The benefits for students were anecdotal but nonetheless
strong from the very first time I connected a composition class with another composition
class—I believe the very first was my ENG 101 with an ENG 099 Ximena was
teaching. Students saw the process of offering feedback to another set of
students, people who were not in the class, as an authentic, meaningful
experience serving real needs. Peer review within the classroom could not
compare to connecting with another person whose blog and personalization of it
revealed a character yet unexplored. There was no mystery in looking at a
classmate’s paper any more than there was in their looking at their own—they were
all hoops to jump through set by the professor. For reasons I do not pretend to
fully understand, the same text posted somewhere as a blog entry produces
different reactions. Maybe we (or the students’ generation for certain) live in
an era where such online identities are real identities—it is of little
importance for my exploration. What did matter was that in that interaction
students produced feedback far better, in quality and quantity, than they did
in the confines of the single traditional classroom.