In a reassessment of peer review practices, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch explores how computer technology changes our understanding of this activity. She defines "virtual peer review" as the use of computer technology to exchange and respond to one another's writing in order to improve it. Arguing that peer review goes through a remediation when conducted in virtual environments, the author suggests that virtual peer review highlights a unique intersection of social theories of language and technological literacy.

In "Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers", 24 college educators focus on the most important questions to be addressed by all scholar-teachers and administrators committed to developing high-quality online education programs. We describe these questions as "global" because they transcend the particular situations of individual institutions. They are questions that everyone involved in online education needs to address: What are the issues to consider when first developing and then sustaining an online education program? How do we create interactive, pedagogically sound online courses and classroom communities? How should we monitor and assess the quality of online courses and programs? And how should recent developments and innovations in online education cause us to reexamine our roles and responsibilities as educators in technical communication?While these global questions affect all of us in one way or another, they demand different local answers, such as those presented by the contributors to this text. Readers will need to consider which of these local answers might apply to their own situations and how these answers might need to be adapted to reflect the particular needs of their own institutions.

This book grows out of the insights and proficiencies gained through teaching undergraduate and graduate students in onsite, online, and blended formats for almost three decades. Using a practitioner focus, it proffers best practices utilized and validated during the process of successfully instructing students in writing their scientific or technical proposals, professional or business reports, and academic papers or doctoral dissertations at premier American universities. The book guides facilitators through syllabus creation, discussion management, and open educational resources use, while specifically offering strategies and support to the underserved online writing teachers who utilize multimedia materials and virtual discussions in learning management systems to reach out to students. Also, insider insights and specialist knowledge on using visual creation tools and open educational resources are shared. The text is a must-have handbook for undergraduate and graduate teachers, and particularly fills the need for a helpful sourcebook for remote teaching in a post-COVID world.

Student-led peer review can be a powerful learning experience for both giver and receiver, developing evaluative judgment, critical thinking, and collaborative skills that are highly transferable across disciplines and professions. Its success depends on purposeful planning and scaffolding to promote student ownership of the process. With intentional and consistent implementation, peer review can engage students in course content and promote deep learning, while also increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of faculty assessment.Based on the authors’ extensive experience and research, this book provides a practical introduction to the key principles, steps, and strategies to implement student peer review – sometimes referred to as “peer critique” or “workshopping”. It addresses common challenges that faculty and students encounter. The authors offer an easy-to-follow and rigorously tested three-part protocol to use before, during, and after a peer review session, and advice on adapting each step to individual courses.The process is applicable across all disciplines, content types, and modalities, face-to-face and online, synchronous and asynchronous. Instructors can guide students in peer review in one course, across two or more courses that are team-taught, or across programs or curriculums. When instructors, students, and university stakeholders create a culture of peer review, it enhances learning benefits for students and allows faculty to share pedagogical resources.Student peer review is a high-impact pedagogy that’s easily implemented, inculcates lifelong learning skills in students, and relieves the assessment burden on faculty as students collaborate to improve their own work.

Around twenty years ago, with the digitisation of almost every facet of life, most businesses started including their own review system, so that their products could be rated and reviewed. This was the first wave of online reviews, called online consumer reviews (OCRs). The emergence of the smartphone and the proliferation of social media in the 2010s, however, resulted in a new ecosystem in which peers could share their assets, review other peers and be reviewed. This is the second wave of online reviews, or the emergence of online peer reviews (OPRs). This book explores the three differentiating discursive practices found in BlaBlaCar in Spanish and in English (emotive, relational and metacommunicative) as representative of this new wave. It demonstrates that OPRs have characteristics of their own, and proposes a new definition that captures the latest developments in online reviews in the context of peer collaboration.

When people hear the term "role-playing games," they tend to think of two things: a group of friends sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons or video games with exciting graphics. Between those two, however, exists a third style of gaming. Hundreds of online forums offer gathering places for thousands of players--people who come together to role-play through writing. They create stories by taking turns, describing events through their characters' eyes. Whether it is the arena of the Hunger Games, the epic battles of the Marvel Universe or love stories in a fantasy version of New York, people build their own spaces of words, and inhabit them day after day. But what makes thousands of players, many teenagers among them, voluntarily type up novel-length stories? How do they use the resources of the Internet, gather images, sounds, and video clips to weave them into one coherent narrative? How do they create together through improvisation and negotiation, in ways that connect them to older forms of storytelling? Through observing more than a hundred websites and participating in five of them for a year, the author has created a pilot study that delves into a subculture of unbounded creativity.

Now, more than ever, it seems that the age of professional learning networks has well and truly arrived. The rise and proliferation of digital communication, coupled with the circumstances enforced during the pandemic experience, have led to a dynamic re-imagining of Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) – both in terms of what they are for and what they can achieve. Set against this context this book provides a stimulating insight into the current state of the art of professional learning networks and the transformative difference they are poised to make to our educational future. Drawing on a wealth of expertise, each chapter is written by leading thinkers and doers in the field, and covers a range of topics and emerging areas. These include: the professional learning vistas opened up through digital opportunities; how these networks have helped to enhance teachers’ identity and sense of well-being: the new sense of practitioner ownership and partnership now at the heart of PLNs; new openings for professionalization; how PLNs have become vehicles for radically different forms of professional development and learning; and what this all means for school leadership.