Technology (and innovations!) of the Past - The Ditto Machine and Peer Editing

In looking for information about the ditto machine, I came across the article referenced above in the infographic I made. I found this article very interesting and made some comparisons to today.

Source:
Bissland, J. H. (1980). Peer evaluation method promotes sharper writing. Journalism Educator, 34(4), 17-19.

Summary:
James Bissland from Bowling Green State University introduces two tools for teachers to use called the Feedback Profile Project and the Peer Evaluation and Review System (PERS). Both tools take student writing and give them lots of audience feedback in addition to the teacher's comments. In the Feedback Profile Project, experts look at student papers with the help of computers. This became problematic because not all teachers have access to computers and finding experts would take time. PERS is a simpler approach. Students write their papers with spirit duplicators and then the masters are collected. They are stripped of their names and given a code to differentiate between them. They are then duplicated and put into packets and given to each student. The order of the stories is varied in each packet, but they all include an evaluation tool.

When it comes time to review the packets, students are told to first rank them in order. The next step is continue looking through the materials and then to explain why they gave the score they did. They would then be graded on their story, get a grade based on their paper's rankings, and finally a grade of their comments on other papers. The work now shifts to the teacher tallying and totaling to get point totals and a ranking system.  Finally, students are given all of the different pieces which provide for a great learning opportunity for students at all levels and discussions amongst themselves. The instructor of this class found that using PERS allows for great amounts of qualitative feedback peer feedback, it reflects the gate keeping decision process, it gives plenty of time for the writers and critics to have face to face discussions, the feedback is based on familiarity with the audience, the judges are guaranteed, the competition increases interest, and having students critically analyze and assess other students' successes and failures helps to compare to their own writing.

Reflection:
I had a smile on my face while reading through this because you can see how much thought and process went into the PERS process and how beneficial and potentially groundbreaking it was at the time. There was a need for qualitative feedback and they had found a solution, largely in part to using an everyday tool (the duplicator) to make the learning happening in the classroom able to reach heights that were not possible before. With having Google Docs now, it is so much faster for students to share their papers and get feedback from numerous people. They can even leave the feedback inside of the document instead of needing to print off copies. It really makes me think about what articles we might look back on more than 30 years for now about an innovative technology integration example that has long since been replaced with something faster, better, etc.