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Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 4. Improved: “Be More Constructive with Your Feedback, Please” Joseph Reagle Published on: Apr 03, 2019 Updated on: May 14, 2019 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 4. Improved: “Be More Constructive with Your Feedback, Please” Other rappers dis me; say my rhymes are sissy. Why? Why exactly? Why? Be more constructive with your feedback, please. Is it because I rap about reality? Like me and my grandma drinking a cup of tea? There ain’t no party like my nanna’s tea party. Hey! Ho! —Flight of the Conchords, “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros” The fear of public speaking is supposedly so great that comedian Jerry Seinfeld once quipped that people at a funeral would “be better off in the casket than giving the eulogy.” Is the basis for this joke true? Richard Garber, the blogger behind Joyfully Public Speaking, investigated and found that on a 1993 survey that asked people about their fears, 30 percent of those surveyed said they feared death, and 45 percent reported a fear of public speaking. However, although more people did report a fear of public speaking, they never were asked to compare it to death.1 Yet this quibble is easily forgotten in light of the keen anxiety many feel when they speak in public. They are afraid of disparaging comments that might arise in others’ thoughts or, worse yet, comments that might be furtively exchanged between their peers. In fact, professionals make a living studying “communication apprehension” and treating “glossophobia,” from the Greek glōssa (tongue) and phobos (fear). One way that people improve their public speaking and lessen their anxiety is to practice in a supportive space. The Toastmasters International organization aims to provide an environment where its members can improve their speaking and leadership skills. At a Toastmasters meeting, participants encounter guidebooks, roles (such as the “time keeper” and “ah counter”), evaluations, and competitions—all of which are intended to move people toward “competent communication.” The irony of Toastmasters’s focus on evaluation and competition is that a source of anxiety is a fear of judgment (what are others thinking or saying about me?). And in the age of the Web, such judgments are seemingly more frequent and public. For instance, the online commentary about someone’s presentation is known as the backchannel. Recently, academic tweeter Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote that she was feeling frayed by quick and unthinking comments on the backchannel: “I’ve done this, probably more times than I want to admit, without even thinking about it. But I’ve also been on the receiving end of this kind of public insult a few times, and I’m here to tell you, it sucks.” The problem is that in addition to the “the real generosity, the great sense of humor, the support, the engagement, [and] the liveliness” that Twitter engenders, it also “produces a kind of critique that veers toward the snippy, the rude, the ad hominem.”2 Although evaluations at Toastmasters meetings typically are short (often three to five minutes), the intention is to provide useful comments to the speaker. The evaluator should avoid the “three Cs” (criticize, complain, and condemn) and instead perform the “three Rs” (review, reward, and 2 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 4. Improved: “Be More Constructive with Your Feedback, Please” recommend). Evaluation should help the speaker improve, encourage another speech, lift self-esteem, and provide useful recommendations (i.e., H.E.L.P.). Good feedback is so important at Toastmasters that evaluation is evaluated, which can also be a source of anxiety: as one club member wrote, “I am scheduled to evaluate a brilliant speaker tomorrow at our toastmasters meeting. Needless to say I’ve been feeling a bit apprehensive.”3 But the group provides guidelines, tips, and many opportunities to practice. It even hosts competitions to determine who can give the most masterful evaluation— examples of which can be viewed online. Toastmasters’s culture shows that giving and receiving feedback can be a rewarding and difficult practice, much like public speaking itself. This can be even more challenging in the online realm. As seen in Fitzpatrick’s concern about the backchannel, the shortness of comment can lead to slights. The asynchronicity of comment (its disconnect from the bounds of immediate interaction) can cause context to be lost (or “collapsed”). The potential for both constructive critique and “snippy” tweets is heightened, as is the emotional work required of users to manage it all. In this chapter, I address feedback: comment that is intended (or at least expected) to be seen by the person it is about, its object. To do this, I look to three online comment cultures: peer feedback in an online course, in a less formal writing community, and in communities where the line between feedback and collaboration blurs. Among the many types of comment, what is most salient about feedback is that it can be personal. It is an expressed reaction to something that often is close to the core of another’s self. Consequently, I will show how posting and reading comments on the bottom of the Web can require a brave heart and “strong ears.” Bridging the Gap with Feedback According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word feedback is a creature of the twentieth century that was first used by electrical and mechanical engineers and later applied to biological systems. Norbert Wiener, the famed proponent of cybernetics, spoke of communication feedback within social systems in the 1950s. This sense of the term then appeared within the OED in a 1959 quotation that speaks of a person who adjusts a speech based on the “‘feed-back’ from the listeners.” In 1971, it was used in the sense of this chapter: “We began to get a fairly good feedback from most people.”4 This reflects that people sometimes speak of positive (good) and negative (bad) feedback, distinguishing between what works well and what can be improved. The emergence of the term feedback also paralleled a new perspective in teaching—and a few more new terms. In 1967, Michael Scriven coined the terms summative evaluation, which assessed the performance of the learner, and formative evaluation, which assessed the effectiveness of the curriculum. Yet, almost two decades later, his colleague, Royce Sadler, lamented a continued emphasis 3 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 4. Improved: “Be More Constructive with Your Feedback, Please” on test scores and statistics: “Only cursory attention has usually been given to feedback and formative assessment.” Sadler advocated for a continued shift in evaluation toward how teachers can “shape and improve the student’s competence.”5 This is now the dominant sense of the word among teachers. Today the idea of formative evaluation is that students have a level of competence that is short of a learning goal and they can be helped to bridge the distance by feedback. Students can be instructed on how to traverse the gap, but a more substantive type of learning occurs when they are able to specify their own learning goals, assess their own competence, and devise techniques for bridging the gap. Facilitating such metacognition in the learner is not easy. For example, I assess my students’ assignments on the basis of a rubric, and in the hopes of advancing deeper learning, I have asked students to give feedback to their peers using the same rubric: does the assignment substantively engage the appropriate concepts, does it show an understanding of those concepts, is it well written, and does it conform to typical scholarly conventions? Not only did students fail to use the rubric in the execution of their own essays, but the feedback that they sometimes gave their peers focused on fixing a couple of typos and pronouncing the essay worthy of an A. One issue is that students generally fear “breaking rank” or “throwing someone under the bus” when it comes to peer evaluation. Furthermore, in the language of educational psychologists, the students’ “unconscious incompetence” (not knowing what they don’t know) and my “unconscious competence” (being blind to the scaffolding needed by the students) failed to intersect. Good teachers compensate for their expert blindness and help students move toward “conscious competence.” Unfortunately, my own mistake of not teaching students how to give good feedback has been replicated on a larger scale. A MOOC is a massive and open online course, and at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, MOOCs were center stage in the panel about reinventing higher learning. (The term parallels MMOG, or massive multiplayer online game, such as World of Warcraft.) The strongest advocates of MOOCs tend to be from recent online ventures such as Coursera and Udacity. However, even traditional educational institutions are argued to benefit from them because they can enroll students from outside their geographical reach in new degree or certificate programs and they can lower their costs by shifting some traditional courses online. The stories about far-flung students who take classes at MIT and Harvard are compelling, but MOOCs are criticized for their uneven quality, low completion rates, and cost savings that are suspected to come at the expense of teachers’ jobs and students’ learning. Beyond cost savings, some claim that the MOOC educational experience is superior to in-class learning. Coursera, a commercial MOOC, notes that its online platform provides an opportunity to exploit mastery learning and peer assessment. In mastery learning, students can retake randomized versions of assignments until they know the material rather than following the instructor to the next topic while they still are unprepared. Also, instructor feedback traditionally is “often given weeks after the concept was taught, by which point the student barely remembers the material and rarely goes back to 4 Reading the Comments • Reading the Comments 4.

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