Reading through the log of this conference, it is apparent that the students never tightly focused on any of the writings, and none of the papers were fully discussed. The reason for this was that the peer group session was severely limited in several ways, compared to the teacher and tutor conferences:

• The peer group conference attempted to discuss three students' papers rather than just one
• The students only had a fifty minute class period to discuss the writings as opposed to the tutorials and student-teacher conferences' hour-and-a-half
• The students all read each others' papers in class before logging into the MOO, so they could not allow time for extended thought on the papers before conferencing

Consequently, I did not expect the students to dig deeply into the specifics of each peer's paper. Instead, they were to discuss the issues that they confronted while drafting their papers and give general feedback on the drafts. In this group, the students had a difficult time focusing on any issue in much detail. But I chose this group as an example because of the interesting variety of annotations that they write in the margins of the logs.

MOO-based Metacognition: Incorporating Online and Offline Reflection into the Writing Process
Joel A. English