Peerless

One of the great untapped academic uses of the internet (at least at GGU) is the lack of paper peer review. The professors sometimes split people into teams but even this does not seem to elicit a lot of good feedback (at least most of the time). Blogs can help in this area for at least four reasons:

• Focus of feedback
• Timeliness of feedback
• Anonymity
• A Wider Net
  

Focus Focus Focus
I think the reason for this is most students aren't very good writers, and it is just too much effort to get people to read an entire paper (even if its only 5 pages). One of the nice things about blogs, as a form of writing, is that they break things up into nice, bit size, chunks for people to digest slowly, perfect for review as you go. In my writing, I am not trying to be Emanual Kant, where each sentence is profound, but also takes 10 minutes to understand. Instead a good paper really only has 2 or 3 complex ideas that are difficult to explain, and that is where I need the help. So rather than waste my reviewers valuable time reading the entire paper, I think it helps to have them review only specific parts of a paper. This helps them, and me focus on the areas that need it.

Time is of the Essence
How many times have you had someone review a paper knowing full well that it is too late for major changes? Putting a paper on a blog as you write it makes sure: a) You actually write it gradually as opposed to the last minute (again bite sized chunks), and b) You find and weed out the truly bad ideas when they come up, rather than 3 hours before the paper is due.

Come on baby make it hurt so good
Both in brick and mortar and online classes at big universities share at least one basic problem: Students are mostly strangers to each other. Everything students have been taught about social etiquette tells them that telling people how much their writing sucks is not a good way to start interacting. Thus, many people will refrain from giving good feedback simply because giving good feedback (criticism) to strangers is impolite. Which leads us to...

No one knows you are a Dog on the internet
People will (anonymously) say things on the internet, that they will not say in real life. I believe, we will test this hypothesis, that this is an advantage of the internet. People love to argue, and if you make provocative posts people will chime in with opinons which will show you the weakness of your arguement/ideas (assuming you can weed out the obvious trolls). Also if your post doesn't make sense,and you have enough people reading your blog, and your readers are sane, it will show you where you should explain your ideas better.

Are you Pondering what I'm Pondering
One of the other problems with class-mates reviewing your paper, is that they may not be any better or more knowledgeable writers than you. In addition, social media is a wide area and the topic you are covering may be very different from theirs. One of the things I hope to get from publicizing this blog is feedback from people who ARE NOT my classmates, or necessarily even college students but are instead interested and learning about/reasearching the same topic I am writing about.