This week in the Applied Digital Learning program at Lamar University, we were asked to peer review other classmates’ work. We had previously been given the task to create an article either by ourselves or with a partner in hopes to get it published by an online blog site, magazine, or even a scholarly journal. Once we created the rough draft of the article, we needed at least two people to look it over and give feedback using a rubric that we created together.
Throughout this program, I have been working solely with my core group that was established the first semester of classes. For this project though, one of my core group members, Naima, and I decided to branch out and work with two different classmates for the peer review, Nicole and Sabine.
Working with people you aren’t used to always comes with a learning curve, but this was one I was appreciative of! Nicole and Sabine took off right away and started to get the rubric together that we would use to peer review each others’ work. With mine and Naima’s suggestions here and there, a rubric was created that was easy to understand and follow. I was appreciative of Nicole to put it together and share with the rest of us.
As we got to actually peer reviewing, it was a little more difficult than I thought it would be. As far as grammar and clarity of the article, I could easily comment on that. But when you are asking about the content and whether or not it is ‘publishing’ level of work, that is something I have a hard time determining, specifically because you don’t know how the intended publication site wants their articles to sound like. I struggled with this thinking about the article that Naima and I wrote as well. Some of the feedback that we got from our peer review was there was not enough personal experience or references added. Although that may be important information for one avenue of publication, other publication sites may not want the personal feel to the article.
Overall, I am glad we branched out and worked with a new group other than our original core group for this project. We were able to get a new set of eyes looking at our work and giving necessary feedback. I think all of our articles will end up coming out nicely, and I can’t wait to see if any of us get accepted for publication.