You walk into a restaurant and sit yourself at one of the tables. At one corner of your table, you see pieces of paper with a 'Feedback: Help Us Improve' heading and a bunch of questions on it and you wonder, 'What is feedback?'. Well, in case you don't know, feedback is simply your response about something. According to The Free Online Dictionary, 'feedback' is defined as 'the return of a portion of the output of a process or system to the input, especially when used to maintain performance or to control a system or process'. Feedback is not only used in businesses like restaurants, but in anything in the world that you can comment on.
Importance
- to know whether we are doing things correctly
- to identify strengths and weaknesses
- to understand people's point of view (not everyone thinks like us; different people = different views)
- to get new ideas for improvement
- pave new ways for idea generation
- to share and discuss about matters
Good feedback help us in our learning because we can know whether our work is relevant or not. Being humans, we are far away from perfection and of course, we make mistakes and there are areas where we can improve on. Without feedback, we can spend lots of time on outputting but not know whether we are doing the correct thing. For example, we might think that we have done well in our Geography work, but the truth is that there is lots to work on and not knowing about it means that we are going to fail miserably. Feedback from peers can help us identify our strength and weaknesses. Most of the people assume that feedback is a bad thing because they sometimes don't sound nice, but in reality, it is actually an integral part of learning because we benefit from them. Feedback points out our weak points so that we can make adjustments. The end-product would be improvements!
Good feedback are those we can benefit and learn from. They have high level of details which enables us to see our strengths and weaknesses. People who give feedback are also honest and transparent; they do not give good comments and praises just because you are their friend or something, but instead they speak from the bottom of their heart and they are truthful in their comments. They not only point out your areas of weakness, but also gives you ideas on how to make improvements. It is also equally significant to be straight to the point rather than dragging and beating around the bush because some people might misinterpret what we are conveying. Just be direct, not indirect. Even if it's negative feedback, good feedback are constructive; they are positive to encourage people to not give up and are solution-oriented.
Bad feedback, on the other hand, are a total bull-crap. Some of them are long-winded- paragraphs of it- but at the end it's pointless. Others are angel-like comments like 'Nice job bro' 'Fantastic', even if the work that is commented is far from acceptable. The truth is there are people who comment for friendship's sake; they tell you nice things just to kiss up to you when in reality they think that your work is horrible. These people are not doing you any good because they are not telling the truth. As a result, your learning would not improve any further. Then, there are those who are very brief in their comments. They say things like 'I like it very much', but they do not specify on which part they liked. Details are very important and lack of it means that the comment is pointless. Some people also tend to list down tonnes of problems with your work but not a single thing on how you can improve. These comments are also a waste of time.
Blogs are useful tools in learning because they can be used as a medium to give feedback. Blogs are very interactive because it is a two-way thing rather than a one-way thing. Input is also as important as output, and we can easily give input on blogs. Blogs are also important for reflection purposes because we can look back on what we have done. We can review our past work at the archives and see our learning process. It is easy to use and a more interesting way of learning.
Feedback is made easier through blogs. Without blogs, we have to give feedback to others by doing it orally or maybe writing it on one's book (these are the only way I could think of). The problem is, if we give feedback orally, people might not remember it and writing it on people's book would mean that we have to go from book to book to give comments. Would you want to go through the hassle? I would certainly not.
Have I been giving good feedback?
Honestly, I think that I have not been giving good feedback. My comments were generally very brief; I did not specify and explain my points. I also did not include ways of improving for the problems I had pointed out. Here are some of the examples of my low-in-detail-level feedback:
I have to admit that my comments above have a terrible level of detail.
After learning and researching about good feedback, I realize the importance of giving good feedback and remind myself about it every time I make a comment. Here is an example of my improved feedback:
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| Name censored for privacy purposes =D |
My comment above improved a lot in terms of level of detail. I pointed out the strengths and what I liked about the presentation with justifications as well. I also posted a question about one of the points to enable the learner to elaborate more about it. This is how new ideas are generated.
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