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Ed Webb

Writing in College - 1. Some crucial differences between high school and college writing - 0 views

writing-program.uchicago.edu/...high_school_v_college.htm

reading writing learning

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Aug 14 - Cached
  • some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. "After all," they say, "we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. Here's my opinion. Take it or leave it." This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 17 Aug 14
       
      Key!
  • In an Age of Information, what most professionals do is research, think, and make arguments. (And part of the value of doing your own thinking and writing is that it makes you much better at evaluating the thinking and writing of others.)
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 17 Aug 14
       
      Both parts of this - both sentences - are important.
  • Words such as "show how" and "explain" and "illustrate" do not ask you to summarize a reading. They ask you to show how the reading is put together, how it works
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A third kind of assignment is simultaneously least restrictive and most intimidating. These assignments leave it up to you to decide not only what you will claim but what you will write about and even what kind of analysis you will do: "Analyze the role of a character in The Odyssey." That is the kind of assignment that causes many students anxiety because they must motivate their research almost entirely on their own. To meet this kind of assignment, the best advice we can give is to read with your mind open to things that puzzle you, that make you wish you understood something better. Now that advice may seem almost counterproductive; you may even think that being puzzled or not understanding something testifies to your intellectual failure. Yet almost everything we do in a university starts with someone being puzzled about something, someone with a vague--or specific--dissatisfaction caused by not knowing something that seems important or by wanting to understand something better. The best place to begin thinking about any assignment is with what you don't understand but wish you did.
  • If after all this analysis of the assignment you are still uncertain about what is expected of you, ask your instructor. If your class has a Writing Intern, ask that person. If for some reason you can't ask either, locate the Academic Tutor in your residence hall and ask that person. Do this as soon as possible.
  • you will only rarely be able state good points like these before you write your first draft. Much more often, you discover good points at the end of the process of drafting. Writing is a way of thinking through a problem, of discovering what you want to say. So do not feel that you should begin to write only when you have a fully articulated point in mind. Instead, write to discover and to refine it
Ed Webb

BBC News - World News America - How to disconnect from your online life - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8999235.stm

privacy identity internet online socialnetworking socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • "We figured out that people have advertised so much with their online ego, that basically a kind of avatar persona has been created so actually people start talking about killing someone like it would be a real person,"
  • "If you are heavily active [on the internet], by disconnecting you are losing a significant relationship. Those 30 or 40 hours of time now have to be filled with real life." Dr Block says some people can find it very gratifying, while others find they are not capable of staying disconnected. However, he believes the worst case scenario is when the decision to disconnect is made by a third party. "It can be a disaster and can even lead to suicide."
  • If we can't live in the moment without tweeting about it, or broadcasting all of our thoughts to our 2,000 Facebook friends, are we in danger of losing our sense of identity?
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  • "We are a social species, we've always shaped each other's identities. "What's happened now, is the explicitness, the permanentness, the globalness, the searchability, all of those things have amplified a bunch of those effects." So how do we navigate this magnified environment we are all operating in now? Mr Shirky's advice is to find balance. "We should look at the medium and say what are its advantages and disadvantages, and how can we maximise the former and minimize the latter, based on the way the world is right now?
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