Read Chapter 5 in "They Say, I Say" and all the essays in the back.
Review in Hacker P1, P2, P3 on commas and semicolons
Review in Hacker pages 360 and 361 on paraphrase and plagiarism
Review text for in-class essay on volunteerism; bring text to class.
Bring any extra materials needed for portfolios for unit 1: grammar tests, handouts, free writes, response papers, drafts and peer edits.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Homework for Wednesday, Jan. 28
Homework for Wednesday, Jan. 28
1. Download volunteer article, in-class essay. Read, annotate in the margins or on an attached piece of paper, and bring to class.
2. Watch 2 volunteer videos; URLs are posted below.
3. Bring an article of something you like to read and attach a one paragraph analysis of its argument. What is its argument? What is its appeal: logical, emotional, moral? How do you respond to its argument (Why did you read it? Do you think it is a successful argument?)
4. Read Chapter 4 in They Say, I Say.
5. Review Hacker W2, Wordy sentences.
1. Download volunteer article, in-class essay. Read, annotate in the margins or on an attached piece of paper, and bring to class.
2. Watch 2 volunteer videos; URLs are posted below.
3. Bring an article of something you like to read and attach a one paragraph analysis of its argument. What is its argument? What is its appeal: logical, emotional, moral? How do you respond to its argument (Why did you read it? Do you think it is a successful argument?)
4. Read Chapter 4 in They Say, I Say.
5. Review Hacker W2, Wordy sentences.
volunteer videos
1. Starbucks promises free coffee to people who volunteer in their communities
http://www.youtube.com/user/starbucks
www.pledge5.starbucks.com
2. Celebrities pledge to work for Obama and idea: "Be the change"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51kAw4OTlA0
http://www.youtube.com/user/starbucks
www.pledge5.starbucks.com
2. Celebrities pledge to work for Obama and idea: "Be the change"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51kAw4OTlA0
volunteer article for in-class essay
Volunteer article, in-class essay
Headline: Good Deeds: The Backlash
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
New York Times
November 27, 2008
It’s a rainy November Saturday in Yonkers, and all across town, high school students are engaged in the relentless pursuit of community service hours.
Five students from Horace Mann, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, are spackling and painting a half-gutted, partly bullet-riddled home on Porach Street so that a new family can move in. (Three hours.)
On the other side of town, students from Lincoln High School, a public school in Yonkers, are raucously demolishing the basement of a thrift store on Riverdale Avenue, to create space for storage. (Four hours.)
Meanwhile, on East 27th Street in Manhattan, a hostess at the upscale barbecue restaurant Blue Smoke is turning away the fifth person who showed up a day early looking to make crafts for underprivileged children. The restaurant’s Web site had the right date, she insists, but students these days seem pretty desperate to volunteer. (Come back tomorrow; two hours.)
Through the holidays and beyond, high school students will be working feverishly to serve the needy — packing food baskets, ladling meals at soup kitchens, collecting toys for children in hospitals — all in the name of amassing the community service credits they need for graduation.
Cynics call these programs a form of forced altruism. Proponents say that they widen students’ horizons while getting service work done. Either way, the backlash has begun: not only do college admissions officers roll their eyes at bogus-sounding claims, but high schools are scaling back the requirements, acknowledging that a lot of the so-called service is meaningless.
When Lauren Swierczek took over last year as director of community service at Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx whose students hail mainly from Manhattan (tuition: about $35,000 a year), she was troubled by the program she inherited. “What I was finding was that the fixation was more on hours than acts of service,” she said. Worse still, some students “weren’t actually doing it,” she said. “Documents were forged.”
Students from wealthy families were “knocking out their service hours with one total trip,” like a three-week summer jaunt to Costa Rica or the Galápagos Islands, Ms. Swierczek said. These teen tours, which cost $4,000 or more, use as a selling point the ability to rack up as many as 80 hours of community service. When they are not cleaning debris from beaches or teaching English to local schoolchildren, the travelers enjoy heavy doses of kayaking and scuba lessons.
So Ms. Swierczek abolished Riverdale’s requirement that students perform more than 100 hours of service before graduation. Instead, she decreed that all “naturally formed communities” at the school — sports teams, the school newspaper and adviser groups, to which all students belong — must tackle a community service project each year that is approved and supervised by her.
The result, she said, is a renewed focus on the charitable experience itself. “The message we want to teach our children is to live in a world bigger than their own,” she said. “It’s provided real camaraderie within the school community.”
At Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (tuition: about $33,000), Patti Schackett, also in her second year as community service coordinator, has slashed the required number of hours to 60 from 100. As a parent there, she had already seen the system up close.
“We found that kids were getting credit for working at day camps” and other summer jobs, Mrs. Schackett said. By cutting back the requirement, “we were hoping that students would choose quality projects that do the most good, as opposed to projects that offer a lot of hours,” she added.
So far, the reaction from parents at both schools has been favorable. “It’s been a phenomenal, phenomenal change,” said Donna Stern, a psychologist on the Upper East Side with three children at Riverdale.
Mrs. Stern recalled being dismayed watching her eldest son, a ninth grader, do the kind of community service that helped no one, like stacking books in a synagogue library or checking its pens for ink.
“He was doing what I would consider ridiculous work just to get the hours,” she said. “I wasn’t comfortable with it, but I felt, ‘How else are we going to get the hours?’ ”
She credits Ms. Swierczek with changing the culture of community service at Riverdale, and offers as evidence a shoe drive her children held that collected more than 20 boxes of shoes for children in South Africa.
“It’s not about getting hours anymore, it’s about doing something as a team and as a school and supporting a very important cause,” Mrs. Stern said.
American high schools started adding community service requirements to their curriculums about 15 years ago. The practice had been around for decades at Jesuit schools, but began catching on at prep schools in the 1990s, with public schools quickly following suit. It didn’t hurt that colleges looked favorably on applicants who could claim hundreds of hours of charity work before they had even gotten their driver’s licenses.
The requirements became so popular — despite some unsuccessful legal challenges asserting that forced volunteerism was an oxymoron — that states began adopting them. Maryland now requires students to perform 75 hours of community service before graduation, and the District of Columbia requires 100 hours. Florida, Iowa and Rhode Island have granted local boards or districts the authority to set up their own programs.
In New York State, where schools set their own policies, requirements of 100 hours or more have grown common. (As always, New York tends to do things big: President-elect Barack Obama has suggested setting a national goal of 50 hours a year for all middle and high school students.)
But critics say that what started as a dignified attempt to instill a sense of noblesse oblige in high school students has devolved into an unseemly obsession with hours — not counting the ones that parents spend chauffeuring teenagers to soup kitchens. When students are in a panic over how to fill their hours, it leads to a debasement of community service that mistakes quantity for quality, these critics say. It also can prompt some teenagers to exaggerate their deeds, or, in the case of those from wealthier families, simply to buy their hours.
Schools tend to be “strict about the requirements, but not so strict about how you fulfill them,” said Sandra R. Bass, editor of The Private School Insider, a newsletter in Manhattan. The requirements, she said, have “been a major boon for a lot of different tour companies because most of the kids don’t want to get their hands dirty, and a lot of the parents don’t want their kids’ hands too dirty.”
Of course, not everybody is trying to blow off the requirements, and many teenagers who are exposed to community service grow passionate about it. Walter Koshel, a 17-year-old senior at Horace Mann, said he felt a deep commitment to his work with Habitat for Humanity. Yes, he acknowledged, some colleges might be impressed by this.
In college admissions, “it’s so much harder now, there are so many different angles you can have, but I feel like this is really powerful,” said Walter, who is helping refurbish the house on Porach Street in Yonkers.
He said he had seen classmates try to game the system. “I know someone who worked on the Obama campaign,” he said, “and at some points they got paid, but they also, like, gave in hours.”
There are those who benefit from the hourly requirements — for instance, the charities themselves. James Killoran, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Westchester, stood on the porch of the Porach Street house and motioned toward the houses built by his organization. How much of the construction was done by student volunteers? “At least 50 percent,” he said.
“The high school kids aren’t fair-weather friends,” Mr. Killoran said. “They know they have to come out.” This makes them more valuable than, say, office workers who turn out for a one-time corporate event.
If more schools reduce the number of required hours, charities could see a bountiful source of free labor begin to dry up. On the other hand, students who grow passionate about a cause often wind up exceeding their school obligations. “It becomes part of their routine,” Mrs. Schackett said....
As for the students, they seem to understand the difference between meaningful work and work done to fill a timesheet. Angelica Body-Lawson, a junior at Horace Mann, said that her younger sister, a middle school student with no hourly requirements, recently volunteered for a project that made crafts for the children of battered women, and the work went late into the night.
“They don’t know what ‘hours’ is,” she said. “It was just like actually helping.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/fashion/27service.html
retrieved nov 27 08
Headline: Good Deeds: The Backlash
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
New York Times
November 27, 2008
It’s a rainy November Saturday in Yonkers, and all across town, high school students are engaged in the relentless pursuit of community service hours.
Five students from Horace Mann, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, are spackling and painting a half-gutted, partly bullet-riddled home on Porach Street so that a new family can move in. (Three hours.)
On the other side of town, students from Lincoln High School, a public school in Yonkers, are raucously demolishing the basement of a thrift store on Riverdale Avenue, to create space for storage. (Four hours.)
Meanwhile, on East 27th Street in Manhattan, a hostess at the upscale barbecue restaurant Blue Smoke is turning away the fifth person who showed up a day early looking to make crafts for underprivileged children. The restaurant’s Web site had the right date, she insists, but students these days seem pretty desperate to volunteer. (Come back tomorrow; two hours.)
Through the holidays and beyond, high school students will be working feverishly to serve the needy — packing food baskets, ladling meals at soup kitchens, collecting toys for children in hospitals — all in the name of amassing the community service credits they need for graduation.
Cynics call these programs a form of forced altruism. Proponents say that they widen students’ horizons while getting service work done. Either way, the backlash has begun: not only do college admissions officers roll their eyes at bogus-sounding claims, but high schools are scaling back the requirements, acknowledging that a lot of the so-called service is meaningless.
When Lauren Swierczek took over last year as director of community service at Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx whose students hail mainly from Manhattan (tuition: about $35,000 a year), she was troubled by the program she inherited. “What I was finding was that the fixation was more on hours than acts of service,” she said. Worse still, some students “weren’t actually doing it,” she said. “Documents were forged.”
Students from wealthy families were “knocking out their service hours with one total trip,” like a three-week summer jaunt to Costa Rica or the Galápagos Islands, Ms. Swierczek said. These teen tours, which cost $4,000 or more, use as a selling point the ability to rack up as many as 80 hours of community service. When they are not cleaning debris from beaches or teaching English to local schoolchildren, the travelers enjoy heavy doses of kayaking and scuba lessons.
So Ms. Swierczek abolished Riverdale’s requirement that students perform more than 100 hours of service before graduation. Instead, she decreed that all “naturally formed communities” at the school — sports teams, the school newspaper and adviser groups, to which all students belong — must tackle a community service project each year that is approved and supervised by her.
The result, she said, is a renewed focus on the charitable experience itself. “The message we want to teach our children is to live in a world bigger than their own,” she said. “It’s provided real camaraderie within the school community.”
At Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (tuition: about $33,000), Patti Schackett, also in her second year as community service coordinator, has slashed the required number of hours to 60 from 100. As a parent there, she had already seen the system up close.
“We found that kids were getting credit for working at day camps” and other summer jobs, Mrs. Schackett said. By cutting back the requirement, “we were hoping that students would choose quality projects that do the most good, as opposed to projects that offer a lot of hours,” she added.
So far, the reaction from parents at both schools has been favorable. “It’s been a phenomenal, phenomenal change,” said Donna Stern, a psychologist on the Upper East Side with three children at Riverdale.
Mrs. Stern recalled being dismayed watching her eldest son, a ninth grader, do the kind of community service that helped no one, like stacking books in a synagogue library or checking its pens for ink.
“He was doing what I would consider ridiculous work just to get the hours,” she said. “I wasn’t comfortable with it, but I felt, ‘How else are we going to get the hours?’ ”
She credits Ms. Swierczek with changing the culture of community service at Riverdale, and offers as evidence a shoe drive her children held that collected more than 20 boxes of shoes for children in South Africa.
“It’s not about getting hours anymore, it’s about doing something as a team and as a school and supporting a very important cause,” Mrs. Stern said.
American high schools started adding community service requirements to their curriculums about 15 years ago. The practice had been around for decades at Jesuit schools, but began catching on at prep schools in the 1990s, with public schools quickly following suit. It didn’t hurt that colleges looked favorably on applicants who could claim hundreds of hours of charity work before they had even gotten their driver’s licenses.
The requirements became so popular — despite some unsuccessful legal challenges asserting that forced volunteerism was an oxymoron — that states began adopting them. Maryland now requires students to perform 75 hours of community service before graduation, and the District of Columbia requires 100 hours. Florida, Iowa and Rhode Island have granted local boards or districts the authority to set up their own programs.
In New York State, where schools set their own policies, requirements of 100 hours or more have grown common. (As always, New York tends to do things big: President-elect Barack Obama has suggested setting a national goal of 50 hours a year for all middle and high school students.)
But critics say that what started as a dignified attempt to instill a sense of noblesse oblige in high school students has devolved into an unseemly obsession with hours — not counting the ones that parents spend chauffeuring teenagers to soup kitchens. When students are in a panic over how to fill their hours, it leads to a debasement of community service that mistakes quantity for quality, these critics say. It also can prompt some teenagers to exaggerate their deeds, or, in the case of those from wealthier families, simply to buy their hours.
Schools tend to be “strict about the requirements, but not so strict about how you fulfill them,” said Sandra R. Bass, editor of The Private School Insider, a newsletter in Manhattan. The requirements, she said, have “been a major boon for a lot of different tour companies because most of the kids don’t want to get their hands dirty, and a lot of the parents don’t want their kids’ hands too dirty.”
Of course, not everybody is trying to blow off the requirements, and many teenagers who are exposed to community service grow passionate about it. Walter Koshel, a 17-year-old senior at Horace Mann, said he felt a deep commitment to his work with Habitat for Humanity. Yes, he acknowledged, some colleges might be impressed by this.
In college admissions, “it’s so much harder now, there are so many different angles you can have, but I feel like this is really powerful,” said Walter, who is helping refurbish the house on Porach Street in Yonkers.
He said he had seen classmates try to game the system. “I know someone who worked on the Obama campaign,” he said, “and at some points they got paid, but they also, like, gave in hours.”
There are those who benefit from the hourly requirements — for instance, the charities themselves. James Killoran, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Westchester, stood on the porch of the Porach Street house and motioned toward the houses built by his organization. How much of the construction was done by student volunteers? “At least 50 percent,” he said.
“The high school kids aren’t fair-weather friends,” Mr. Killoran said. “They know they have to come out.” This makes them more valuable than, say, office workers who turn out for a one-time corporate event.
If more schools reduce the number of required hours, charities could see a bountiful source of free labor begin to dry up. On the other hand, students who grow passionate about a cause often wind up exceeding their school obligations. “It becomes part of their routine,” Mrs. Schackett said....
As for the students, they seem to understand the difference between meaningful work and work done to fill a timesheet. Angelica Body-Lawson, a junior at Horace Mann, said that her younger sister, a middle school student with no hourly requirements, recently volunteered for a project that made crafts for the children of battered women, and the work went late into the night.
“They don’t know what ‘hours’ is,” she said. “It was just like actually helping.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/fashion/27service.html
retrieved nov 27 08
Monday, January 19, 2009
optional reading
"From books, the new president found a voice."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&hp
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Computer labs on campus
Computer labs on campus
My printer didn't work...my computer crashed....no excuses!!!!
1. Phelps Hall (7 different rooms, including Open Access Lab in Phelps 1513; open many hours and on weekend)
2. Kerr 2160
3. Psychology East (Life Science Computing Facility)
4. Intercollegiate Athletics Building
5. Student Resources Building. (Computer Lab and Satellite Stations )
6. Ellison 2626 (closed on Saturday and sunday)
7. HSSB 1203 (closed on Sunday)
8. library
Sources:
http://computerlabs.ic.ucsb.edu/location/
http://www.lsit.ucsb.edu/index.php?page=lsit-labs
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/services/computing.html#word
My printer didn't work...my computer crashed....no excuses!!!!
1. Phelps Hall (7 different rooms, including Open Access Lab in Phelps 1513; open many hours and on weekend)
2. Kerr 2160
3. Psychology East (Life Science Computing Facility)
4. Intercollegiate Athletics Building
5. Student Resources Building. (Computer Lab and Satellite Stations )
6. Ellison 2626 (closed on Saturday and sunday)
7. HSSB 1203 (closed on Sunday)
8. library
Sources:
http://computerlabs.ic.ucsb.edu/location/
http://www.lsit.ucsb.edu/index.php?page=lsit-labs
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/services/computing.html#word
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Essay 1 (Google) prompt
Prompt for Essay 1: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Write a 4-page essay, or 1,000-word essay on the topic:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with Nicholas Carr's argument in "Does Google Make Us Stupid?” and why.
In your thesis, make clear whether you agree overall or not. In the thesis and/or the body of the essay, you may describe to what extent you agree and/or what. You may review some of the approaches outlined in “They Say, I Say” for explaining the extent of your agreement/disagreement and qualifications for certain claims. Example: “While I agree that Carr’s point xxxx, I disagree with him about xxx because xxxx,” etc.
The question of “why” can be addressed explicitly or emerge implicitly in your argument.
Make sure to summarize Carr’s overall idea in the first paragraph and to adequately explain Carr’s specific arguments in your subsequent paragraphs. You will need to refer to the Carr's text in each paragraph, either using direct quotes or paraphrases.
Explaining parts of Carr’s argument in detail will help you develop the depth of the required analysis and required length of the paper.
Reasonable writers acknowledge other viewpoints than the one they are arguing. You should allude at least one counterargument to your own view and argue for why your own view should prevail.
You may use specific arguments from the blog Counterargument, but be sure to specifically attribute those ideas to that source, using MLA format for direct quotes. You may come up with your own counterargument ideas without citing the blogsite.
Your essay should include this information in each section:
1. Introduction:
This includes an overall summary of the article, using the full name of author and title of the essay. The first paragraph should also include your thesis statement.
2. Body paragraphs:
a. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence that announces or presents some analysis about the topic the paragraph will discuss.
b. In each paragraph, point to a specific point or points in Carr’s article as evidence, either through direct quotes or paraphrases.
c. Each paragraph should take up one topic only and not ramble off into other directions.
d. Each paragraph should be about 5 to 7 sentences. This is not an absolute rule but a suggestion to develop each point but not go off in another direction. (See MLA sample essay, “Online Monitoring,” p. 408)
e. Acknowledge a counterargument. Argue for why your view should prevail.
Conclusion:
Don’t repeat the exact words as the beginning.
Finally:
Include a word count at the end of your paper.
Spell-check! Spell-check! Spell-check!
Deadlines:
1. Bring 3 copies of your draft, pages stapled together, to class on Wednesday, Jan. 21.
2. Email an overview of your paper to me before class on Wednesday at the latest. If you email me this earlier, you can get my response and use it in your draft.
a. First paragraph, including thesis.
b. 3 key points or topic sentences of your subsequent argument.
Format:
See MLA format paper in Hacker, p. 408.
1. Your name, my name, Writing 1, and date in upper left hand corner
2. Title: Same size font as body text
3. 1 inch margins
4. page numbers upper right hand
5. double-spaced
6. Include the following “Work Cited” reference at the end. This is the format:
a. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly. July Aug. 2008. 18 Aug. 2008.. (Atlantic Monthly is italic or underlined.)
b. If you use the blog, the citation is:
Laura. “Technological Determinism Makes You Stupid (Not Google). Weblog post. bookn3rd. 11 June 2008. 3 Jan. 2009.. (bookn3rd is italic or underlined.)
Write a 4-page essay, or 1,000-word essay on the topic:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with Nicholas Carr's argument in "Does Google Make Us Stupid?” and why.
In your thesis, make clear whether you agree overall or not. In the thesis and/or the body of the essay, you may describe to what extent you agree and/or what. You may review some of the approaches outlined in “They Say, I Say” for explaining the extent of your agreement/disagreement and qualifications for certain claims. Example: “While I agree that Carr’s point xxxx, I disagree with him about xxx because xxxx,” etc.
The question of “why” can be addressed explicitly or emerge implicitly in your argument.
Make sure to summarize Carr’s overall idea in the first paragraph and to adequately explain Carr’s specific arguments in your subsequent paragraphs. You will need to refer to the Carr's text in each paragraph, either using direct quotes or paraphrases.
Explaining parts of Carr’s argument in detail will help you develop the depth of the required analysis and required length of the paper.
Reasonable writers acknowledge other viewpoints than the one they are arguing. You should allude at least one counterargument to your own view and argue for why your own view should prevail.
You may use specific arguments from the blog Counterargument, but be sure to specifically attribute those ideas to that source, using MLA format for direct quotes. You may come up with your own counterargument ideas without citing the blogsite.
Your essay should include this information in each section:
1. Introduction:
This includes an overall summary of the article, using the full name of author and title of the essay. The first paragraph should also include your thesis statement.
2. Body paragraphs:
a. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence that announces or presents some analysis about the topic the paragraph will discuss.
b. In each paragraph, point to a specific point or points in Carr’s article as evidence, either through direct quotes or paraphrases.
c. Each paragraph should take up one topic only and not ramble off into other directions.
d. Each paragraph should be about 5 to 7 sentences. This is not an absolute rule but a suggestion to develop each point but not go off in another direction. (See MLA sample essay, “Online Monitoring,” p. 408)
e. Acknowledge a counterargument. Argue for why your view should prevail.
Conclusion:
Don’t repeat the exact words as the beginning.
Finally:
Include a word count at the end of your paper.
Spell-check! Spell-check! Spell-check!
Deadlines:
1. Bring 3 copies of your draft, pages stapled together, to class on Wednesday, Jan. 21.
2. Email an overview of your paper to me before class on Wednesday at the latest. If you email me this earlier, you can get my response and use it in your draft.
a. First paragraph, including thesis.
b. 3 key points or topic sentences of your subsequent argument.
Format:
See MLA format paper in Hacker, p. 408.
1. Your name, my name, Writing 1, and date in upper left hand corner
2. Title: Same size font as body text
3. 1 inch margins
4. page numbers upper right hand
5. double-spaced
6. Include the following “Work Cited” reference at the end. This is the format:
a. Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly. July Aug. 2008. 18 Aug. 2008.
b. If you use the blog, the citation is:
Laura. “Technological Determinism Makes You Stupid (Not Google). Weblog post. bookn3rd. 11 June 2008. 3 Jan. 2009.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Homework for Wednesday, Jan. 14
Homework for Wednesday, Jan. 14
Print out and read Google counterargument. Write a response paper.
Read Tips for Reading Academic Texts on blog.
Read in Hacker about comma use: P1a, P3a, P2g.
Read in They Say: Chapters 1 and 3.
Print out and read Google counterargument. Write a response paper.
Read Tips for Reading Academic Texts on blog.
Read in Hacker about comma use: P1a, P3a, P2g.
Read in They Say: Chapters 1 and 3.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Tips for reading academic texts
Tips for reading academic texts
Reading academic texts is different than reading a novel for pleasure
1. Set aside enough time to reach your goal-- getting started or getting finished?
2. Consider what questions you are assigned to answer.
3. Scan first for an overview—title, index, and chapters. Titles tell you a lot about the author’s point of view.
4. Dip into text: Pay close attention to key words and beginnings of selective paragraphs. Look for ideas that interest you.
5. Annotate while reading: Make note of key words and ideas in the margins.
6. Don’t worry if you can’t understand everything the first time.
7. Academic reading requires rereading. Expert readers know that you don’t get the complete meaning out of a work on first reading.
8. Many of these same rules apply to reading online. The only problem is it’s easy to get lost from your main task.
10. Talk to other people about the reading.
Websites about academic reading:
improve your reading of academic texts
http://www.tlc.murdoch.edu.au/slearn/resource/pdf/Improve%20your%20reading.pdf
tips on reading academic texts
http://shoeleg.yak.net/51
Reading academic texts is different than reading a novel for pleasure
1. Set aside enough time to reach your goal-- getting started or getting finished?
2. Consider what questions you are assigned to answer.
3. Scan first for an overview—title, index, and chapters. Titles tell you a lot about the author’s point of view.
4. Dip into text: Pay close attention to key words and beginnings of selective paragraphs. Look for ideas that interest you.
5. Annotate while reading: Make note of key words and ideas in the margins.
6. Don’t worry if you can’t understand everything the first time.
7. Academic reading requires rereading. Expert readers know that you don’t get the complete meaning out of a work on first reading.
8. Many of these same rules apply to reading online. The only problem is it’s easy to get lost from your main task.
10. Talk to other people about the reading.
Websites about academic reading:
improve your reading of academic texts
http://www.tlc.murdoch.edu.au/slearn/resource/pdf/Improve%20your%20reading.pdf
tips on reading academic texts
http://shoeleg.yak.net/51
Google counterargument
Technological Determinism Makes You Stupid (Not Google)
June 11th, 2008
By Laura (see Note 1 at end.)
Today’s post is about a long article in the Atlantic Monthly in which the author argues that the internet prevents us from focusing on long articles.
Hmm.
I found this piece both overly alarmist and annoyingly deterministic. Carr argues that the internet, like previous media forms, alters not only our daily habits but the very essence of our neurobiology. And because the internet is inevitably fast-paced and distracting, it results in skimming rather than “deep reading,” turning us from intelligent, thoughtful individuals to hyper, impatient and shallow cretins.
“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”
In reality the internet, or any other form of technology, is what we make of it, guided by both individuals and by social norms or institutions. It’s easy enough to avoid the condition that Carr describes simply by altering the way you interact with the internet. Leaving blinky, ad-filled sites for mature and thoughtful online spaces (which do exist,) exerting self-control when it comes to checking email and mobile phones, changing browser settings (or the browser itself) to calm your monitor down, cleaning off the desktop, making an effort to engage with serious literature and periodicals on a daily basis and leaving time for contemplation, long walks, etc. Certainly one would not argue that in public spaces you have no choice but to step in McDonalds rather than the bookstore. The same logic applies to the internet.
Carr’s piece, however, is full of this type of pronouncement. Here’s another example of the rampant determinism:
“The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.”
In actuality, most historians of technology will probably tell you that the clock did not, alone, bring about a change in the mindset of society. Instead, it was the changing social sphere (the emergence of capitalism, the growth of transportation networks and the scientific revolution) that created the need for accurate clocks in the first place.
Another annoying aspect of the article is that Carr focuses on Google as a leading contributor to the problem, again, very deterministically and by making use of a bizarre comparison with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management. Taylor’s methods were used to control workers in factory settings, and while this did bleed over into life outside the factory, the analogy breaks down pretty quickly when it comes to the internet. The last I checked no one can force me to search more efficiently. Google may work at making the algorithms better on its end, but that doesn’t affect the way that I choose to search, the keywords I enter, or how I parse and use the results.
I understand that there are serious concerns with Google’s page ranking system, and the ways that information can be either down-ranked or promoted by the algorithms (or censored entirely,) but this doesn’t seem to be Carr’s concern. He appears more worried by the idea of search as artificial intelligence that will one day replace thinking. Is it the case that people will replace cognition with Google? Perhaps, but I believe that these are the types who would not be very thoughtful in the first place, even in a Google-free environment. Not those who are reading the Atlantic Monthly on a regular basis, certainly.
Because, wait, haven’t we heard all this before? TV springs immediately to mind. Yet the dire predictions of a zombie nation seem not to have come to pass. Some people waste their lives in front of the tv, but others who are inclined toward reading and scholarly past-times, or sports, or socializing, are not forced into zombiehood just because there is a TV in the living room. Similarly, some scholars of the early modern era bemoaned the printed book, fearing that it made possible the rise of shallow, extensive reading versus the intensive reading of a few books over the course of a lifetime.
Thus, the whole thing seems just another iteration of the old, tired complaints. I suppose that’s what’s so frustrating for me. It’s not so much his attitude to the internet, but his poor grasp of information history and historical theory in general, which disappoints but doesn’t really surprise. Carr does give a shallow overview of book history on the final page, musing that new media technologies like writing and printing have often given rise to dire predictions not unlike his. Yet in the end, he brushes off these concerns:
“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”
What he fails to do entirely is justify his conclusion that the internet, by its very nature, prevents “deep reading” while print, by its nature, encourages thoughtfulness. To go back to my earlier point, the internet is what you make of it, and it is as well suited a tool for intensive reading as it is for skimming the headlines, celebrity gossip and latest YouTube videos. Compared to words on screen, there is nothing intellectually special about the printed page, save for an emotional attachment that many of us feel for it, for the pleasure of holding, leafing through and smelling a book (and the fact that some people have difficulty looking at computer monitors for extended periods.) But you could just as easily pick up a printed copy of the Enquirer as a volume of Voltaire, and likewise, spend an hour engaged with a scholarly article online rather than skimming search results.
Carr ignores the more complex perspectives offered by book history and concludes by predicting a troubling future in which the internet makes us more machine-like than HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don’t buy it.
Note 1: Laura was identified with her first name only, and this:
“A twenty-something book nerd, I have an undergraduate degree in the History of Technology from Georgia Tech and am currently pursuing an MA in Book History at the University of London. This blog focuses on book history, rare books, literature, grad school, and related subjects, but will occasionally diverge to topics like travel and life in London. You can contact me here: laura at bookn3rd dot com”
Note 2: determinism: philosophic theory that events are caused or directly linked to prior events
From blog: bookn3rd: book history and diversions thereform
http://bookn3rd.com/?p=68
downloaded 1 3 09
(Google counterargument)
June 11th, 2008
By Laura (see Note 1 at end.)
Today’s post is about a long article in the Atlantic Monthly in which the author argues that the internet prevents us from focusing on long articles.
Hmm.
I found this piece both overly alarmist and annoyingly deterministic. Carr argues that the internet, like previous media forms, alters not only our daily habits but the very essence of our neurobiology. And because the internet is inevitably fast-paced and distracting, it results in skimming rather than “deep reading,” turning us from intelligent, thoughtful individuals to hyper, impatient and shallow cretins.
“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”
In reality the internet, or any other form of technology, is what we make of it, guided by both individuals and by social norms or institutions. It’s easy enough to avoid the condition that Carr describes simply by altering the way you interact with the internet. Leaving blinky, ad-filled sites for mature and thoughtful online spaces (which do exist,) exerting self-control when it comes to checking email and mobile phones, changing browser settings (or the browser itself) to calm your monitor down, cleaning off the desktop, making an effort to engage with serious literature and periodicals on a daily basis and leaving time for contemplation, long walks, etc. Certainly one would not argue that in public spaces you have no choice but to step in McDonalds rather than the bookstore. The same logic applies to the internet.
Carr’s piece, however, is full of this type of pronouncement. Here’s another example of the rampant determinism:
“The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.”
In actuality, most historians of technology will probably tell you that the clock did not, alone, bring about a change in the mindset of society. Instead, it was the changing social sphere (the emergence of capitalism, the growth of transportation networks and the scientific revolution) that created the need for accurate clocks in the first place.
Another annoying aspect of the article is that Carr focuses on Google as a leading contributor to the problem, again, very deterministically and by making use of a bizarre comparison with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management. Taylor’s methods were used to control workers in factory settings, and while this did bleed over into life outside the factory, the analogy breaks down pretty quickly when it comes to the internet. The last I checked no one can force me to search more efficiently. Google may work at making the algorithms better on its end, but that doesn’t affect the way that I choose to search, the keywords I enter, or how I parse and use the results.
I understand that there are serious concerns with Google’s page ranking system, and the ways that information can be either down-ranked or promoted by the algorithms (or censored entirely,) but this doesn’t seem to be Carr’s concern. He appears more worried by the idea of search as artificial intelligence that will one day replace thinking. Is it the case that people will replace cognition with Google? Perhaps, but I believe that these are the types who would not be very thoughtful in the first place, even in a Google-free environment. Not those who are reading the Atlantic Monthly on a regular basis, certainly.
Because, wait, haven’t we heard all this before? TV springs immediately to mind. Yet the dire predictions of a zombie nation seem not to have come to pass. Some people waste their lives in front of the tv, but others who are inclined toward reading and scholarly past-times, or sports, or socializing, are not forced into zombiehood just because there is a TV in the living room. Similarly, some scholars of the early modern era bemoaned the printed book, fearing that it made possible the rise of shallow, extensive reading versus the intensive reading of a few books over the course of a lifetime.
Thus, the whole thing seems just another iteration of the old, tired complaints. I suppose that’s what’s so frustrating for me. It’s not so much his attitude to the internet, but his poor grasp of information history and historical theory in general, which disappoints but doesn’t really surprise. Carr does give a shallow overview of book history on the final page, musing that new media technologies like writing and printing have often given rise to dire predictions not unlike his. Yet in the end, he brushes off these concerns:
“The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”
What he fails to do entirely is justify his conclusion that the internet, by its very nature, prevents “deep reading” while print, by its nature, encourages thoughtfulness. To go back to my earlier point, the internet is what you make of it, and it is as well suited a tool for intensive reading as it is for skimming the headlines, celebrity gossip and latest YouTube videos. Compared to words on screen, there is nothing intellectually special about the printed page, save for an emotional attachment that many of us feel for it, for the pleasure of holding, leafing through and smelling a book (and the fact that some people have difficulty looking at computer monitors for extended periods.) But you could just as easily pick up a printed copy of the Enquirer as a volume of Voltaire, and likewise, spend an hour engaged with a scholarly article online rather than skimming search results.
Carr ignores the more complex perspectives offered by book history and concludes by predicting a troubling future in which the internet makes us more machine-like than HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don’t buy it.
Note 1: Laura was identified with her first name only, and this:
“A twenty-something book nerd, I have an undergraduate degree in the History of Technology from Georgia Tech and am currently pursuing an MA in Book History at the University of London. This blog focuses on book history, rare books, literature, grad school, and related subjects, but will occasionally diverge to topics like travel and life in London. You can contact me here: laura at bookn3rd dot com”
Note 2: determinism: philosophic theory that events are caused or directly linked to prior events
From blog: bookn3rd: book history and diversions thereform
http://bookn3rd.com/?p=68
downloaded 1 3 09
(Google counterargument)
How to seek help from CLAS writing tutors
How to seek help from CLAS writing tutors
CLAS will not proofread your letter, but they can help you with a number of writing issues.
Pick out one or two issues that are a concern, or ask me for comments to show your tutor.
CLAS has excellent tutors, but it is always better to seek out help from your individual professor whenever possible to get specific suggestions on your writing. Professors from different classes have various ideas about what to emphasize.
Students seeking individual assistance with any writing assignment or project can sign up in advance for an appointment in the Writing Lab or use the Writing Drop-in Lab on a first-come, first served basis.
Writing services are in the Student Resource Building, Room 3240.
Help for students with ESL concerns:
Students for whom English is not their first language can meet individually with a ESL Specialist to receive assistance with any piece of writing at any stage of the writing process—from analyzing the assignment to identifying and resolving problems with grammar, idioms, syntax, and organization.
For more information about CLAS:
http://www.clas.ucsb.edu/CLAS_services.htm#Writing
For more information about schedule:
http://www.clas.ucsb.edu/schedule/scheddi.pdf
CLAS will not proofread your letter, but they can help you with a number of writing issues.
Pick out one or two issues that are a concern, or ask me for comments to show your tutor.
CLAS has excellent tutors, but it is always better to seek out help from your individual professor whenever possible to get specific suggestions on your writing. Professors from different classes have various ideas about what to emphasize.
Students seeking individual assistance with any writing assignment or project can sign up in advance for an appointment in the Writing Lab or use the Writing Drop-in Lab on a first-come, first served basis.
Writing services are in the Student Resource Building, Room 3240.
Help for students with ESL concerns:
Students for whom English is not their first language can meet individually with a ESL Specialist to receive assistance with any piece of writing at any stage of the writing process—from analyzing the assignment to identifying and resolving problems with grammar, idioms, syntax, and organization.
For more information about CLAS:
http://www.clas.ucsb.edu/CLAS_services.htm#Writing
For more information about schedule:
http://www.clas.ucsb.edu/schedule/scheddi.pdf
New office hours
New office hours
I am expanding my official office hours on Monday and Wednesday after class, from 1 to 3 p.m. My office is South Hall 1510.
I am dropping the office hour on Thursday because I am now taking a class in the morning.
I am also available by appointment at other times.
I am expanding my official office hours on Monday and Wednesday after class, from 1 to 3 p.m. My office is South Hall 1510.
I am dropping the office hour on Thursday because I am now taking a class in the morning.
I am also available by appointment at other times.
How to do a response paper
How to Do A Response Paper
1. Write a summary, 1 to 2 sentence overview of the entire article. Write complete sentences. Use author's first and last name and name of article.
2. Write 3 key points or more. Look over what you underlined while reading, and your notes in the margin. This should help you distill the main ideas of the author before you start writing a response.
3. Write your response. This should be at least a paragraph long, about 5 to 7 sentences. You may write more. The more you write now, the better prepared you will be to begin to write your essay.
1. Write a summary, 1 to 2 sentence overview of the entire article. Write complete sentences. Use author's first and last name and name of article.
2. Write 3 key points or more. Look over what you underlined while reading, and your notes in the margin. This should help you distill the main ideas of the author before you start writing a response.
3. Write your response. This should be at least a paragraph long, about 5 to 7 sentences. You may write more. The more you write now, the better prepared you will be to begin to write your essay.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google.
Downloaded 8 18 08
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
BY NICHOLAS CARR
Atlantic Monthly July/Aug 2008
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer
HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Downloaded 8 18 08
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
BY NICHOLAS CARR
Atlantic Monthly July/Aug 2008
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer
HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Syllabus
Writing 1 Syllabus
*** “You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form."
--Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
Dr. Cissy Ross
Enroll Code: 48207
Time and place: MW 11 a.m.-12:50, Girvetz 2127
Office hours: Monday and Wednesday 2 to 3 p.m.; Thursday 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. and by appointment. Try to let me know at the end of class if you want to come by.
Office: South Hall 1510 (There are 3 people in this room. I’m in the middle space.)
Phone: (805) 893-2613. You can leave a message here only. This is not a direct line.
Email: cross@writing.ucsb.edu. I check my email daily, so this is the best way to contact me.
Drop box: If you need to leave papers after class hours, a drop box is located in front of South Hall 1520, or you may slide materials under the door after hours. I would prefer, however, that you email about such materials. Put any text in the body of the letter, not as an attachment.
Why are you taking this class?
This is a terrific learning opportunity for new students at the university. It is purposefully small class so we will have a chance to get to know each other better than in many of your other larger classes. In addition, it is a small class so we can support each other in a learning environment.
I don’t consider this a required class. College is optional, so it’s your choice to be in this class.
This is not an easy class, however; in fact, it will likely be one of the most difficult classes you take this year. Writing 1 in particular, is based on research that students must make a major intellectual shift as they move from high school to college writing. The work is not about memorizing facts; it is about using your ideas to create written arguments. It starts with reading texts closely; then forming your own ideas about them, and finally expressing them by using your own voice and academic formats.
Course requirements:
You will write a number of texts in different formats—response papers to readings, free writes in class, in-class essays and papers written out of class that are later revised and resubmitted.
At the conclusion of the course, students will write a final examination a timed essay in which students will respond to one or more readings that will be given to all students the last class period of the quarter. (It is called a common final because the same prompt is given to every student in all the Writing 1 sections.)
Required texts and supplies:
1. Class blog: http://writing1ucsb.blogspot.com/
You will be able to download the syllabus and many of the readings here.
2. A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker, sixth edition. Available at bookstore.
3. They Say: I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Available at bookstore.
4. Starting Lines (a collection of student essays). Available at the bookstore.
5. A stapler
6. A manila folder to submit all drafts, peer review comments, final portfolio.
7. A thumbdrive to keep all drafts and essays.
Drop deadline:
The drop deadline (via Gold) for this course is Friday, Jan. 9 before 5 p.m.
Required writing and grades: (See note 1.)
You must get a C or higher to pass this class and advance onto other required writing classes, according to UC standards.
You are required to write 18 to 20 pages, or 6,500 words, in a number of different formats.
Essay 1: digital literacy: 20 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 4: visual literacy: satire and Obama cover: 20 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 3: in class essay 1: 10 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 4: in class essay 2: 10 percent
Homework: response papers, reflections on your writing process, etc.: 10
Attendance/participation: 15
Common final: 15 percent
Common final: At the conclusion of the course, students will write a common final examination, a timed essay in which students must respond to one or more readings that will be given to all students the last class period of the quarter. Students may be asked to synthesize two short readings or to analyze and respond to one longer reading. It will be held 8 to 10 p.m. on March 16.
The essays are not graded by me, but by a group of Writing 1 teachers. This means your essay quality has to “stand on its own merits”—rather than on the fact that I may know you have tried hard in class. Essays are scored according to the same guidelines as employed for the systemwide Analytic Writing Placement Test.
Other grade related issues:
*** “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
--Woody Allen
Attendance:
You can miss 2 classes with no excuse. If you miss 3 classes, you’ll get C for attendance; miss 4 or more-F.
Attendance is taken every day. You really can’t make up the work that you miss in class. If you miss the discussions, your essays will be more difficult to write and your grades will suffer.
If you are absent, I am not responsible for telling you about the assignments or what you missed in class.
You must attend peer review day with a draft or you will receive no points for that portion of the assignment. That means a B grade will be reduced to a D; a C to an F, etc.
Do not be late for class. If you are late class more than twice, you will be marked absent. Same policy for leaving early.
Late papers will usually not be accepted. If a late paper is accepted, the grade is reduced one letter grade per day.
How to get along with the teacher:
1. It is my honor to be your teacher. I put a lot of effort into the class, and likewise, I expect you to put in a lot of effort into the class and be courteous to both me and your classmates.
2. It is important for you to create a support group for yourself within the class. Exchange email and/or telephone numbers with at least one other person. There are two reasons for this.
First of all, all writers need a good reader for their work besides themselves. Cultivate smart friends in all your classes.
Second, if you miss a class, you can contact a classmate and ask what you missed and what is due for the next class.
If you are sick or you have an emergency, however, it is best to email me before the class and let me know why you are missing class. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you are a slacker. When you do return to class, check with me and turn in any missed work.
4. It is important for you to seek me out during office hours to discuss your work and your concerns. You will be required to meet with me at least once during the quarter, but you will benefit even more if you take the initiative to speak to me more often about assignments, their expectations, your expectations, and your individual work. The same holds true for all your classes. You need to make the effort for your professors to get to know you as an individual, not just a slot in a gradebook.
5. No cell phones. No texting.
6. No excuses for missed work such as “my computer crashed” and “my printer didn’t work.” Likewise, “I had to take care of my sick cat (boyfriend, roommate, etc.)” or (fill in the blank). I’m an experienced teacher, boss and parent—I’ve heard a lot of excuses—and even tried to use some, unsuccessfully--to get around personal responsibility. To avoid losing your work, email you drafts to yourself as you finish each page. Store all finished work on a thumbdrive.
7. Come prepared. Bring the readings, texts, paper, pencil.
Helpful services on campus:
Counseling & Career Services offers counseling for personal and career concerns, self-help information and connections to off-campus mental health resources. They also offer help in stress management. (893-4411) www.counseling.ucsb.edu
Campus Learning Assistance Services or CLAS has tutors to help you with your writing. Check out their schedule: www.clas.ucsb.edu/schedule/scheddi.pdf
Disabled Students Program: If you are a student with a disability and would like to discuss special accommodations, please contact me via email or speak to me after class or during office hours. This is important if you need extra time for the in-class essays or common final. Disabled Students Program: 893-2668; www.sa.ucsb.edu/dsp
Plagiarism:
Using someone else’s work in part or whole and portraying it as your own, even inadvertently, is a serious offense. Even in a culture when people take papers from the Internet, download movies and sample music clips, the penalties imposed by the university or by most employers for plagiarism are harsh and unforgiving. You could be asked to leave school or be fired from your job. Besides that, at the university, it’s not necessary to plagiarize: You are asked to display a range of ideas you have considered—just credit them to the different authors and then respond in your own words.
Note 1: The New York Times noted in a biography about the great poet Gerald Manley Hopkins that he once worked as a classics teacher, spending “after night poring over … exams, making scrupulous ‘quarter-point and eighth-point’ distinctions lest his pupils miss out on attending a university—“his eyes bleeding … the chamber pot overflowing… the fate of thousands of students in his hands.” After that experience, his death at 44 was a comfort. (“I am so happy” were the poet’s dying words.”)
Schedule
This schedule is subject to change. This is an overview of the quarter. Pay attention in class for updates.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introductions
First week: Jan. 5 and 7
Writing:
Personal narratives:
Something I wanted to learn
Letters of introduction
Readings:
1. Reading Like a Girl
2. Hacker MLA essay: Online monitoring, p. 409
3. They Say, I Say: Introduction and Chapter 1
4. Hacker: Planning to write: C1, p. 3-14
Lessons:
Common grammar mistakes quiz
Hacker handbook tour
Brainstorming
Response papers to readings
Quotes: What to quote, integrating quotes, MLA in-text quote format
Form of essays: Differences between academic and popular essays
Argument: Classical rhetorical themes: logical, emotional, moral appeals
Thesis statements
Jan. 5:
Review syllabus
Writing sample: Something You Wanted to Learn
Homework:
Reading Like a Girl
Reading in Hacker, Online Monitoring, p. 409
Write and e-mail Letter of Introduction
Jan. 7: TBA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First unit-digital literacy
Second week: Jan 12 and 13
Readings:
1. Is Google Making You Stupid?
2. Google counterargument
3. Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online
4. Reading strategies for academic texts
5. They Say, I Say: Chapter 2
6. Hacker readings: TBA
Lessons:
20 most common errors in student papers
Grammar Festival of Knowledge, assignments for class presentations
Jan 12: TBA
Jan 14: TBA
Third week: Jan 21
Writing: First paper due
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 3
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: the comma P1
Jan. 19: Holiday, Martin Luther King’s birthday
Jan. 21: Draft of first paper due, peer review, do NOT be absent
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Second unit: visual literacy: satire and Obama cover
Fourth week: Jan. 25 and 28
Writing: First paper due
Readings:
1. How opinions are formed
2. They Say, I Say: Chapter 4
3. Political cartoons
4. Writing as a public activity
5. Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal
Lessons: Grammar Festival of knowledge: Unnecessary commas
Jan. 25: First paper due, do NOT be absent
Jan. 28: Beginning of second unit
Fifth week: Feb. 2 and 4
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 5
Lessons: Grammar Festival of knowledge: Parallelism S1
Feb. 2: TBA
Feb 4: TBA
Sixth week: Feb. 9 and 11
Writing: Second paper due
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 6
Lesson: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Dangling modifiers, S3e., p. 103
Feb. 9: Draft of second paper due, peer review
Feb. 11: Second paper due
Seventh week: Feb. 16 and 18
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 7
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Semicolon P3
Feb. 16: Holiday, President’s Day
Feb. 18: TBA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Third unit: In-class practice exams
Eighth week: Feb. 23 and 25
Writing: 1st in-class essay
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 8
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Shifts S4
Feb. 23: discuss reading for 1st in-class essay
Feb. 25: in-class essay
Ninth week: March 2 and 4
Writing: 2nd in-class essay
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 9
Lesson: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Problems with pronouns G3
Mar 2: discuss reading for 2nd in-class essay
Mar 4: 2nd in-class essay
Tenth week: March 9 and 11
Portfolio revisions
March 9: return 2nd in-class essay
March 11: TBA
March 16
8 to 10 a.m., Common final
*** “You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form."
--Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
Dr. Cissy Ross
Enroll Code: 48207
Time and place: MW 11 a.m.-12:50, Girvetz 2127
Office hours: Monday and Wednesday 2 to 3 p.m.; Thursday 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. and by appointment. Try to let me know at the end of class if you want to come by.
Office: South Hall 1510 (There are 3 people in this room. I’m in the middle space.)
Phone: (805) 893-2613. You can leave a message here only. This is not a direct line.
Email: cross@writing.ucsb.edu. I check my email daily, so this is the best way to contact me.
Drop box: If you need to leave papers after class hours, a drop box is located in front of South Hall 1520, or you may slide materials under the door after hours. I would prefer, however, that you email about such materials. Put any text in the body of the letter, not as an attachment.
Why are you taking this class?
This is a terrific learning opportunity for new students at the university. It is purposefully small class so we will have a chance to get to know each other better than in many of your other larger classes. In addition, it is a small class so we can support each other in a learning environment.
I don’t consider this a required class. College is optional, so it’s your choice to be in this class.
This is not an easy class, however; in fact, it will likely be one of the most difficult classes you take this year. Writing 1 in particular, is based on research that students must make a major intellectual shift as they move from high school to college writing. The work is not about memorizing facts; it is about using your ideas to create written arguments. It starts with reading texts closely; then forming your own ideas about them, and finally expressing them by using your own voice and academic formats.
Course requirements:
You will write a number of texts in different formats—response papers to readings, free writes in class, in-class essays and papers written out of class that are later revised and resubmitted.
At the conclusion of the course, students will write a final examination a timed essay in which students will respond to one or more readings that will be given to all students the last class period of the quarter. (It is called a common final because the same prompt is given to every student in all the Writing 1 sections.)
Required texts and supplies:
1. Class blog: http://writing1ucsb.blogspot.com/
You will be able to download the syllabus and many of the readings here.
2. A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker, sixth edition. Available at bookstore.
3. They Say: I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Available at bookstore.
4. Starting Lines (a collection of student essays). Available at the bookstore.
5. A stapler
6. A manila folder to submit all drafts, peer review comments, final portfolio.
7. A thumbdrive to keep all drafts and essays.
Drop deadline:
The drop deadline (via Gold) for this course is Friday, Jan. 9 before 5 p.m.
Required writing and grades: (See note 1.)
You must get a C or higher to pass this class and advance onto other required writing classes, according to UC standards.
You are required to write 18 to 20 pages, or 6,500 words, in a number of different formats.
Essay 1: digital literacy: 20 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 4: visual literacy: satire and Obama cover: 20 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 3: in class essay 1: 10 percent
4 page essay, peer review, grade, revision and writer’s statement
Essay 4: in class essay 2: 10 percent
Homework: response papers, reflections on your writing process, etc.: 10
Attendance/participation: 15
Common final: 15 percent
Common final: At the conclusion of the course, students will write a common final examination, a timed essay in which students must respond to one or more readings that will be given to all students the last class period of the quarter. Students may be asked to synthesize two short readings or to analyze and respond to one longer reading. It will be held 8 to 10 p.m. on March 16.
The essays are not graded by me, but by a group of Writing 1 teachers. This means your essay quality has to “stand on its own merits”—rather than on the fact that I may know you have tried hard in class. Essays are scored according to the same guidelines as employed for the systemwide Analytic Writing Placement Test.
Other grade related issues:
*** “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
--Woody Allen
Attendance:
You can miss 2 classes with no excuse. If you miss 3 classes, you’ll get C for attendance; miss 4 or more-F.
Attendance is taken every day. You really can’t make up the work that you miss in class. If you miss the discussions, your essays will be more difficult to write and your grades will suffer.
If you are absent, I am not responsible for telling you about the assignments or what you missed in class.
You must attend peer review day with a draft or you will receive no points for that portion of the assignment. That means a B grade will be reduced to a D; a C to an F, etc.
Do not be late for class. If you are late class more than twice, you will be marked absent. Same policy for leaving early.
Late papers will usually not be accepted. If a late paper is accepted, the grade is reduced one letter grade per day.
How to get along with the teacher:
1. It is my honor to be your teacher. I put a lot of effort into the class, and likewise, I expect you to put in a lot of effort into the class and be courteous to both me and your classmates.
2. It is important for you to create a support group for yourself within the class. Exchange email and/or telephone numbers with at least one other person. There are two reasons for this.
First of all, all writers need a good reader for their work besides themselves. Cultivate smart friends in all your classes.
Second, if you miss a class, you can contact a classmate and ask what you missed and what is due for the next class.
If you are sick or you have an emergency, however, it is best to email me before the class and let me know why you are missing class. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you are a slacker. When you do return to class, check with me and turn in any missed work.
4. It is important for you to seek me out during office hours to discuss your work and your concerns. You will be required to meet with me at least once during the quarter, but you will benefit even more if you take the initiative to speak to me more often about assignments, their expectations, your expectations, and your individual work. The same holds true for all your classes. You need to make the effort for your professors to get to know you as an individual, not just a slot in a gradebook.
5. No cell phones. No texting.
6. No excuses for missed work such as “my computer crashed” and “my printer didn’t work.” Likewise, “I had to take care of my sick cat (boyfriend, roommate, etc.)” or (fill in the blank). I’m an experienced teacher, boss and parent—I’ve heard a lot of excuses—and even tried to use some, unsuccessfully--to get around personal responsibility. To avoid losing your work, email you drafts to yourself as you finish each page. Store all finished work on a thumbdrive.
7. Come prepared. Bring the readings, texts, paper, pencil.
Helpful services on campus:
Counseling & Career Services offers counseling for personal and career concerns, self-help information and connections to off-campus mental health resources. They also offer help in stress management. (893-4411) www.counseling.ucsb.edu
Campus Learning Assistance Services or CLAS has tutors to help you with your writing. Check out their schedule: www.clas.ucsb.edu/schedule/scheddi.pdf
Disabled Students Program: If you are a student with a disability and would like to discuss special accommodations, please contact me via email or speak to me after class or during office hours. This is important if you need extra time for the in-class essays or common final. Disabled Students Program: 893-2668; www.sa.ucsb.edu/dsp
Plagiarism:
Using someone else’s work in part or whole and portraying it as your own, even inadvertently, is a serious offense. Even in a culture when people take papers from the Internet, download movies and sample music clips, the penalties imposed by the university or by most employers for plagiarism are harsh and unforgiving. You could be asked to leave school or be fired from your job. Besides that, at the university, it’s not necessary to plagiarize: You are asked to display a range of ideas you have considered—just credit them to the different authors and then respond in your own words.
Note 1: The New York Times noted in a biography about the great poet Gerald Manley Hopkins that he once worked as a classics teacher, spending “after night poring over … exams, making scrupulous ‘quarter-point and eighth-point’ distinctions lest his pupils miss out on attending a university—“his eyes bleeding … the chamber pot overflowing… the fate of thousands of students in his hands.” After that experience, his death at 44 was a comfort. (“I am so happy” were the poet’s dying words.”)
Schedule
This schedule is subject to change. This is an overview of the quarter. Pay attention in class for updates.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introductions
First week: Jan. 5 and 7
Writing:
Personal narratives:
Something I wanted to learn
Letters of introduction
Readings:
1. Reading Like a Girl
2. Hacker MLA essay: Online monitoring, p. 409
3. They Say, I Say: Introduction and Chapter 1
4. Hacker: Planning to write: C1, p. 3-14
Lessons:
Common grammar mistakes quiz
Hacker handbook tour
Brainstorming
Response papers to readings
Quotes: What to quote, integrating quotes, MLA in-text quote format
Form of essays: Differences between academic and popular essays
Argument: Classical rhetorical themes: logical, emotional, moral appeals
Thesis statements
Jan. 5:
Review syllabus
Writing sample: Something You Wanted to Learn
Homework:
Reading Like a Girl
Reading in Hacker, Online Monitoring, p. 409
Write and e-mail Letter of Introduction
Jan. 7: TBA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First unit-digital literacy
Second week: Jan 12 and 13
Readings:
1. Is Google Making You Stupid?
2. Google counterargument
3. Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online
4. Reading strategies for academic texts
5. They Say, I Say: Chapter 2
6. Hacker readings: TBA
Lessons:
20 most common errors in student papers
Grammar Festival of Knowledge, assignments for class presentations
Jan 12: TBA
Jan 14: TBA
Third week: Jan 21
Writing: First paper due
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 3
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: the comma P1
Jan. 19: Holiday, Martin Luther King’s birthday
Jan. 21: Draft of first paper due, peer review, do NOT be absent
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Second unit: visual literacy: satire and Obama cover
Fourth week: Jan. 25 and 28
Writing: First paper due
Readings:
1. How opinions are formed
2. They Say, I Say: Chapter 4
3. Political cartoons
4. Writing as a public activity
5. Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal
Lessons: Grammar Festival of knowledge: Unnecessary commas
Jan. 25: First paper due, do NOT be absent
Jan. 28: Beginning of second unit
Fifth week: Feb. 2 and 4
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 5
Lessons: Grammar Festival of knowledge: Parallelism S1
Feb. 2: TBA
Feb 4: TBA
Sixth week: Feb. 9 and 11
Writing: Second paper due
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 6
Lesson: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Dangling modifiers, S3e., p. 103
Feb. 9: Draft of second paper due, peer review
Feb. 11: Second paper due
Seventh week: Feb. 16 and 18
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 7
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Semicolon P3
Feb. 16: Holiday, President’s Day
Feb. 18: TBA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Third unit: In-class practice exams
Eighth week: Feb. 23 and 25
Writing: 1st in-class essay
Readings: They Say, I Say: Chapter 8
Lessons: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Shifts S4
Feb. 23: discuss reading for 1st in-class essay
Feb. 25: in-class essay
Ninth week: March 2 and 4
Writing: 2nd in-class essay
Reading: They Say, I Say: Chapter 9
Lesson: Grammar Festival of Knowledge: Problems with pronouns G3
Mar 2: discuss reading for 2nd in-class essay
Mar 4: 2nd in-class essay
Tenth week: March 9 and 11
Portfolio revisions
March 9: return 2nd in-class essay
March 11: TBA
March 16
8 to 10 a.m., Common final
Homework for Wed., Jan. 7
Homework for Wed., Jan. 7
Reading Like a Girl
Reading in Hacker, Online Monitoring, p. 409
Write and e-mail Letter of Introduction
Don't forget new location Girvetz 2127
Reading Like a Girl
Reading in Hacker, Online Monitoring, p. 409
Write and e-mail Letter of Introduction
Don't forget new location Girvetz 2127
letter of introduction
Letter of introduction
In a reflective letter, tell me about your academic background and any other information that would be helpful or interesting to know about you. Please organize your thoughts into paragraphs organized by subjects, rather than one long page or a list of one-liners.
Sign your letter with your name and your U-Mail email address
Email letter to me by 5 p.m. Tuesday: Cross@writing.ucsb.edu.
You may limit your letter to academic matters only if you wish, but it may also include background information such as:
Background:
Where did you grow up?
Do you speak any other languages besides English? Is English your native language?
What interests do you have outside of class, other than what you might have covered in your in-class essay?
Do you do any kind of writing outside of class—diary, song writing, etc.?
Have you ever had a job? Do you work now?
What do you read outside of school—novels, books about other interests, magazines, newspapers, sports news, online sites?
Schooling:
What do you think are your strengths and weaknesses as a student?
Do you think you are well prepared for college? How so? Why?
Do you think you are a good reader?
What’s your favorite kind of reading in school? Your least favorite?
What kind of writing instruction have you received in high school or college?
What kind of writing assignments do you enjoy? Not enjoy?
What’s your writing process when you have to write a paper?
What would you like to accomplish in this class?
What’s your favorite subject? Least favorite?
What extra curricular activities are you involved in—or would like to pursue?
What major do you think you will pursue?
What do you want to get out of attending the university?
In a reflective letter, tell me about your academic background and any other information that would be helpful or interesting to know about you. Please organize your thoughts into paragraphs organized by subjects, rather than one long page or a list of one-liners.
Sign your letter with your name and your U-Mail email address
Email letter to me by 5 p.m. Tuesday: Cross@writing.ucsb.edu.
You may limit your letter to academic matters only if you wish, but it may also include background information such as:
Background:
Where did you grow up?
Do you speak any other languages besides English? Is English your native language?
What interests do you have outside of class, other than what you might have covered in your in-class essay?
Do you do any kind of writing outside of class—diary, song writing, etc.?
Have you ever had a job? Do you work now?
What do you read outside of school—novels, books about other interests, magazines, newspapers, sports news, online sites?
Schooling:
What do you think are your strengths and weaknesses as a student?
Do you think you are well prepared for college? How so? Why?
Do you think you are a good reader?
What’s your favorite kind of reading in school? Your least favorite?
What kind of writing instruction have you received in high school or college?
What kind of writing assignments do you enjoy? Not enjoy?
What’s your writing process when you have to write a paper?
What would you like to accomplish in this class?
What’s your favorite subject? Least favorite?
What extra curricular activities are you involved in—or would like to pursue?
What major do you think you will pursue?
What do you want to get out of attending the university?
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Read Like A Girl
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/fashion/01spy.html?sq=read%20like%20a%20girl&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
downloaded 1 2 09
Read like a girl
January 1, 2009
New York Times
I Wish I Could Read Like a Girl
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
FOR weeks now, I have been watching my children endure life in the fishbowl of the holiday season. On hiatus from school, they swim patient laps around one another in the cramped space of a family.
I don’t envy this. I know from personal experience that the last thing you want, in that awkward decade when you are trying to figure out who you are and where you are headed, is the pressure of being under the constant observation of cranky grown-ups who wonder why you aren’t unloading the dishwasher for them more often.
My daughters cope with having to live around me in much the same way that I remember dealing with my mother. They sleep in. They stay up very late. They put gasoline in the car just often enough to neutralize criticism.
Watching these delicate negotiations makes me glad to be past that stage of life. Most of the time. But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.
Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds — any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch — and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.
I miss the days when I felt that way, curled up in a corner and able to get lost in pretty much any plot. I loved stories indiscriminately, because each revealed the world in a way I had never considered before. The effect was so profound that I can still remember vividly the experiences of reading “Little Women” (in my bedroom, by flashlight) and “Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris” (in a Reader’s Digest condensed version at my grandmother’s) and “The Diamond in the Window” (sitting cross-legged on the linoleum amid the stacks at the public library). And a thousand others. After each, I would emerge a changed person.
This has nothing to do with the way I “read” these days, with piles of books sitting forlornly on the night table, skimmed and dog-eared and dusty as they wait listlessly for me to feel a compelling urge to return to them, to finish “Beginner’s Greek” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or even, God help me, “Midnight’s Children.” (See Note 1.)
That I can be sitting here now in another room two floors away from those half-digested stories and be engaged, without longing for them, in an entirely different activity is not something I would have believed possible when I was young.
I am not sure when or exactly how I started merely reading books instead of living in them. I could make the usual excuses about how I no longer have the luxury of time to give in to my imagination; when I sit down with a book, I feel the pressure — of unfinished work, unfolded laundry, unpaid bills. But I suppose the true reason is sadder. It’s an inevitable byproduct of growing up that I formed too many opinions of my own to be able to give in wholeheartedly to the prospect of living inside someone else’s universe.
Unfortunately there is only a narrow window of time, after one learns to read but before one gets old enough to read critically, to fully appreciate the sweet sadness of “Mick Harte Was Here” or the orphan’s longing in “Taash and the Jesters” — I read that one eight times the summer I was 10 — or the trapped restlessness of being the teenaged “Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.”
Among my three daughters, whose ages are 19, 17 and 11, I see signs of an inevitable progression toward being skeptical readers.
I fear Zoe, the oldest, has completely lost the childhood gift of being able to suspend disbelief. Last week, in an attempt to delay the transition, I dug out for her one of my favorite frothy romances — an Elinor Lipman novel called “The Inn at Lake Devine.”
But results of that experiment were mixed.
“How was it?” I asked a few days later.
“I couldn’t stop reading it,” she said, before adding, with regret, “but I knew from the beginning how it would turn out.”
Ella, my middle daughter, has been taught in high school to be an analytical reader. I have mixed feelings about this: good preparation for taking standardized tests, but bad for someone who is trying to revel without reservation in the absurd plot twists of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” It took me hours to persuade her it was O.K. to turn her back on everything she had learned in science class about the time-space continuum.
Clementine, who is 11, is the luckiest. She’s still young, so she was able to leave the rest of us behind for whole days this year when she was off somewhere else, inhabiting the world of a sign-language-knowing chimp in “Hurt Go Happy.”
Currently, she totes around the house one or another of the doorstopper-heavy volumes in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-loves-mortal-girl series. She comes to the dinner table wearing the hollow-eyed, devotional expression of someone who has just glimpsed something wonderful in a distant land.
Although there is much about the vampire books to make an adult reader roll her eyes — Edward is too controlling and Bella has the sort of low self-esteem mothers hope will never plague their own daughters — I understand the appeal. At Clementine’s age, I too would have been able to smell Edward and feel the delicious iciness of his breath on the back of my neck. And at several hundred pages apiece, the series of four easily would have carried me through winter break.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com
Note 1: Midnights Children, a 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie, is an allegory for events surrounding India’s independence from the British. The narrator is a child gifted with telepathic abilities who can make contact with all the other children with similar magically powers. The novel presents an encyclopedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. It is able to do this, in part, by merging with the novel form a number of non-Western texts such as the Arabic epic One Thousand and One Nights.
downloaded 1 2 09
Read like a girl
January 1, 2009
New York Times
I Wish I Could Read Like a Girl
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
FOR weeks now, I have been watching my children endure life in the fishbowl of the holiday season. On hiatus from school, they swim patient laps around one another in the cramped space of a family.
I don’t envy this. I know from personal experience that the last thing you want, in that awkward decade when you are trying to figure out who you are and where you are headed, is the pressure of being under the constant observation of cranky grown-ups who wonder why you aren’t unloading the dishwasher for them more often.
My daughters cope with having to live around me in much the same way that I remember dealing with my mother. They sleep in. They stay up very late. They put gasoline in the car just often enough to neutralize criticism.
Watching these delicate negotiations makes me glad to be past that stage of life. Most of the time. But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.
Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds — any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch — and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.
I miss the days when I felt that way, curled up in a corner and able to get lost in pretty much any plot. I loved stories indiscriminately, because each revealed the world in a way I had never considered before. The effect was so profound that I can still remember vividly the experiences of reading “Little Women” (in my bedroom, by flashlight) and “Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris” (in a Reader’s Digest condensed version at my grandmother’s) and “The Diamond in the Window” (sitting cross-legged on the linoleum amid the stacks at the public library). And a thousand others. After each, I would emerge a changed person.
This has nothing to do with the way I “read” these days, with piles of books sitting forlornly on the night table, skimmed and dog-eared and dusty as they wait listlessly for me to feel a compelling urge to return to them, to finish “Beginner’s Greek” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or even, God help me, “Midnight’s Children.” (See Note 1.)
That I can be sitting here now in another room two floors away from those half-digested stories and be engaged, without longing for them, in an entirely different activity is not something I would have believed possible when I was young.
I am not sure when or exactly how I started merely reading books instead of living in them. I could make the usual excuses about how I no longer have the luxury of time to give in to my imagination; when I sit down with a book, I feel the pressure — of unfinished work, unfolded laundry, unpaid bills. But I suppose the true reason is sadder. It’s an inevitable byproduct of growing up that I formed too many opinions of my own to be able to give in wholeheartedly to the prospect of living inside someone else’s universe.
Unfortunately there is only a narrow window of time, after one learns to read but before one gets old enough to read critically, to fully appreciate the sweet sadness of “Mick Harte Was Here” or the orphan’s longing in “Taash and the Jesters” — I read that one eight times the summer I was 10 — or the trapped restlessness of being the teenaged “Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.”
Among my three daughters, whose ages are 19, 17 and 11, I see signs of an inevitable progression toward being skeptical readers.
I fear Zoe, the oldest, has completely lost the childhood gift of being able to suspend disbelief. Last week, in an attempt to delay the transition, I dug out for her one of my favorite frothy romances — an Elinor Lipman novel called “The Inn at Lake Devine.”
But results of that experiment were mixed.
“How was it?” I asked a few days later.
“I couldn’t stop reading it,” she said, before adding, with regret, “but I knew from the beginning how it would turn out.”
Ella, my middle daughter, has been taught in high school to be an analytical reader. I have mixed feelings about this: good preparation for taking standardized tests, but bad for someone who is trying to revel without reservation in the absurd plot twists of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” It took me hours to persuade her it was O.K. to turn her back on everything she had learned in science class about the time-space continuum.
Clementine, who is 11, is the luckiest. She’s still young, so she was able to leave the rest of us behind for whole days this year when she was off somewhere else, inhabiting the world of a sign-language-knowing chimp in “Hurt Go Happy.”
Currently, she totes around the house one or another of the doorstopper-heavy volumes in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-loves-mortal-girl series. She comes to the dinner table wearing the hollow-eyed, devotional expression of someone who has just glimpsed something wonderful in a distant land.
Although there is much about the vampire books to make an adult reader roll her eyes — Edward is too controlling and Bella has the sort of low self-esteem mothers hope will never plague their own daughters — I understand the appeal. At Clementine’s age, I too would have been able to smell Edward and feel the delicious iciness of his breath on the back of my neck. And at several hundred pages apiece, the series of four easily would have carried me through winter break.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com
Note 1: Midnights Children, a 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie, is an allegory for events surrounding India’s independence from the British. The narrator is a child gifted with telepathic abilities who can make contact with all the other children with similar magically powers. The novel presents an encyclopedic exploration of an entire society through the story of a single person. It is able to do this, in part, by merging with the novel form a number of non-Western texts such as the Arabic epic One Thousand and One Nights.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)