Heading into Peer Review & “The End of Time!”

Be sure to watch the video, which is where I discuss some of the calendar details and other bits of information about how stuff will go for the rest of the term.  But here are some other important details:

Peer Review:

Here are the peer review groups for discussing the drafts of the research project, drafts you should strive to post by Friday or Saturday at the very latest!

• Group 1:  Andrea L., Angie L., Cristin B.
• Group 2:  Brian R., Ashlee W., Gloria S.
• Group 3:  Dave N., Carrie L., Judy W., Renee L.

I’m going to assume that all of you have been through some kind of peer review experience before; in some very basic ways, I don’t think doing this sort of activity for a graduate class is a whole lot different than doing it for first year writing.  The goal here is to both give your colleagues some feedback on their drafts and to also learn something from each other by engaging in each others’ research projects.  The hardest part to doing good peer review, I think, is trying to balance good advice and directness with kindness.  You don’t want to be a jerk in your critiques, of course; at the same time, just sparing your colleagues’ feelings by not telling them anything constructive isn’t that useful either.

In any event, what I suggest is that you simply visit each others’ blogs and the drafts that are available there and post comments.  I’ll be checking in on the process too, though I probably won’t post any comments until others do, if that makes sense– don’t want to influence things too much.  Like I said, begin this by Friday or Saturday and finish it by Wednesday of next week!

The Corner:

We are on for tomorrow at The Corner Brewery at 5 pm on Friday, April 9.  Here’s a link to the Corner Brewery’s web site.  The address is 720 Norris Street in Ypsilanti; here’s that on a Google Map.

The stuff during Finals week:

Now, the final draft of your research project is due by 5 pm on Friday, April 16! This means you need to have your project posted up on your blog/wordpress.com site for me and everyone/anyone else to read and experience.  Also on Friday, 16, I will post the final for the class.  I talk about this in the video a bit, but the key thing is that as long as you’ve kept up with the readings and the discussions, you should be fine.

While you are working on your finals, I will be working on reading and commenting on your final projects with audio comments.  Roughly speaking, when you turn in your final to me, I will send you back my audio comments and grade comments for your final projects.

Also during finals week: I will ask of you all to once again email me to let me know what grade you think you ought to get for participation for the second half of the class.  This is something I’ll remind you about again.

And finally, the end of time:  It’s Friday, April 23, 5 pm, Michigan time!