Once student work becomes public, whether to the cohort of the world doesn't really matter, forms of peer critique become easier. Peer critique achieves several things:

• provides students with a critical language to critique their own, and others practice and work
• provides a language by which to judge their work
• generates a structure that they can apply to other contexts
• teaches skills that are applicable outside of the individual course or program
• separates out the personal (and personalities) from critique

There are lots of ways to undertake structured critiques. The key thing is probably to realise that if you are going to undertake a critique then it must be clearly structured so that students know what their role is. De Bono's coloured hats critique is a simple structure to use. Students can either be one 'hat' at a time and rotate through the colours, or can work in groups. Similarly a SWOT analysis can also be effective. The key point is to model for the students how to undertake the critique, holding them to task as they learn how to do it, and remember that for students who do not come from a design background this is novel, so you need to be clear for yourself why they should do this and what the benefits are.

In my case my rationale runs something like this. We expect you to be critical thinkers and makers. At school and university you tend to rely on your teachers to tell you if something is good, good enough, or not. Once you graduate who is going to tell you if your work is good enough? You're supposed to know this, but how would you learn this if you're not taught the methods or tools 

| cookbook |

This is just a page to help find your way around the cookbook. Below you will find a list of the wiki pages that the project team has written (remember it's a wiki so things change regularly!) that are directly about using wikis for teaching and learning.

We also have pages that provide lists of what has been written about using blogs for teaching and learning. 

Welcome to the Mashed DLC collaboration space. The starting point for all DLC documents in progress.

Mashed DLC Social Software Coobook

Project Overviews

-Adrian Miles

-Axel Bruns

-Stephen Barrass

-Sam Hinton

Learning Manifesto

Glossary of Social Software Terms

Project Documentation 

Welcome to the Mashedlc Wiki.

We will be using this space for collaborative editing and content creation.