we would’ve liked. One person posted a review of all three groups, and a couple others added to those reviews as needed; in reality, this translates to: someone added a good amount of material to the reviews, and I added a minimal amount (sorry!).

I personally had A LOT of work to do this week—especially a lot of catching up on reading for other classes, and I admittedly am in the habit of not completing assignments promptly unless they factor directly into my grade; i.e., I spent a lot of time working my part of the midterm sales letter—the heading, address, and patron/introduction part—and spent very little time working on the reviews for the other three groups.

The end result were reviews that probably could’ve contained a little more information and could’ve been a lot more helpful to the other groups. The best way to do this probably would’ve been to assign groups to one another for us to individually review, much like the way that we have been divvying up specific parts of other assignments among one another. Bottom line is, much of our peer reviews consisted of simple “yes” or “no” answers to the review criteria. If we had spent more time peer reviewing the other groups’ work, we probably would’ve been able to give more constructive and/or critical feedback which would be much more useful to them.

In the end though I believe that we had our priorities straight. All five of us seem to have pretty busy lives, so we are simply unable to put in the ideal amount of time for each of the assignments. However, by prioritizing properly, we know which tasks are most important; we know which tasks we need to devote the most time to, and therefore we generally get done what we need to get done. Next week is our midterm review, where we will discuss with the professor where our group needs to go from here. The midterm review will be very helpful in helping us see what we need to work on for the oral presentation and the final proposal.