Reflections on Peer Postings and Wiki Evaluations

This week, I would like to discuss my experience of this class so far. I feel my experience is somewhat unique, as I am not part of the Masters program at Millersville, nor even a matriculated student. At times, I have felt that it has been more difficult for me to “break the ice” with my peers and work with them during discussion assignments and other work. If we were in a class that met regularly (even if only a few times during the semester), as was the case with a class I took over the summer at another institution, I think that my personality and knowledge of psychology would have shown and other students may have felt more comfortable interacting with me. As that has not happened, I find myself wondering if that is why I have only ever gotten a couple of peer responses to my discussion postings this whole semester. I have seen that other students have received lots of replies and an educational discussion often ensues. It is difficult to make that happen when 1) no one responds to my posts and 2) rarely does anyone respond when I reply to their posts. It is very easy to be seen as an outsider who is not invested in this class in any way, and students who see me that way may feel very cautious about their grades or the work they do or may not feel comfortable interacting with me because they don’t know how much I know or if I’m a good student, etc. Those are my assumptions, anyway.

As far as doing these evaluations, I have found it very interesting that there have been so many different opinions about each other’s reviews. Even though we were all given the same article to read (Granello) which has clear guidelines about where a written work would fall on the cognitive complexity scale, none of us seems to have the same perspective on the work we have reviewed. I wonder if this is because many of us come from different undergraduate programs and have all learned writing skills separately from this class. I also wonder if having a class in-person where we discussed Granello’s article in-depth could have been useful so that we could all have made sure we understood how to evaluation  a literature review. Moreover, I have found that I disagree with some of the comments that were made about my group’s lit review. I feel as if some of the comments have been unfounded and others provided an example of how even having the same class, and the same APA guidelines, people can interpret things differently. Where I felt we were paraphrasing research findings and providing appropriate citations, some felt we were making generalizations without research to back them up and others thought we needed to use less citations. It all seems to be very inconsistent across the board. Ultimately, once we find out the next steps, each group will have to decide for themselves what feedback was of value and what can be disregarded and move on from there.