Final Blog Assignment

My final research question is "Should cellular phones be allowed in classrooms as educational tools?" After taking a final look at all my research, I've come to the conclusion that yes, cell phones should be allowed in the classroom for educational purposes.

Microsoft Powerpoint

Although Prezi is really neat, it was really confusing to me. I like how it’s “3-D”, I think that’s a really good way to get the audience’s attention. It was really confusing, though. It was talking about a “path” and a “journey” and I had no idea what it meant. I would like to learn more about this platform in the future because I think it has potential. I really liked the Wix platform where you can make free websites. I’m thinking about using that for my presentation, but it seems like a lot of work and I’m not really technologically inclined, so I’m not sure yet. I may just stick with Microsoft Powerpoint because I’ve used it in the past and it’s not as confusing or fancy as the platforms I looked at today.



Above is just a practice page for my presentation, which I created on Microsoft Powerpoint.

I would like to use Sliderocket to make my powerpoint, so I could access it online instead of having to worry about a jumpdrive, but Sliderocket isn't available to people anymore unless they're with a company.

 

Plagiarism!

                The digital age and widespread use of the internet is making plagiarism easier than ever before. It’s physically easier because we can go on a website or blog or whatever it may be, copy the text, and paste it right into a Word document like it’s our own work. It’s also getting harder to determine what’s considered plagiarism and what isn’t because there’s so much information on the web that it’s difficult to decide what you should cite and what you don’t have to. A lot of stuff seems like common knowledge when really you should still give credit to the author.

            It feels like I plagiarize sometimes, not purposely but because sometimes it’s hard to paraphrase without using the same words as the author. If it’s really the only word that makes sense then it’s hard to not “steal” the author’s words or phrases. I’ve also heard of many people, like one of the examples in the article, accidently plagiarizing from Wikipedia because they aren’t aware it’s plagiarizing, since it’s hard to discern what’s common knowledge.

2 Helpful Sources

Research Question: How has technology changed the classroom?

Hendricks, Drew. “A Look at Recent Findings on Technology in the Classroom.” Huffington Post. Huff

          Post Tech, 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2013.

Periathiruvadi, Sita and Anne N. Rinn. "Technology in Gifted Education: A Review of Best Practices

          and Empirical Research." Journal of Research on Technology in Education 45.2 (2012): 153-169.

          Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Apr. 2013.

Try Something New...

       First, I tried using Boolean operators in my search. I used the keywords "women OR females", "affects OR roles", and then just export processing zones in the last line. I found many subject specific articles that I hadn’t found before. Before, most the articles I found just had a small section about women in EPZs, but the articles I found when I used Boolean operators were mainly about the women. I also tried using the truncation symbol with the word affect (affect*), so I could see results for affects, affecting, affected, etc… I got about the same results with that as I did without the truncation symbol. I like this new technique of using Boolean operators and I think I’ll use it more often in my research, especially for my topic for this class, because it gave me more subject specific information.

       Secondly, I tried finding statistics and government information relating to my topic. I searched in the database Statistical Universe using the keywords “women in export processing zones.” At first I only got one result, and it didn’t seem to have much to do with EPZs, so I tried broadening my keyword to just “export processing zones.” Doing this gave me 69 results, but they were all about the workers’ conditions or their Annual Reports, not about the women. For my project the only statistic I’ll probably use is the percent of women that make up EPZs. I didn’t find it on Statistical Universe but I’m sure I can find it on another site.

"First World Problems Read by Third World People"

https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=10151692702876258&set=vb.295429577163605&type=2&theater

This video is called "First World Problems Read by Third World People," It's by the organization Water is Life and it's trying to get people to donate money to help bring clean water to those in need. The video shows poeople from third world countries reading "problems" that first world countries often complain about, such as "I hate when my leather seats aren't heated." I think the author is trying to argue that we should help people in need because they have way bigger problems than "I hate when I tell them no pickles and they still give me pickles" or "I hate when my neighbor blocks his wifi." Having people from third world countries read the problems makes our problems look so silly compared to their's. That's how the author emotionalizes the video, by having poor kids and people read the problems while they're standing in their horrible living conditions, because that makes people feel sorry for the people and want to donate money to their cause. I think the video has a good cause behind it, but if I had to pick a rhetorical device that the author uses I would say either appeals to emotion or false cause. Overall, I think this video is more rhetorical writing (trying to persuade us to do something) than argumentative writing, though.

"Presearch"

       “Presearch” helped me to come to the topic I’m at now: labor conditions in export processing zones. I started off wanting to research why America’s life expectancy has went down compared to other developed countries, but my “presearch” revealed that there was way too much information on that subject and too many aspects to approach. Background searching in Galileo and the UWG Library Catalogue helped me to narrow down my topic more and to see what information there was available on my topic. It also helped me find more keywords to use in my research. I still have to narrow my current topic down a lot, and Professor Walsh’s feedback on the topic selection worksheet helped with that. I’ve decided to either focus on women in export processing zones or compare China, which has benefitted from EPZs, and Namibia, which has very bad working conditions and hasn’t seen much growth from EPZs. Even those seem broad, though, so I’ll probably still have to narrow it down some more.

       I checked out Women in the Global Factory by Annette Fuentes & Barbara Ehrenreich from the library. Call number HD6223.F841983