Blog Entry Four: The Last One!

Hello Class,

Here is the last blog! Whew! You can post this by the last day of the course. I want you to take the time to do a little reflection on this, and, of course, this is valuable material for your portfolio.

Here is the blog assignment. Make sure that you only pick one of these questions or think of one of your own. It will be a really scattered entry if you attempt to answer all ten of these very different questions.

Blog Entry Four: The Last One!

·         Final Reflections on the Process of Research: You will discuss what you have learned about the process of research for life and for this class.  I am interested in the quality of the content of this assignment and how it shows evidence of your progression in the research process.  The minimum length for this part of the research journal is one page, formatted appropriately (cite a source if you use one and create a works cited entry for that source if you used one).  I have listed some suggestions for reflective topics, and you can pick one of these topics if you would like.  Of course, you know more about you than I do, so topics and entries that you create yourself will be more meaningful to the expression of your experience. Be sure to include the necessary detail to make this journal engaging and reflective. Some great topic ideas for this response would be:

1.      Discuss what you already knew about research from previous experience before beginning English 1102 and how you feel that your knowledge of research has changed.

2.      Discuss the small successes and dead ends you faced in the process of researching for class, and detail how you handled this roller coaster ride. How were both the disappointments and successes both learning experiences?

3.      Discuss why research is important to human beings. Give specific examples.

4.      Explain why we use citations and give credit for intellectual work as academic writers. Are there ways of giving credit for ideas that you see every day in non-academic writing? Do you think that this practice is a social one or a legal one? Why? Feel free to use your originality journal to help you with this one.

5.      Examine why we discriminate between popular sources of knowledge (fashion magazine, .com sites, IMDB, Wikipedia, popular music, etc.) and academic, peer-reviewed sources of knowledge. Do you think that distinction is valid? Why?

6.      Analyze the difference of process between conducting everyday research like using a phone book or scanning the sales advertisements and concentrated, academic research. Why are these two activities necessary to be a literate citizen and a strong writer? Feel free to revise or expand upon your journal entry for this entry (an unrevised copy of the previous journal is not acceptable for this assignment, so be sure that you are ready to revise if you take this route).

7.      Project how you will apply your knowledge of research to subjects beyond this class.

8.      Explore how one source (you can use more than one for this, but be sure to keep this journal narrow enough to be relevant and not so general that it loses its power) you found truly changed your views on your inquiry project.

9.      Show how one source educated you about bias through example (using inadequate sources or misinterpreting sources to push a point). You can use the STEM versus liberal arts degrees debate that we explored in class to help you with this if you feel it is relevant. Also, please consider how not clearly seeing the other side of your issue could also make writing unnecessarily biased.  Think about what it means to be both a fair and a persuasive writer.

10.   Illustrate how research has made you a stronger student. Use specific examples for this blog from class (you can feel free to use example from other classes where you are researching topics). I am looking for real reflection not flaky, generalized, non-specific writing. While this looks relatively simple, it is deeper question that it seems.

Getting into Academic Conversations: Crashing, Gliding, Climbing, Bungee Jumping, Parkouring, Questioning, or Easing?

Getting into Academic Conversations: Crashing, Gliding, Climbing, Bungee Jumping, Parkouring, Questioning, or Easing?

Joining the Academic Conversation

Objective: To figure out how to paraphrase academic writing, putting it into your own words, in order to boost our level of thinking about our inquiry project

Class, I know that Wednesday's activity was very challenging! I appreciate your hard work on the activity, and I want to let you know that it will pay off throughout college! Please write a regular blog entry on the experience. Be sure that you try to write a whole journal to get the most benefit, not just a series of short answer questions. Think about your main beliefs about the process of trying to integrate an academic source. You can use mini-headers if that format helps (it sure helps me when I write).

Here is your chance to vent. What was the most confusing part about trying to paraphrase "The Corleone Chronicles"? Did you have any trouble with the article? How did your understanding of this article compare with your understanding of Sarah Vowell's podcast on The Godfather? Why is the focus on academic writing in college as opposed to more popular writing like Sarah Vowell's podcast? Do you agree with the academic focus? Do you think that learning this new way of arguing and debating will help you to understand other parts of your world?

What was your process? How did you choose the passage from “The Corleone Chronicles” to add to your journal? How did the passage relate to your way of thinking about genre and originality? Did you think that it was a big jump to link the two different views of originality and genre? Were they unrelated in your opinion? If so, how hard was it to find a place to relate it back to your journal, and did you feel like you were just plugging it somewhere? Had you considered The Godfather in your original journal before today? What examples had you previously included to support your view of originality? Finally, how helpful was the article in helping you to rethink the views that you had previously explored in your first journal?

If you had to do the process again (and you will!), what would you do differently to make the process go smoothly?

This is due on Thursday, April 12th at 9 am.

Thank you for your hard work,
RW

Blog Entry Two: Thinking about Research

Approach:  Class, you will want to start this blog entry early, but I would suggest going back to it to a few times this week before the due date to update your post as you learn from your sources. Double check on your journal hints and annotated bibliography assignment sheet in Moodle for help with this entry. It will be due on Blogger on Thursday, April 5^th at 2 pm.

Describe a self-directed (not professor-directed!) research activity from your daily life this week. What did you research, what prompted this research, what did you get out of this research, and how did you use the fruits of your research? For instance, you might have looked for a car part on Craig’s List for the repair of your car. This is self-directed! As another example, you might have looked up something that made you curious on The Godfather (not from my prompting), and you might have discovered something that you did not know or that we did not cover in class.  This is to get you thinking about how you view research at this point in time and your relationship to research that you do outside of class and research in response to course requirements!

Now I want you to describe how you acquired your sources that I required for the annotated bibliography this week! You started with a question, and you conducted this research in response to your question. How did you approach this process? Did you see any major similarities or differences between your self-directed, daily research and your academic research? Was it harder, easier, or about the same? Why? Did you note any problems with searching or feeling like you were on the right track with either kind of research? Where do you engage in research? Just as I have you analyze your writing process and what makes your way of writing unique to you, I want you to analyze how you go about being a researcher and what that means to you as a person and writer!

Finally, explain what you feel you have learned this week conducting academic research. What is academic research? How does your experience of academic research for this class compare with what you see as your self-directed research as well as your initial beliefs about research for your inquiry project?

Blog Entry One: Public Thoughts and Research

Dear Class,

This is a brave step for me to join you on Blogger, but I figured that I would not ask you to do anything in a public forum that I would not do! Good writing means exposing ourselves to vulnerability (within reason-not the vulnerable stupidity that we see on reality television) and the possibility that we could be wrong! In the best case, public writing causes us to rework and revise what we think about a subject, and this playground of possibilities will help us both with creating our portfolios but also lead us to the recognition that good writing comes out of good conversations with people in the same boat (okay, I partially take that back-don't talk to your soccer ball in the boat like Tom Hanks in Castaway). We are in the same boat, class!
For my creation of this blog, I must reflect on how I am trying something new (and a little intimidating) with my writing and how I am trying on new genres in the process of creating this new film class that analyzes the way that genre works in the language and discourse of film. First, I am a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to public writing. I feel a bit uneasy with Facebook because I see that personal privacy in American seems to be eroding. Despite the fact that I love people and talking with people, I am also a little bit of a hermit in the web world. Please be patient with me in this aspect, and I will do the same with you. This is a safe place, and we will be our own little group unless you want to add others to the conversation.

 I see genres acting as both as a way to view the world, in that we often start to place things into categories from the day that we are born, and a way to avoid deeper observations or explorations of the world! Let me supply some examples of how genre works as a way or organizing our experience in the world!  As babies, we have parent categories that are held together through our experience of the characteristics of our parents. We have stranger categories as well, held together through recognition that we have fewer characteristics through which to know this category and group. If we did not have the ability to group things into types based on what we observe and link together, then we would have no learning that extended beyond our tiny lives. Remember my analogy of the poison mushrooms: we are alive today because our ancestors placed mushrooms into categories based on characteristics when one ancestor was not lucky enough to avoid the poison.

 As well as keeping us safe, typing or genre creation can also be destructive when categories are accepted without critical thinking. When someone accepts a prejudiced view of a group of people without seeing the many variations within a group, this typing devolves into bigotry. Unfortunately, both of these possibilities are very human. This is why I wanted us to analyze genre-making as an action and consider how each of the genres that we explore limits or expands our view of the world. I thought that film would be a great place to start because it is a popular medium. As a popular medium, all of us have some experience with making sense of film. I hope that you will feel a sense of familiarity with the medium while exploring and learning about your questions of genre within the medium of film, and I hope that this familiarity will cause you to take a deeper look, blending your sense of ownership with a strong sense of inquiry that challenges simple and commonly accepted film genre discourses.

One of my reasons for picking the film theme for this class is that I love the time in my head where I am silent but interacting with the absorbing language of film, just reflecting on what the director wants to communicate and how I am framing the directorial messages. When I keep these thoughts in my head, however, I do not get to see them evolve because there is no challenge from the outside. For instance, I just assumed that everyone was following the language and metaphors as easily as I was in this class for The Godfather until all of you let me know that you were having trouble hearing the language. Your input helped me to see where my assumptions were lying and also forced me to think about why the director chose mumbled words and verbally indistinct dialogue. I think that the confusing sense of sound was to show the new realism of the film and also the cloak and dagger operations of the mafia. I had this new insight because of interaction with my class, and this pulled my analysis of The Godfather up a notch! I am hoping to foster this sense of social revision by having you respond to blogs, create blogs, and trade ideas on your learning for the portfolio.
I also have one last confession about blogging: I am not an easy friend with technology! I want to create this blog as an activity that will widen my scope about what students commonly see as interaction, but I also want to push out of my own comfort level with technologies that are not directly designed for teaching. As I said in class, I love teaching online, but keeping this blog requires other skills. I will have to fiddle with structure, ideas, form, and conventions for blog writing. This is good for you because you will have a teacher who is learning along with you, but it will also help me to think about how new media genres work. Ultimately, this will benefit my teaching! My purpose for my blog is to explore how I can incorporate research strategies into our film and genre conversations and be a good thought partner for you while you are conducting your research.

Now I want to see your questions! What are you thinking of for an extended research question?
Just today, I had several questions that I could follow to write an essay! For instance, I wonder why the new action films feature women as strong, major players while older action films only have girlfriend roles.

Feel free to include paragraphs of personal writing, as I have done, with more academic explorations of your topic. You should reflect on what you know at this point and how you plan to branch out with your inquiry question.

Share your thoughts,
Ms. Walker