Reflection on peer review process

24/03/15
Part of my design challenge for my Design and Digital Technologies course, is to partake in a peer review process, this includes receiving and giving critiquing. I found it hard on top of a long 'to-do' list to remember to also critique my peers work as well as critiquing my own, I also found that waiting for someone else to critique your work is time consuming, as it is part of a series of steps you need to take each week, therefore waiting on others can put the whole group behind (this includes my own memories skills). For example, I myself, forgot to completely critique my peers work and 2 days later, it hit me that, that was why he was messaging me telling me he had finalised his work, while I was thinking "good work mate, thanks for letting me know", there was a logical reason, he was letting me know, I had work to do! Luckily he was very understanding.
 In saying all that, it also works very well, in that we can all relate to each others busy lives and workload, we also know how each other possibly feel about the class and the challenges that we all have to undertake, therefore we can relate better to each other, then to teachers.
I love doing group work, when I have a good group of people, and this semester I have been fortunate enough to have a fantastic bunch of people, who are very involved, helpful and responsive, making the process very easy.
This would be a great teaching strategy, especially in a classroom, opposed to externally, like me and my peers (making it a little harder). It would also help socialisation skills, bringing students together and getting to know each other better, it has certainly helped me network and meet people, when working externally, makes it quite hard. Listening to your peers interpretations opposed to your own, teaches you new ideas and opens your mind more, it is very effective tool, however I am sure that this would not work for all people as some people do work academically better, alone, where as I am a social butterfly and have always loved working with people, to get a better understanding of things.

26/03/15
I would just liked to add to this, that now that I have looked and critiqued my peers work, it made me realise that my work requires more detail. This is another benefit of working in a group, getting to see other peoples ideas and interpretations of the set task, expands your knowledge base and therefore helping with your own assessment.

4-4-15
My design is now complete and a peer has provided feedback to my design process. She brought up a good point I had already thought of but clearly not enough and obviously needed to be documented if not utilised in my process. I am very grateful for her feedback and have enjoyed the feedback process as it gives me an idea how I am going with the course and allows me to compare my work to others to put my mind at ease even more, that I am actually on the right track. I have always found that I learn better in group work and that this is the best teaching strategy for my development, also allowing me to meet people and make new friends which is always a great positive.

14-04-15
I found this week that the feedback process is dwindling and less feedback is being given or taken by myself and my peers. This is most likely because our design process is at its end and we are all feeling that we only need to provide minimal feedback. However we are providing detailed feedback in other forms such as templates being provided e.g. design assessment and evaluation. Last week we did design evaluations for each other and found them very detailed and beneficial to our product. As always providing feedback is always helpful to me and makes me realise improvements for my own product.