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It has been almost two decades since Kenneth Bruffee suggested in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’” that peer review resembled the kinds of conversation that academics most value: social interaction between colleagues about scholarship (639). Bruffee described peer review as an activity in which “students learn to describe the organizational structure of a peer’s paper, paraphrase it, and [suggest] what the author might do to improve the work” (637–38). Although peer review has long been practiced among writers (Gere), Bruffee shed new light on the activity, framing it in terms of social construction, a theoretical perspective characterized by the assertion that knowledge is created through social interaction. Specifically, Bruffee suggested that activities like peer review (and collaborative learning in general) highlighted the relationship between conversation and thought, while providing supportive environments for students to practice academic discourse. Indeed, Bruffee suggested that because peer review and collaborative activities resembled academic discourse, instructors had a responsibility to model this discourse for students. But the peer review that Bruffee described—peer review that scholars have documented and writing teachers have regularly practiced—tends to highlight social interaction in terms of oral communication; the role of writing in peer review is actually downplayed in this scholarship. For example, as several scholars have documented, peer review in classrooms typically occurs in the form of the face-to-face, in-class workshops between student pairs or student groups (Spear, Sharing Writing; Hawkins; DiPardo and Freedman; Gere), or more informally as sit-down discussions with other writers (Gere; Spigelman). In this book, I suggest that a new form of peer review has emerged that is unaccounted for in peer review scholarship: a virtual kind of peer review. By “virtual” I do not mean “less than real” or “simulated,” for this would suggest that virtual peer review is not a concrete activity. Rather, I refer to “virtual” in the computer sense; that is, activities that are facilitated by means of a computer . This new form of peer review is one that, unlike the peer review that Bruffee and others described, occurs without a single face-to-face discussion, because it is conducted in writing through computer technology. Specifically, through Internet technology writers can exchange documents through e-mail and attachments; they can communicate with one another about their work; 7 C H A P T E R 1 Virtual Peer Review as “Remediation” and they can edit or comment on writing using word-processing programs. This series of activities forms what I call “virtual peer review,” or the use of computer technology to critique and to comment on another person’s writing. This new kind of peer review raises an important question for writing studies: to what extent does peer review change when it is entirely conducted through computer technology? The question is similar to one that Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin raise in terms of “remediation.” Defining remediation as a “repurposing” of media, these authors argue that media shift and borrow from one another. They suggest that remediation is bound in a “double logic”: it multiplies media while simultaneously seeking ways to erase it (5). To illustrate remediation, Bolter and Grusin use the examples of paintings being transformed to digital images, webcams imitating live presence , and the World Wide Web borrowing from print, yet transforming it. Bolter and Grusin suggest that remediation can happen in various degrees. For example, remediation can highlight older media in newer media; “refashion” older media entirely while still making the presence of older media apparent; emphasize stark differences between older and newer media; and absorb older media entirely, erasing their characteristics (47). They explain that a “repurposing as remediation is both what is ‘unique to digital worlds’ and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness” (50). Although Bolter and Grusin do not specifically address remediation in terms of face-to-face and electronic communication, I apply the concept in that way to examine the degree to which electronic communication “borrows ” from face-to-face communication. I am particularly interested in remediation as it applies to virtual peer review. Is virtual peer review a remediation of face-to-face peer review? Does virtual peer review borrow from face-to-face peer review, or is it its own distinct activity? The position I take is that while virtual peer review shares theoretical roots in peer review, virtual peer review has important, even fundamental , differences from peer review in practice. I therefore argue virtual peer review is a remediation of face...

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