ROUGH DRAFT PAPER
From Mizzou Wiki
Michael Welch,-sp- a professor at Kansas State University, created a video with the help of his 200 students, reflecting on his views of education today at the college level. Some of the issues the students address are relevant to my experiences as a student entering her freshman year of college. The students presented the issues in a powerful manner by just using words without sound, showing statistics and facts about being a college student. This video begins with a quote from Marshell McCluhan, criticizing the way in which modern students are taught. He refers it to 19th century technology, being applied to 20th century students. It would be interesting to see how much more McCluhan would be disappointed that students are still sitting in front of a chalkboard in the 21st century. It's ironic that in the video the students are using "mini chalkboards" to deliver their messages. Their messages concern student ecology at Kansas state, in the year 2007. Some of the concerns and issues that form student ecology at Kansas state include the cost of education, formal reading vs. informal reading(facebook), formal writing vs. informal writing(web pages) and then the relevance of college in a world that includes so much abject poverty. Two of the more dramatic points that were being made were that the students have to find a way to deal with problems that they inherited but didn't create and then having to solve those problems. Along with trying to prepare for a job that doesn't even exist today. The video ends with the professor still at the chalkboard despite McCluhan's warnings that a much more innovative educational experience is required for the challenges of the modern world.--he says this?-- Cultural literacy is also brought up in the video. In today's society to be culturally literate you must be able to master technology and use it to learn and expand your understanding of your own culture. Marshell McCluhan saw this idea so clearly that he could be considered a visionary in his time.
--while you introduce a lot of issues in this paragraph, several of them need a bit more thought, I think. Also, I don't see a clear thesis at the end. You aren't assigned to argue whether McCluhan was a visionary or not, but rather the connection that Wesch's video has to you, to education, to technology, to literacy, etc...--
I, a student that just graduated from high school have yet not been able to experience the college environment as it is presented in the video. I find things that I can relate to and things I have yet to be faced with during my college experience. Even though I'm enrolled in two summer classes at a university with a population of 30,000 students, I've had the advantage of hoping that my professors currently will know my name because of the smaller class size. This ideal situation will no longer exist once fall classes begin and i too will be a part of the impressionableness of the student to professor ratio. Thus far, one week into summer classes, I can already put away my one hundred and fifty dollar math textbook due to the advances of technology. Walking into my first "real college" math course, I found myself sitting in front of a Macintosh computer. I double-checked the room number because I thought perhaps I might have walked into a computer course. It wasn’t a mistake; each person has full working computers, and with Internet I might add, available to us. Unlike high school, this math course doesn't consist of scratch paper, pencil and your friendly calculator. All the work is to be done online, without the depended of the calculator.--i'm confused about this, as there are calculators online?-- While being shocked that the freedom of internet access wasn't prohibited "while the teacher is teaching", I realized by glancing at my fellow classmates that I'm not the only fan of Facebook. Looking back on to my "high school"--why quotes?-- days I can recall thinking to myself, "college can't be any harder than this," I realize now that High School didn't fully prepare me for this type of work. In these last two weeks of summer school, I've worked harder than ever before. College is harder than attending the crazy parties; it is much harder than coming to class and taking down a few notes. In the video it creates an image that college students live a twenty-six hour day. Having time to accomplish everything that needs to be done is limited, although this depends on the type of student you are and how motivated you are to be successful. Working hard and being able to balance your time creates a smooth path for your feature. This is shown in the video when a student states,"I'm a multitasker, I have to be". The current generation of college students has grown to adapt to this ability to be fluent in our competitive world today.
--This paragraph does a nice job presenting your ecology so far!--
One of the key points in Wesch's video are the effect on technology use in the classroom, --and?--whether or not technology is beneficial to the students during class. As it is stated in the video, that "Some say technology can save us, while some say technology alone can save us".--not a complete sentence-- Wesch illustrates his opinion by showing students who do bring their laptops to class but yet aren't using it for class work. Although, properly used technology can be very beneficial to both the student and the professor. The ongoing advances in technology today are a distraction in itself--themselves?-- because of the interests and fascination that it creates in the minds of the students. Students become mesmerized with exploring and conquering what the new technologies technology has to offer. To add to the problem, the Internet is almost accessible anywhere. Now we can see that the chalkboard cannot compete with endless, immediate information. This can result in lack of attention, lack of interest, ability to be distracted, and absent students in the classroom.
It is legitimate to question how successful Michael Wesch was in persuading his audience about his views in modern student life. In many respects he seems to fail in connecting with every college student today. Although some issues that were brought up in the video are similar to my own experiences, they only showed a small sample of college life. Wesch picks apart and focuses on the negative effects of technology being used in the classroom. In my brief experience in the college classroom, I feel that Wesch's repartition of students misusing computers in the classroom is a gross exasperation. I have found that the pace of the classroom is so fast that it is hard to keep up and wander into cyberspace. Any student who is serious about getting a good grade doesn’t have time to update their profile on Facebook or adventure off to the worldwide web. This is where I feel the video does a bad job showing student ecology. At times I felt that if an unfamiliar young adult were to watch this video, they would be lead into the wrong direction about college life.
--This is an interesting take on the video, however, two issues come to mind. 1) what do you think his "opinion", that is, his "argument" is? and 2) I'm not sure it's exaggerated. I know YOU can't see what others are doing, but I can, and I'd say 50% of our class is offtask at any given moment.--
At the same time, Wesch does do a good job in presenting his views by using different rhetorical methods. Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing eddectively. He uses college students with expressed emotion--what do you mean by this?-- to deliver his message. This technique ileitis pathos, which is an effective--well, it has to be used effectively-- way to grab an audience’s attention. Some of the data he uses seems to be too shocking and the sheer amount of data seems to support his positions.--?what do you mean?-- This is an example of logos or appealing to the logical part of the viewer's mind. In the video Wesch also employs the rhetorical method of ethos by contrasting the prices of a computer to the amount of what a person makes in a third world country annually. Using the statistic hits the audience’s emotional response.--ethos doesn't mean emotion-- The information he used was accurate because it was gathered from real students. No one knows what it is like to be a student more than students themselves. Wesch uses these methods to convince his audience to think more deeply about the complexity of student ecology today. I'll have to say that the video wasn't the best-put together film. Although the fact that Wesch used so many forms of persuasion he was able to pull his audience in on an emotion and logical level.--awkward here-- Wesch presented the ideas in a way that the audience was fully able to see his points that were being made. After watching the video time after time I was still left asking questions to myself about technology and was determined to find an answer to them.
--so...the points were made, but not in a way that left you with answers? I think something that's missing from this paper so far is Wesch's point(s). You allude to them several times, but never really say, THIS is what he's saying. You talk about "key" points and opinions, but not about an overall argument or thesis for the video.---
Michael Wesch created two other videos about technology along with his first video about student ecology. His first video is created on information and the effect technology has on information. He focuses on expressing how the traditional forms like books and other sources are very different from today’s digital information. He goes into showing that information stored on the internet, like Wikipedia, is constantly changing and being updated. The option to change information is open for anyone with internet access. The luxury of updated information at our fingertips has created a new reliable source that our cultural currently depends on today--currently today seems redundant--. Wesch makes it apparent that the internet is also helping our society achieve Cultural literacy and Cultural competence. Unlike the--?-- books, the Internet has links that lead you to other pages which makes the information never ending.--hmm, technically, this is what bibliographies do-- Allowing anyone to interact with sites and change information ties into Wesch's third video, about web 2.0. Most web browsers can say they have visited sites like Facebook, Myspace or any blog, which are all forms of web 2.0. The main point of these sites is to allow the user to interact with others, or as we call it, social networking. Being able to communicate with other people from all around the world is a form of cultural literacy. We can read about other cultural--cultures-- and understand their background simply by typing in a keyword on Google.
--Hmm, I'm not sure that last sentence is true..."understand" is a HARD word to describe what we get from Google. And cultural literacy is about your OWN culture, not others'.--
Cultural literacy can be defined as the ongoing process of developing the ability to have the background knowledge and to understand what is important in that--?-- culture. Technology can help a person achieve cultural literacy faster than it might have been obtained in the past. In the past, to obtain information about a certain topic, a person would have to take a trip to the library, find the topic in the card catalog, go to the stacks to find the book, open the book to the index and hope that the information is relevant. Today, from any coffee house you can Google that topic and find numerous references, before that persons coffee has cooled. Technology has created a new way in understanding cultural literacy that the chalkboard could never compete with. In the video welch also beings up the idea of cultural competence. I would define cultural competence as the ability to interact with people from other cultures. Being able to interact with people from other cultures is a good opportunity to develop cultural competence. Today most college campuses are diverse, with many students and professors from different cultures. Another aspect of cultural literacy and cultural competence is the need to have a broad based educational background. As this applies to myself and my dream to become a nurse.--sentence fragment-- In this process I must take required general education classes to even be admitted to nursing school. When taking these classes I become more fluent in my culture, and this is a practical application in being a good nurse. In order to have a better healing relationship with patients you have to be able to connect with them. In able to connect with them knowing their values, beliefs and interests you have to have the required knowledge base. For example, maybe an elderly lady wants to talk with you about crocheting, knowing the background of crocheting will give you an instant connection with that person. A good nurse will continue to learn through out their lives so they will always have something to talk about with their patients. Knowing the background or understand the cultural competence of that persons cultural--? what does this mean?-- will make this process easier. Although you might not learn cultural literacy directly, being able to avoid it isn't possible. Soon to become cultural literate in the college world, I will be interested to see how many of my lessons are taught on the chalkboard.
--This doesn't seem like a conclusion. You're getting to definitions and connections to your life, but these are ALL new ideas, not restated ones. Then, as you get to the end, it suddenly goes back to the chalkboard. While that last sentence might appear in your conclusion, the rest doesn't really do conclusionary things.
While I think you're approaching the assignment for paper 2, with the the pathos/ethos/logos terms, I don't think you've got a good handle on all of them--ethos, for sure, seemed a little up in the air. You also need to include more examples for those ideas. In general, each one should have its own paragraph, if you want to do it justice. You bring up the ideas in the other videos well, and I DO think they connect well to cultural literacy, perhaps not as easily as you've got them right now, though. You still need a conclusion at the end, and a thesis, a driving argument, for the whole paper. What is it that you think Wesch is DOing in these videos? If you need ideas, click around to some of the other papers. People are doing great and interesting things.
Finally, lots of proofreading. Word choices are in bold, and I put my questions in --these dashes--. Good luck with revisions.
