Audience Awareness

In the article, "Developing Audience Awareness In Writing," Jose´ Brandao Carvalho publishes a study testing a teaching method involving what's called procedural facilitation. Procedural facilitation is designed to help students develop a better sense of audience awareness through focusing on text revision.

In the experiment, which was conducted on both fifth and ninth graders in Portugal, there was an experimental group being taught using procedural facilitation, and a control group which were not taught using the method. Students in the experimental group were asked to "evaluate and to modify the
text they were writing whenever they considered it was necessary" (275).

To measure the effectiveness of the teaching method, Carvalho evaluated both the control and experimental groups by means of a pre-test and post-test. The test results indicated progress in terms of audience awareness in the group that was taught using the procedural facilitation method, and no progress in the group that received no specially designed education.

The results show that procedural facilitation can be an effective teaching strategy that promotes audience awareness, as it "enables the identification of the writers' main difficulties and problems and the definition of the best strategies for tackling them" (281).

Swales

Move 1

The lives of our children are bound to vary greatly from those of our parents, and because of the omnipresence of an evolving technological society, there are limitations to the power we have over influencing them. In seeking the best interests of our children, we must consider the distance between our era and theirs, and make decisions to guide them while complying with the technology that will always play an active role in their lives. Currently, a key component of this technology is the internet. The internet is the most widely used medium – this may seem obvious now, but until relatively recently, people by no means anticipated its preponderance.

Move 2

In the 1960s, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that media not only supply the stuff of thought, they also shape the process of thought (Carr). So, because we and those before us have absorbed information by lowering our noses into books, and the children of today lack that experience and absorb mainly by browsing the internet, there are bound to be critical differences between us and our kids regarding the way our brains process thought – in other words, differences in the way we learn. The purpose of my literature review is to continue the ongoing conversation discussing the examination of the ways internet use affects the way children learn. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that internet use results in a decrease in capacity for concentration.

Move 3

I will be arguing that this decrease in thought capacity is not an inevitable change that the children of this generation must suffer. I will argue that parents and educators need to encourage (sometimes forcefully) their kids to read actual books so they don’t become victims of the internet’s destructiveness. I will begin by first examining the lives of students affected by internet use, then the lives of adults, and then I will move on to discuss the quantitative data and its effects on my overall research. I will end by tying all of the research together and arguing my position based upon my collaborative findings.

Progress

I need to continue to explore the conversation around my topic, but I now feel like I have a focus, which is the changes that occur in the brain resulting from internet use. Up to this point it has been a struggle to find much research, and I believe this is because I was only skimming the surface of a deep ocean with many pockets of ideas. However, now that I am focused, I feel confident in my abilities to find the research I am looking for, and then to join the conversation myself.

Core I Final

Looking back at my life in its totality in retrospect up to this very moment, with no clear idea of what tomorrow will look like, I can ascertain one thing – technology has been a blessing and a curse. With no area of my life left unaffected, life itself is anything but simple. I have come to realize that I can either embrace the swift movements of the technological backbone of this country, or be left out to dry. In 2010, I find myself riding the tail of a technologically savvy comet moving at an exponentially increasing speed. This comet is so empowering that I doubt I would ever want to be too close to its nose. However, I am curious to know how hot the fire is - curious about the complex, enlightened brains of the well-versed computer technicians and seasoned software programmers. Have they really gained something that I should envy?

To some extent, I have only “gone with the flow” of the technology wave. I was a child who was taught to read and write on the computer, spent my free time playing the latest video games, and began texting on my cell phone at age eleven. It isn’t until at this age, in the closing years of my adolescence that I step back and retrospectively look at how technology has molded my life. The mighty cell phone has served me as a guiding light and my right hand man. In an awkward social situation, to whom do I turn? When my expected ride to school on test day is a no-show, what is my reflex? When my Jeep sinks in the opaque depths of a Costa Rican river, where might I reach to find the nearest flashlight? The answer is the most convenient place I could ever find an answer – inside my pocket. This is the kind of answer technology provides: a perpetually accessible answer on the receiving end of a short lived dial tone.

Yet the truth is, the dial tones of our most familiarly acquainted technologies are not short lived – in fact, they never subside. Our eardrums have grown numb to their mellow frequencies. These frequencies can be as high-pitched as a laptop or a muted television, or as dull as a humming air conditioner or refrigerator. My fear is that our brains are becoming too lax, traveling on autopilot due to what has become an involuntary process of seeking and gathering information. With computers and cell phones like combat tools resting in their holsters on our belts, a bottomless cauldron of information and communication is forever within reach of our hands, where it takes no more than a twitch of the wrist and bend of a finger to pull the trigger.

As our ears have adjusted to the constant hum of the dial tones, our bodies have adjusted to the added weight of our tool belts. These belts have possibly become bodily extensions, inexplicable to their owners – twenty-first century students that live in a culture defined by technology. As the bodies of these students become instrumental machines, their actions become mechanized. This is a generation of students who have grown up as players in a digital interface world, where all of their adaptation and growth are only credible because of existing technology. Their skills begin and end with the precursor of the computer. Stuart Selber succinctly writes, “although students will develop some extremely useful skills under an instrumental approach, they will have a much more difficult time thinking critically, contextually, and historically about the ways computer technologies are developed and used within our culture and how such use, in turn, intersects with writing and communication practices in the classroom.” The accomplished student who is a technical genius in the computer lab could lack essential communicative skills. The value of technological advancement does not reach into our lives any further than technology does.

Works Cited

Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies For A Digital Age. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print.

Core I Part II

With no solid career plan in mind, I am certain only of one thing: my profound passion for making music. To make music is to produce music, and the process of production virtually involves two things: writing and recording. I have no doubts that I will continue to focus on this and improve my abilities in this field for the rest of my life. After writing a song, recording it can mean a number of things. I can go the route of "recording raw" and simply record it with a straightforward music recording device such as a 4-track, but in this day and age with the technologies that are accessible I might be more apt to use something called "sequencer software."

I am not yet familiar with this software, but I have strong intentions to become so because of the obvious way it has changed the production of music. These programs will allow me to record audio musical sequences and then organize them over a time-line in any fashion of my choosing. Sequences can be duplicated, edited, manipulated and processed using a bouquet of audio effects. There is a whole new realm of musical capabilities with this software acting as a tool for the musician, or rather an extension of an already existing tool, the musician's instrument. I am truly excited and earnestly motivated to become well-versed in this software for it seems to be the key to the unlocking of a vast musical frontier.

Core I Part I

As a baby born into a rapidly changing technological era, I've had no choice but to accept these changes and make the most of them. My first memories of familiarization with technology are of the family television and subsequently my brothers' video game systems. I became an "ace" with these kinds at a very young age, due to the many focused hours I spent. My mother first introduced to me the computer by means of educational computer games. Eventually, around age six or seven, I began to grow acquainted with the world wide web and its many nuances and fantasies - something I had not realized would play such a major role in my life in years to come.

By the time I reached middle school, I was introduced to functional programs like excel, word and power-point. I also began to spend chunks of time on AOL Instant Messenger. The video camera soon became an expertise of mine as well as I had a great deal of fun recording and editing home videos. To this day, I have not become relatively very technologically savvy. Over the course of high school, I have mastered a few more technologies which mostly correspond to my soaring interest in music. I learned a decent bit about mixing and recording music which still is to my advantage today. This is a general skill that is not limited to specific software or programs but is across the board applicable from a musician's standpoint.

On the computerized end of things, there is a semi-short list of programs I would like to familiarize myself with. Sonar/Cakewalk is some renowned recording software that I would really like to have at my disposal as a tool musically. Garage-band on the Mac is a very basic recording program that I have a partial understanding of but would like to look into more. Speaking of the Mac, I really need to get 'in-the-know' with its interface in all of its "user-friendliness." Being a PC user for fourteen or so years won't make for an easy transition, but it is one which is necessary with all the Mac's prominence. Photoshop and Moviemaker are two additional programs I would benefit from mastering, for both practical and enjoyable reasons.

Analysis of Celtic Biliteracy by Dr Fiona Lyddy

In her article, "Celtic Biliteracy," Lyddy discusses whether or not exposure to certain languages with shallower orthographies, such as the Gaelic and Brittonic languages, inhibits students' abilities to learn languages with more complex orthographies, such as English. The issue is that these shallower orthographies have consistencies within them that cause the brain to draw patterns and make certain connections during the learning process, while the English language "exhibits inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation that may affect reading development." Therefore, the concern of some European school systems is that teaching shallow languages such as Welsh, Gaelic and Irish could have a negative impact in terms of the cost to literacy attainment in English.
Lyddy, who is backed by studies conducted by her research team, argues that the students in these schools that have minority-language-backgrounds do not have difficulty learning English as a second or third language - rather, their backgrounds actually benefit their ability to learn English. Lyddy argues that concerns over the effect on English literacy are unsubstantiated, and that "perhaps, learning a shallow orthography encourages appreciation of the relationship between writing and sound" without causing detriment to English literacy. Her studies show that the consistencies learned in shallower orthographies positively affect students' abilities to learn English, rather than negatively, so the European school boards need not worry about their current standards of teaching biliteracy.