A worthwhile disaster of 50 pages?

A quick post.

My students recently did presentations on a selected topic of interest.

Fairly straightforward, right?

I went ahead and complicated it a bit.

Each student had to give feedback on the presenter.  3 positives comments with 1 constructive criticism on something they can improve on.

I decided that it was worthwhile not only for the students to receive feedback from me, and read the feedback from the rest of the class -- that it was also worthwhile for them to read their own comments to other people.

So began my journey of typing up all these comments and sorting them for each student.  I finally gave them back to the students today.  On the 2 paged document that each one of them got, there were comments from me, comments from the class, and also their own comments to other people.

The "own comments to other people" bit was an interesting one.  Students would take a look at their expectations of other work, and match their own work to it.  It also makes them look at the whole process of feedback a bit differently.  It also allows them to examine the criteria of assessment a bit more closely.

The end result was a 50 paged document that I typed up.  It's a disaster in the sense that it took me a long LONG LONG time to type them all up and sort accordingly.  In fact, on many occasions I felt like giving up... there was way too much to type up.  But I followed through with this crazy idea.  On the other hand, I do believe that the students got a lot out of it.

So... even though it was a disaster for me, it was worthwhile.  I won't be doing this again though.  If anything, I would need to streamline the process so I can avoid the part where I had to sit in front of a computer and data entry for 10 hours.