Tag: Blog (Page 1 of 2)
My goal for this paper is to articulate how the internet provides students with a tool for learning and pursuing their purpose. To achieve this goal I plan to connect and synthesize the ideas of Bill Wasik, Sam Anderson, and my choice author, Sugata Mitra. I plan to distinguish between the populations of children, students, and young adults by trying to stay focused on the topic of students throughout my paper. To make my first claim stronger I will reference the book They Say I Say and use one of the transitional cues mentioned in the book. I will make my second paragraph more specific by talking about how the internet provides students with a variety of information to use to benefit their learning. I will also try to be more specific about how “the bandwagon effect” can be used as a tool for learning. I plan to include more summery in my concluding paragraph and revisit the ideas mentioned throughout the paper. My biggest challenge will be specifying how the bandwagon effect can be used as a tool for learning and clarifying how students are able to create something out of nothing with the help of the internet and technology.
An experience that I have had that is similar to the recursive writing process we learned about in class is becoming a softball pitcher. I started pitching when I was in elementary school, but didn’t start going to lessons until the 8th grade. Like learning to play any other position or playing any other sport I practiced a lot. I went to lessons up to twice a week with my pitching coach Steve. Eventually I developed a routine, similar to how writers go through the steps of planning out their writing. Then at every pitching lesson Steve would come up with something for me to work on that day, like keeping a good posture or making sure that I opened my hips right after pushing off the mound. Every day I would find something to revise and work on, and was eventually able to master it. I had to make a plan for how I was going to become a better pitcher, and then I had to revise and practice and was able to learn by doing.
Here is the link to the Podcast I created for this assignment. The podcast is an interview with my mom about adulthood. The sound quality is scratchy at some points during the conversation because the interview was over the phone.
The essay that I chose to work with for prompt 3 is called The Internet Can Harm, But Can Also Be A Child’s Best Tool For Learning, by Sugata Mitra. This essay is about how the author feels that when used correctly the internet can be a helpful tool for children to learn. He goes against the perception that the internet is misleading for to children. If adults are able to make the internet into a safe environment children will be able to use it to their advantage. They have the opportunity to learn what ever they want and to communicate with anyone from around the world. I am choosing this essay because it supports my claim that the internet can be used as a tool to our advantage for pursuing life purpose. I will be able to use Mitra’s essay as evidence for the claims I plan to make and to help go against the naysayers. Mitra acknowledges the opposing side to his claim throughout his essay so I will be able to use his arguments to support my own. I consider this source acceptable for a couple of reasons. I found this essay on the site The Guardian and it was published in 2013 so the information is relevant and not outdated. The Guardian is a trustworthy site because it is a well known news source and I have also been assigned to read articles from this site for other classes. Based of the CRAAP test that we learned about in class the other day I would say this source is acceptable. This article is current, relevant to the topic for prompt 3, has an author who has also spoken at TEDx talks, is supported by evidence, and has the purpose of educating people and presents multiple sides of his issue.
I also choose to work with this essay because I feel like I will be able to make connections between Mitra’s essay, Wasik’s “My Crowd Experiment”, and to Anderson’s “In Defense of Distraction”. Both Mitra’s essay and Wasik’s essay explain how the internet can be used as a tool. Anderson’s essay talks about how distraction can be a good thing for young people and for people trying to create something. All of these texts show the benefits of the internet and technology. I will also be able to make connections between Mitra’s and Wasik’s essays because they both talk about how the internet can help people pursue their purposes. Wasik was able to make something out of nothing with his mob project experiment and Mitra talks about how children can pursue what ever they want because of the internet’s unlimited possibilities.
- Marginal Notes
The link above is to pictures of my marginal notes on two different pages. The first picture is from page 476. In the first paragraph I underlined and circled information that illustrated Bill Wasik’s purpose of his Mob Project. I circled the line “a promise to create something out of nothing.” and wrote that this was Bill’s big idea or dream for his project. In the next paragraph I underlined the last sentence and wrote question marks next to it because I was confused as to what Bill was trying to describe. He wrote about a man named Eugene and how one day he closed his ice cream shop and left a note that said closed due to shovel. I knew that Bill was trying to make a joke or sound funny but I did not understand what the point of this story was and why Eugene would say closed due to shovel. In the next paragraph I underlined and circled some ways that I thought the internet extended Bill and his project so I could come back to them and use them to answer the second question below.
The next picture is from page 487. In the first paragraph I circled more information that I thought explained how the internet extended Bill through blogs. Many of these bloggers were writing about how the most recent mob didn’t meet their standards. In the second paragraph Bill talks about how he feels his Mobs couldn’t meet the bloggers expectations for accomplishing something bigger because he thought they were not able to convey a message. Here I challenged this claim by saying why not? Why couldn’t the mobs be used to get a message across? The mobbers could possibly hold signs or sign a song to bring attention to an important subject which could create more awareness for that subject and that would eventually convey a message to a large group of people. On this page Bill also takes a moment to include the naysayers point of view in his essay. I thought this was interesting and commented on this because we had recently talked about the ‘naysayer’ in class.
2.How does the internet extend Bill and what does this say about the internet
The internet extends Bill in a few different ways. Bill is able to start his project through e-mailing people about the mob. At first he wanted email to be the only way that he contacted people and to draw a crowd. “I could use e-mail to gather an audience for a show…” (Wasik, 475). He is using e-mail as a tool to reach out to as many people as possible. E-mail is just one way that Bill is able to spread the idea of his project. Other people also spread the news of the mob for Bill. During the different mob events many people observing would capture the event on their handheld cameras or phones and then share it with other people. “Still others lingered around, filming with handheld video cameras or snapping digital pictures,” (Wasik, 476). Some radio stations and different media stations would also get wind of the event, most likely through e-mail or the internet, and would capture everything that happened and then share it on their websites or newscasts. The news of these mobs spread so much that during the second mob two hundred people showed up and “informed clerks that they all lived together in a Long Island City commune and were looking for a ‘love rug’,” (Wasik, 476). Bloggers on the internet also helped to extend Bill and his mobs, they eventually gave them the name ‘flash mob’ and spread the news and popularity of the mobs even further. “Perhaps most important, the Mob Project was almost immediately taken up by blogs,” (Wasik, 477). All these different ways that spread the news about the Mob Project shows that the internet can be used as a tool. It is a way to share information fast and efficiently.
3. Would you argue that Bill pursues purpose or meaning in his essay? How? If not, what is he pursuing instead? Does he accomplish what he sets out to do?
I do think that Bill is pursuing a purpose in his essay. He says repeatedly that is was trying to create something out of nothing and that the “only goal was to attract a crowd” (Wasik, 476). He wanted to see if he could get people come together essentially for no reason at all. Bill also claims that the Mob Project was about the herd instinct and bandwagon trend. “The mob was all about the herd instinct, I reasoned, about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad…” (Wasik, 480). This made the project continue to grow and attract more attention. Bill was eventually able to prove that humans have a desire to not be left behind. He provided a graph in his essay that showed how his Mob Project grew as time went on and more people found out about it. Everyone wanted in on the mob even if they didn’t know everything about it or even who was behind it. Bill quotes an interview that shows that the people involved didn’t even know all the details “Anchor: ‘Do either of you know who he is?’ Mobber 1: ‘Nope’ Mobber 2: ‘Well I’ve- I’ve emailed him. That’s about it.'” (Wasik, 482). People joined the bandwagon almost blindly. This shows that Bill was able to accomplish what he was setting out to do, to attract a crowd of people with no purpose at all.
The link above is to the picture of my brainstorming session.
For my brainstorming session I listed all of the texts we had to choose from for this essay; Richard Restak’s essay, Sam Anderson’s article, Robin Henig’s essay, and Thomas King’s TEDx talk. Then, underneath the each person’s name, I listed the main topics or the topics that related to the prompt and circled each of them. Then I drew lines connecting the topics in each category. The orange lines represented the ideas that support how the availability of constant information could strengthen young minds and the purple lines represented the ideas that support how it could weaken young minds. I wanted to be able to see which claim would have more evidence that I could you as support in my essay. I found that for strengthening young minds I could talk about how times are changing and there is a need for speed, people are expecting more from others when it comes to being efficient, and how focus is a voluntary thing so technology is creating more options for young people to find what interests them and how they want to apply that to the world. I would you the texts from Restack, Anderson, and King for that claim. If I was to write about how constant information weakens young minds I could talk about how it is actually impossible for people to multitask and how that affects young people’s brains. I could also talk about how more jobs have many jobs for people to fulfill and how that can affect mental health of individuals, and how people are turning to drugs to try to keep up with the many impossible jobs they are being asked to do. I could also connect technology to how young people are taking longer to grow up because it is so time consuming. For this claim I would use the texts from Restack, Anderson, and Henig.
Some readers might challenge this view of distractions as they weaken the young mind by saying that they are helpful in the creative sense. Distraction can sometimes lead to new ideas. Anderson mentions in his essay, “This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness,” (Anderson, 11). When writers go off on a tangent or start writing about things that don’t seem to connect to their main ideas they can sometimes come up with great ideas without realizing it. When athletes don’t focus so much on what they’re doing or how well they are performing they sometimes end up performing better than expected. Being able to relax and not think so hard about the task at hand can help people create better outcomes. The times are changing, the speed of technology has a part in that and information being readily available makes young people work faster to keep up with the flow and tasks being asked of them. While it is true that distractions can be beneficial to the creative process, the abundance of distractions technology is creating is mostly hurting the brains of young people, not helping them.
Revision Plan for Essay Prompt 2
My goal for this paper is to prove how the wealth of constant information is weakening young minds. I plan to expand upon how the digitally distracting world forces young people to multitask, puts them at risk for mental illness, distracts them from growing up, and increases their usage of drugs. I need to revise the organization of my paper so that the topics flow more easily. I will use some of the strategies I mentioned in my Learning Log 1 to approach my writing as more of a recursive process. To think more about the global edits of my paper, I will go back and look to see how my thesis sentence lists the claims I will be making and compare it to the order of the paragraphs. If I find that the order of the claim paragraphs do not coordinate with the order of my thesis, I plan to switch up how my thesis lists the claims I make in my paper. During an activity we did in class, we wrote down the claims we were trying to make in our paper on note cards and switched around the order of the note cards until we found an arrangement that made the most sense. I plan to do this to fix the organization of my claim paragraphs and then fix my thesis statement to match. I also need to revise how I introduce the texts I use for evidence. The activity with the note cards will also help me figure out when to introduce the texts. The most challenging part of this revision will be finding the order of my paragraphs that makes the most sense and making sure my concluding paragraph still connects to my thesis.
Before Klinkburg Edits
Although technology is making it easier for young people to ‘multitask’, it isn’t as helpful as they might think. Technology makes it seem as though it’s possible to get things done faster by doing two things at once. Young people make the assumption they are able to text and drive or scroll through their social media accounts while studying for an exam. According to David Meyer, an expert on multitasking mentioned in Sam Anderson’s article, In Defense of Distraction, “ … multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth,” (Anderson, 4). By attempting to do two tasks at once the brain is going back and forth between the two tasks rapidly, while not completely retaining or comprehending the information of either task. This means that it actually takes more time to fully understand something when struggling to do two things at once rather than just doing them one at a time. Practicing this can make the brain more easily distracted because it will become used to trying to switch back and forth between two tasks. Even when trying to study for an exam students are easily distracted by people walking by or their phones going off. So, even when young people are attempting to focus on one thing at a time, their brains are still trying to multitask.
After Klinkburg Edits
Technology is making it easier for young people to ‘multitask’. Multitasking isn’t as helpful as people might think. Technology makes it seem possible to do things faster by doing two things at once. Young people assume they can successfully text and drive or scroll through social media while studying. David Meyer, in Sam Anderson’s article, In Defense of Distraction, says “ … multitasking, … is a myth,” (Anderson, 4). Multitasking means the brain is going back and forth between two tasks rapidly. The brain doesn’t retain or comprehend the information of either task. It takes more time to understand two things at once, rather than one at a time. Practicing this makes the brain more distracted because it becomes used to switching back and forth between tasks. Students trying to focus on studying are distracted by people walking by or their phones going off. When young people attempt to focus on one thing, their brains still try to multitask.
