Paper 2 D.S.
From Mizzou Wiki
Rhetorical Analysis of the Video
Assignment 2 incorporates the actual text of the first assignment. That is, you're actually adding to the original paper in order to build something larger, but in sections, rather than a twenty-something pager, overnight. In this case, you should be almost doubling the length of the initial paper, adding another 1200-1400 words.
So, given that you've defined the terms, outlined how Wesch's work connects to them, and their connection to you, I'm asking you to provide some analysis--beginning with the use of some rhetorical texts. You should choose one or more of the rhetorical methods (which we discussed in class) and evaluate Wesch's presentation of student ecology. How does he (the video) makes his points? What rhetorical strategies can we find in the video(s)? You should also consider how you "fit" into your paper, rhetorically speaking, and how your audience "fits" as well.
Also, videos 2 and 3 are web 2.0-centric, bringing up not only the issue of students, but their connection to Web 2.0 phenomena. You should also consider that if these issues in video 1 are real, can they be mitigated by web 2.0? If so, how?
Draft 1
Student ecology is the study of how students interact with their environment. Michal Wesch, a professor at Kansas State, had two hundred of his students survey themselves to better understand some of the problems that college life gives students. After analyzing the information they found that our current education establishment is set up in a manor that may not reach the needs of students. Wesch and his class then created a somewhat abstract video that addressed the issues that these students found with our education system.
The video begins with a quote, “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century learning environment that still characterizes the education establishment where information is scarce, but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects and schedules.” -Marshal McLuhan 1967. After informing the viewer that the information in the video was gathered from student surveys, the video brings up some of the issues with student life by showing students holding signs describing some of the trends that they found from their surveys. The first issue covered by the video related to the way that college is systematic and impersonal. The students described things such as large class sizes, teachers that don’t know their students, and needing to learn things that aren’t important to them. Next, the video touched on how time consuming being a college student is. The students held up signs that described how many hours students spend doing different things throughout the day and the total came to be twenty six and a half hours. The video goes on to show a girl holding a sign that says “when I graduate I will probably have a job that doesn’t exist today”, then it shows a student holding a Scranton that says, “Filling this out won’t help me get there”. Wesch and his students are saying that the education establishment is not as good as it could be. Students sit in lecture halls and take notes or tests, but they aren’t getting the experiences they need to fully prepare them for life outside of college. Near the end of the video another quote appears on the screen that says, “The inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.” –Josiah F. Bumstead 1841. The video puts emphasis on the fact that this quote is from 1841 by making it appear after the viewer has time to read the quote and putting it in larger font. When comparing McLuhan’s quote about how bewildering the 19th century’s learning environment is to Bumstead’s about how wonderful the system is, I think Welsh is trying to show the viewer that our model of a ridged and systematic education establishment is out-dated.
I feel like overall Wesch’s video did an excellent job of provoking thought. It was formatted in a way that gave me credible information but allowed me to make conclusions on my own about that information. As a student I think I can understand most of the points that Wesch was trying to make, but I felt like he made a few issues seem more important than they really were and left out a few rebuttals that I feel weaken his arguments. The first quote by McLuhan introduced the topic of the format of the education system. Wesch tried to portray this “19th century education establishment” as too systematic and impersonal. I can understand where Wesch is coming from, but I’m not sure if I agree with the point he is trying to make entirely. My experiences in college have proven, in my mind, that there is a big emphasis on organization in our programs at MU. Most of my classes are organized based on chapters in a textbook and I know what chapters are covered when and when tests or homework is due because a schedule is made weeks in advance, but I don’t feel like organized information is as bad of a thing as Wesch made it seem to be, and I don’t think that “information is scarce” in any class I have taken so far. If anything I would say that information is abundant. Most of my classes cover around one chapter from that course’s textbook every day and I have spiral notebooks that have been completely filled with information in the form of notes, so I cannot see how information can be seen as scarce. I can understand how college can be seen as impersonal as implied in the video. I have had a few smaller classes or labs that were more personal, but most of my classes are lectures in auditoriums with more than a hundred other students and most of my teachers don’t know my name. I feel like MU is trying to solve this problem by having RSDs for some large lectures where students get in smaller groups with T.A.s or teachers and use that time to clarify and discuss things learned that week.
The next topic discussed by Wesch is how time consuming being a student is. The students in his video covered all sorts of different things most students do and told us about how many hours daily they spend doing them. I can relate to this issue entirely. I have never been on the move as much as I have been since I came to college. It seems like there is always something that needs to be done, whether it’s social or academic. Last semester during finals week I had so much I felt like I needed accomplish that I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row. Wesch tried to make all of this seem bad, and I can see how a lot of people would hate it, but I really enjoy it. I love having something to do all the time and even though I don’t really have a lot of time to relax I don’t think I would trade my fast paced lifestyle if I could.
I don’t agree with Wesch completely when he implies that the college learning environment doesn’t prepare students properly for their future jobs. Nearly our entire grading system is based on testing in one way or another and I feel like the video implied that we should do away with tests. The problem I see with doing this is that it leaves us no way to prove that we are qualified to graduate. If med schools didn’t test their students I can only imagine that as a society we would have a lot more people dying and a lot more mal-practice law suits. I think Wesch was trying to imply that a more hands on approach to learning would be a good idea, but Wesch failed to talk about internships. I don’t know how it is in other colleges on at MU but at the college of agriculture, food, and natural resources internships are readily available, widely advertized, and provide the hands on experience Wesch implied college doesn’t have. Technology was brought up as an alternative to traditional teaching, but I don’t know if traditional teaching is such a bad thing. Some teachers are very good at getting information to students through lectures, and some students retain information best when it is heard. Personally, I don’t really care. I know that sounds bad, but I have had classes that are traditional lectures where I sit for an hour and write down what the teacher is saying and I have had classes that teach in a more alternative way, like doing the entire course on a wiki, and I think that I can pretty well retain information either way. I can understand how some students would have a hard time with traditional teaching, but I’m sure that quite a few students would have just as hard of a time learning in a different way.
When Wesch implies in the video that our education system is out dated, I agree with him to a certain extent. The focus on organization is there, just like it has always been, but with the advances we have made in technology our education system has become more flexible and less systematic. Technology has allowed us to take tests or do homework online, at our leisure, and look at PowerPoint slides used in during the lecture whenever we want.
The last topic brought up, in relation to college, is the idea of cultural literacy and cultural competency. Cultural literacy is a person’s ability to interact, understand, and fit in with a dominate culture. I wouldn’t say that college life has provided me with this, but I would say it has enhanced it. Things like having everyday conversations, reading the news paper, or going to a party gives us a better grasp on how our culture works and lets us fit in or interact and I did plenty of these things long before I came to college, but I feel as though college has given me a different view of the world and what is going on around me. I never realized that living with my parents was as sheltering as it was until I came here. I don’t mean sheltering in that my parents wouldn’t let me go out with friends or to parties, I mean that until I moved out I didn’t know things that I need to know to survive in this society on my own. For example, it never really hit me until I came to college that I have to shop for groceries. Obviously I understood that someone has to go out and get food, but I had always viewed our fridge as my grocery store that fills up once a week. Things as simple as how to shop for groceries are the parts of cultural literacy that college has provided me with. Cultural competency on the other hand is a person’s ability to interact with other cultures and I think I’ve gotten a lot more of this than cultural literacy in college. I was born and raised in the KC area and I’ve spent my fair share of time in the rural, the urban, and suburban areas, so I thought that I had a grasp on how to deal with different cultures, but I had no idea until I came here. There are people from all over the world here, and I have to learn how to interact and deal with them. For example, in Liberty, and a lot of the KC area, yellow lighters are considered bad luck, and a lot of people, including myself, will go out of their way to avoid them. But my roommate is from Illinois and he bought a yellow lighter recently. I’m not saying I’m going to start buying yellow lighters, but that made me realize that things like yellow lighters being bad luck may be a big deal where I come from, it may not be someplace else, and even though I’m not too comfortable with even having one in my house, it’s something I’m learning to deal with.
Like I said before, Wesch created his video in a way that provoked his viewers to think. He did a good job of mixing rhetorical stratigies to appeal to his viewers and make his points understood. The video has small details that can't be noticed unless they are looked for, along with some stratigies that really stand out, that clearify and support his ideas. Most aspects of his video, the noticable ones and the not so noticable ones, have an affect on his viewers and help get his point across to them regardless of whether they agree with them or not.
Logos is a rhetorical strategy that is used in communication to get ideas to an audience by using reason. Wesch uses this strategy, along with others, in his video. He appeals to his viewer's reasoning abilities by being logical. Many of the things he covered in his videos were nothing more than statistics, but because they related to and supported his ideas they were appropriate. He used percentages and numbers when describing things like class sizes, reading assignments, and finacial situations. These sorts of things aren't contriversial, unlike his topic. When watching his video it's hard for a viewer to not see things the way he wants them to when they can't argue with the points he is makeing. For example, on the topic of how impersonal college life is, Wesch informed his audience that on average 18% of a student's teachers know their name. Because Wesch got this information from a credible source, his students, this is somthing that is hard, maybe even impossible, to argue with. The appeal to logic that Wesch uses does support his ideas, but it doesn't prove them. For example, looking at the percent of teachers that know their students names again, that is a statistic that proves nothing more than 18% of the average student's teachers know their name. It can't prove that college is impersonal because impersonal is a realitive term. Wesch uses facts and information in an appropriate and effective way, but throwing statistics at his audience may still leave doubt in their minds and facts alone would make it difficult to keep their attention. Wesch solves this problem by also using the rhetorical strategy of pathos.
Pathos is another rhetorical strategy. It's a way to get through to an audience emotionally. This strategy is seen in many of the small details that I referred to earlier. The video sets a sort of depressing mood to help the audience relate to the student's issues. Many of the students look upset and the ones that don't look upset most certianly don't look happy. Viewers see this and can't help but think the problems Wesch addresses with student life are true, if they weren't why would these students look so depressed. One of the most noticeable uses of pathos in this video can be seen when a student holds up a sign that states the students didn't create the problems but they are their problems. The fact that they are referred to as problems indicates to the viewer that they should feel sympathy for these students and maybe even do somthing about it. The music also gives the viewer sympathetic feelings. The music he uses is slightly depressing. The choice in music could have been more depressing than it was and it had no words, I think he did this to make the mood of the video more subcontious than contious. By making the viewer feel sypathetic or depressed without making it seem intentional viewers find themselves agreeing with his arguements without anylizing what they are actually being told. I think Wesch's appeal to human emotion also helps in keeping his audiences attention, but doesn't really give credibility to his arguments.
Wesch's credibility can be seen through the rhetorical strategy ethos. Ethos deals with a person's charicter. Because the topic of the video delt with the education system, a professor and his students could be considered experts. It's hard to argue with college students when they say there are problems with the way the college is set up because they are experiencing it. For example, looking back at the sign in the video that said I didn't create the problems but they are my problems. The fact that a student is taking possession of these problems indicates to the viewer that they are qualified to address these issues.
In conclusion, even though there are a few things that Wesch and I don't quite see eye to eye about he has some good ideas. The video he created was well made. I felt as though it made good points but still allowed the viewer to make a lot of conclusions on their own. He also did an excellent job of using rhetorical strategies to get through to his viewer and keep their attention.
Final Draft
Student ecology is the study of how students interact with their environment. Michal Wesch, a professor at Kansas State, had two hundred of his students survey themselves to better understand some of the problems that college life gives students. After analyzing the information they found that our current education establishment is set up in a manner that may not reach the needs of students. Wesch and his class then created a somewhat abstract video that addressed the issues that these students found with our education system. After watching the video I realized that things such as impersonal classes, time consumeing scheduals, and a strict teaching and gradeing style are problems that college students face; but I feel that MU and other colleges are already taking steps to avoid these problems.
The video begins with a quote, “Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century learning environment that still characterizes the education establishment where information is scarce, but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects and schedules.” -Marshal McLuhan 1967. After informing the viewer that the information in the video was gathered from student surveys, the video brings up some of the issues with student life by showing students holding signs describing some of the trends that they found from their surveys. The first issue covered by the video related to the way that college is systematic and impersonal. The students described things such as large class sizes, teachers that don’t know their students, and needing to learn things that aren’t important to them. Next, the video touched on how time consuming being a college student is. The students held up signs that described how many hours students spend doing different things throughout the day and the total came to be twenty six and a half hours. The video goes on to show a girl holding a sign that says “when I graduate I will probably have a job that doesn’t exist today”, then it shows a student holding a Scranton that says, “Filling this out won’t help me get there”. Wesch and his students are saying that the education establishment is not as good as it could be. Students sit in lecture halls and take notes or tests, but they aren’t getting the experiences they need to fully prepare them for life outside of college. Near the end of the video another quote appears on the screen that says, “The inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.” –Josiah F. Bumstead 1841. The video puts emphasis on the fact that this quote is from 1841 by making it appear after the viewer has time to read the quote and putting it in larger font. When comparing McLuhan’s quote about how bewildering the 19th century’s learning environment is to Bumstead’s about how wonderful the system is, I think Welsh is trying to show the viewer that our model of a ridged and systematic education establishment is out-dated.
I feel like overall Wesch’s video did an excellent job of provoking thought. It was formatted in a way that gave me credible information but allowed me to make conclusions on my own about that information. As a student I think I can understand most of the points that Wesch was trying to make, but I felt like he made a few issues seem more important than they really were and left out a few rebuttals that I feel weaken his arguments. The first quote by McLuhan introduced the topic of the format of the education system. Wesch tried to portray this “19th century education establishment” as too systematic and impersonal. I can understand where Wesch is coming from, but I’m not sure if I agree with the point he is trying to make entirely. My experiences in college have proven, in my mind, that there is a big emphasis on organization in our programs at MU. Most of my classes are organized based on chapters in a textbook and I know what chapters are covered when and when tests or homework is due because a schedule is made weeks in advance, but I don’t feel like organized information is as bad of a thing as Wesch made it seem to be, and I don’t think that “information is scarce” in any class I have taken so far. If anything I would say that information is abundant. Most of my classes cover around one chapter from that course’s textbook every day and I have spiral notebooks that have been completely filled with information in the form of notes, so I cannot see how information can be seen as scarce. I can understand how college can be seen as impersonal as implied in the video. I have had a few smaller classes or labs that were more personal, but most of my classes are lectures in auditoriums with more than a hundred other students and most of my teachers don’t know my name. I feel like MU is trying to solve this problem by having RSDs for some large lectures where students get in smaller groups with T.A.s or teachers and use that time to clarify and discuss things learned that week.
The next topic discussed by Wesch is how time consuming being a student is. The students in his video covered all sorts of different things most students do and told us about how many hours daily they spend doing them. I can relate to this issue entirely. I have never been on the move as much as I have been since I came to college. It seems like there is always something that needs to be done, whether it’s social or academic. Last semester during finals week I had so much I felt like I needed accomplish that I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row. Wesch tried to make all of this seem bad, and I can see how a lot of people would hate it, but I really enjoy it. I love having something to do all the time and even though I don’t really have a lot of time to relax I don’t think I would trade my fast paced lifestyle if I could.
I don’t agree with Wesch completely when he implies that the college learning environment doesn’t prepare students properly for their future jobs. Nearly our entire grading system is based on testing in one way or another and I feel like the video implied that we should do away with tests. The problem I see with doing this is that it leaves us no way to prove that we are qualified to graduate. If med schools didn’t test their students I can only imagine that as a society we would have a lot more people dying and a lot more malpractice law suits. I think Wesch was trying to imply that a more hands on approach to learning would be a good idea, but Wesch failed to talk about internships. I don’t know how it is in other colleges on at MU but at the college of agriculture, food, and natural resources internships are readily available, widely advertised, and provide the hands on experience Wesch implied college doesn’t have. Technology was brought up as an alternative to traditional teaching, but I don’t know if traditional teaching is such a bad thing. Some teachers are very good at getting information to students through lectures, and some students retain information best when it is heard. Personally, I don’t really care. I know that sounds bad, but I have had classes that are traditional lectures where I sit for an hour and write down what the teacher is saying and I have had classes that teach in a more alternative way, like doing the entire course on a wiki, and I think that I can pretty well retain information either way. I can understand how some students would have a hard time with traditional teaching, but I’m sure that quite a few students would have just as hard of a time learning in a different way.
When Wesch implies in the video that our education system is out dated, I agree with him to a certain extent. The focus on organization is there, just like it has always been, but with the advances we have made in technology our education system has become more flexible and less systematic. Technology has allowed us to take tests or do homework online, at our leisure, and look at PowerPoint slides used in during the lecture whenever we want.
The last topic brought up, in relation to college, is the idea of cultural literacy and cultural competency. Cultural literacy is a person’s ability to interact, understand, and fit in with a dominate culture. I wouldn’t say that college life has provided me with this, but I would say it has enhanced it. Things like having everyday conversations, reading the news paper, or going to a party gives us a better grasp on how our culture works and lets us fit in or interact and I did plenty of these things long before I came to college, but I feel as though college has given me a different view of the world and what is going on around me. I never realized that living with my parents was as sheltering as it was until I came here. I don’t mean sheltering in that my parents wouldn’t let me go out with friends or to parties, I mean that until I moved out I didn’t know things that I need to know to survive in this society on my own. For example, it never really hit me until I came to college that I have to shop for groceries. Obviously I understood that someone has to go out and get food, but I had always viewed our fridge as my grocery store that fills up once a week. Things as simple as how to shop for groceries are the parts of cultural literacy that college has provided me with. Cultural competency on the other hand is a person’s ability to interact with other cultures and I think I’ve gotten a lot more of this than cultural literacy in college. I was born and raised in the KC area and I’ve spent my fair share of time in the rural, the urban, and suburban areas, so I thought that I had a grasp on how to deal with different cultures, but I had no idea until I came here. There are people from all over the world here, and I have to learn how to interact and deal with them. For example, in Liberty, and a lot of the KC area, yellow lighters are considered bad luck, and a lot of people, including myself, will go out of their way to avoid them. But my roommate is from Illinois and he bought a yellow lighter recently. I’m not saying I’m going to start buying yellow lighters, but that made me realize that things like yellow lighters being bad luck may be a big deal where I come from, it may not be someplace else, and even though I’m not too comfortable with even having one in my house, it’s something I’m learning to deal with.
As previously stated, Wesch created his video in a way that provoked his viewers to think. He did a good job of mixing rhetorical strategies to appeal to his viewers and make his points understood. The video has small details that can't be noticed unless they are looked for, along with some strategies that really stand out, that clarify and support his ideas. Most aspects of his video, the noticeable ones and the not so noticeable ones, have an effect on his viewers and help get his point across to them regardless of whether they agree with them or not.
Logos is a rhetorical strategy that is used in communication to get ideas to an audience by using reason. Wesch uses this strategy, along with others, in his video. He appeals to his viewer's reasoning abilities by being logical. Many of the things he covered in his videos were nothing more than statistics, but because they related to and supported his ideas they were appropriate. He used percentages and numbers when describing things like class sizes, reading assignments, and financial situations. These sorts of things aren't controversial, unlike his topic. When watching his video it's hard for a viewer to not see things the way he wants them to when they can't argue with the points he is making. For example, on the topic of how impersonal college life is, Wesch informed his audience that on average 18% of a student's teachers know their name. Because Wesch got this information from a credible source, his students, this is something that is hard, maybe even impossible, to argue with. The appeal to logic that Wesch uses does support his ideas, but it doesn't prove them. For example, looking at the percent of teachers that know their students names again, that is a statistic that proves nothing more than 18% of the average student's teachers know their name. It can't prove that college is impersonal because impersonal is a relative term. Wesch uses facts and information in an appropriate and effective way, but throwing statistics at his audience may still leave doubt in their minds and facts alone would make it difficult to keep their attention. Wesch solves this problem by also using the rhetorical strategy of pathos.
Pathos is another rhetorical strategy. It's a way to get through to an audience emotionally. This strategy is seen in many of the small details that I referred to earlier. The video sets a sort of depressing mood to help the audience relate to the student's issues. Many of the students look upset and the ones that don't look upset most certainly don't look happy. Viewers see this and can't help but think the problems Wesch addresses with student life are true, if they weren't why would these students look so depressed? One of the most noticeable uses of pathos in this video can be seen when a student holds up a sign that states the students didn't create the problems but they are their problems. The fact that they are referred to as problems indicates to the viewer that they should feel sympathy for these students and maybe even do something about it. The music also gives the viewer sympathetic feelings. The music he uses is slightly depressing. The choice in music could have been more depressing than it was and it had no words, I think he did this to make the mood of the video more subconscious than continues. By making the viewer feel sympathetic or depressed without making it seem intentional viewers find themselves agreeing with his arguments without analyzing what they are actually being told. I think Wesch's appeal to human emotion also helps in keeping his audiences attention, but doesn't really give credibility to his arguments.
Wesch's credibility can be seen through the rhetorical strategy ethos. Ethos deals with a person's character. Because the topic of the video dealt with the education system, a professor and his students could be considered experts. It's hard to argue with college students when they say there are problems with the way the college is set up because they are experiencing it. For example, looking back at the sign in the video that said I didn't create the problems but they are my problems. The fact that a student is taking possession of these problems indicates to the viewer that they are qualified to say whether these issues are a real probelm or not.
Even though there are a few things that Wesch and I don't quite agree on he has some good ideas. The video he created was well made and I felt as though it made good points while still allowing the viewer to make a lot of conclusions on their own. It made me realize that our education system may not be as great as it could be, but I felt like he ignored some things campuses are doing to fix the problems he talked about.
