How would the PROPOSED peer review process work?
Open Planner is PROPOSING to allow teams to exercise varying degrees of control over the content they publish.
There would be two "states" for every curriculum page:
Awaiting Peer Review: visible for editing and comment only by teammates
Published: visible to all site members and the public
There would be three levels of "privilege" for managing the "states" of a curriculum page:
subscriber (default role): able to create and edit own curriculum pages, with the status awaiting peer review. Able to see and comment upon all group content, both published and awaiting peer review.
author (the person who created the page): able to edit their own pages and assign their own pages the awaiting peer review or published state.
primary author (manager-assigned role): able to edit all curriculum pages in the team, able to create pages in either awaiting peer review or published state, able to promote pages from awaiting peer review to published. Able to demote pages from published to awaiting peer review.
In other words:
Before a curriculum page can become "published," or visible to users who do not belong to the group, it must be tagged "published" by its author or one of the primary authors inside the workflow tab.
How would I manage the "workflow state" of a page?
Each curriculum page in your group will have a "workflow" tab at the top. Authors and Primary authors have the ability to change the workflow state from "awaiting peer review" to "published." (The primary author role must be assigned by the team manager in the "manage subcribers" section of the team work area.)
Team members who are subscribers would be limited to creating pages that are "awaiting peer review" and which therefore are not publicly visible.
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Peer Review Structure
Overall this looks like an excellent plan. It allows groups to iron out ideas before opening it to the public. I think that it might also be helpful to have some perhaps color coded options, in which you might allow things to be public, but also wish to indicate the "level of confidence" perhaps with some set of check boxes such as
- trial balloon -
- looking for peer comments on whether this might work
- something that has been tried in your own classroom -
- looking for peer comments on whether this might work in their classroom, whether they like this approach even if they would not be a position to try it.
- looking for peer
- suggestions on how the approach might be improved,
- comments on potential difficulties in the use of the materials in different contexts,
- comparisons with and links to related lessons and discussion of the trade off.
- suggestions on how the concepts might be enriched/extended
- suggestion of tools by which objectives might be evaluated or assessed
- something that has been tested and modified base on experience -
- something that has actually assessment or research data to support the validity of its approach in specific classrooms.
I need to leave and this isn't fully edited. But I see that associated witheach curriculum page need to be an associated page with such feedback and comments.Great suggestions!
A couple of thoughts.
1) A concern I always have when weighing new features: What is the threshold for complexity before the site becomes too "clunky" and/or intimidating to the average user? There's a real pattern amongst the winners in Web 2.0 (Google, Craigslist, ...) of sheer minimalism. Form must strictly follow function, or you start hemmoraging usership, as their other options are just a pageload away. We're probably already bloated by unneccessary features that I've unwittingly fallen in love with despite my better judgment.
2) That said, there's a real need for a system by which the author and/or others can quickly assess RELEVANCY and CONFIDENCE LEVEL for a given contribution, as your suggestions capture very well, or the site quickly becomes a disordered navigation hazard. Because of our shoestring budget and coding limitations, we must first work within the constraints of what currently exists in the Drupal development community, as it allows us to have something, if imperfect, to move forward with as we ponder a more perfect world. I'll be looking more carefully at the user-driven rating and/or tagging systems that are already out there and perhaps we can try them out. I can start by adding a new taxonomy for the author to flag their own content, using some rendition of the categories you suggested.
3) Currently, comments can be left on the same page as a curriculum document itself. Are you suggesting these should be on a separate page? As yet, I don't know if this can be achieved...but I'll look into it.