Personal and Social:
- Author identity: The way I see this, this bullet can be interpreted in two ways so here are the two answers I found!
1.) This peer review is of Natashya Chelson’s blog.
2.) Throughout the blog Natashya maintain’s a personable and intelligent voice. If these posts were handed to me in paper form with no identifying markers I would quite reasonably be able to assume that they were written by one person.
- Documentation of process: This is something that Natashya is amazing at! She has documented everything from the beginning and puts it in such a way that it is easy to follow and understand.
- Interactions: She participated in the flash mob as well as the Skype reading. People were really interested in her creative work with the cake and throughout her blog she links to names of other people in class who she has been able to learn from.
Post:
- Quantity: Natashya did not have strength in numbers from the beginning but since the midterm she has not failed in getting up the correct number of posts per week. We were supposed to have three posts a week, or twelve posts by the end of the month and she has done this.
- Content: Can I just start by saying she is a fantastic writer!
1.) From the beginning she took charge of the self directed learning plan and decided to read plays on her rather than wait for an assignment, meaning this was before we were assigned to read one play from each of the genres.
2.) She is really good at not leaving a topic to one post but also bring it up later.
3.) She provides Queen Elizabeth’s song, youtube clips, pictures of scenes from plays, the cake, great analysis of every play she reads, offering new insights and ideas. She made this learning process fun for herself and others!
- Formant: She makes her post very readable by uses: small paragraphs, bullets, bolded heading within the posts, colors, bolded phrases within paragraphs, and keeping her posts to manageable lengths.
Research:
- Thematic Focus: Her focus is sound in Shakespeare. She out right says this in March but it is a theme throughout all of her blog. She is REALLY good at staying on focus and providing new insight into whatever she is researching. This is important because recently most of what she has been researching is sound in Shakespeare. The constant supply of youtube clips is a fantastic part of this.
- Thesis and Cohesion: Her thesis is SOUND FOCUSES THE TEXT. This is hard to miss because she does such a good job highlighting throughout her posts. She has a great post about how in The Taming of the Shrew the language is what makes Kate so shrewish. Some of her more recent posts talk about pronunciation. She does an excellent job of explaining her thinking and where she is going with it and then continuing with it in two following posts.
- Sources: She has her sources page up. There are not sources there yet but she does include them in her posts.
Design:
- Appropriate to Theme: She has done an excellent job at keeping to her theme and her theme is very appropriate to the course, because of Shakespeare’s extensive knowledge of language and the fact that they plays were meant to be performed.
- Side content: her blog is not cluttered and so busy that it is distracting. She has an about me section, followers, labels, and blog history. She also has set up her source page and I assume she will be adding to it soon.
