Blog #20

1.  What are the strengths your writing for the introduction?  What do you need to work on? 
What are the strengths of your writing for the review of the literature?  What do you need to work on?

• I feel that my introduction is slightly vauge and lacks certain details. When I wrote it, I was trying to not give away my entire arsenal of points that I was going to be making throughout the paper.  

2. What is the research problem identified in your introduction?  How do you point out what your research project will contribute toward resolving this "problem"?  In other words, what have you written about  the importance of your project for writing studies?

• I believe the topic of cell phones are very important, due to the fact that almost every child over the age of 14, most likely has a cell phone. The problem identified is that more and more people are becoming reliant on cell phones to do simply everyday tasks. I'm focusing on the effects of having mass convenient all around us, and how people react when things aren't as convenient 

3. What have other researchers found out about your topic that is relevant to your research project?

Other researchers have found that cell phones are being "over-used" and people are "overcommunicating" a problem that has been unheard of in previous generations.

4.  How do you connect findings from question 3 to the purpose of your project?

• I want to find specific examples, by interviewing people who have grown up without cell phones and compare it to someone who is growing up with cell phones, asking the same set of questions, and comparing the answers i get.

5.  What is your plan for finishing your introduction and literature review?

• Keep revising and reading it aloud, so I can make sure it sounds nice and flows smoothly. At the moment I feel like it's just a bunch of points jumbled together. 

6.  What feedback do you want from me?

• I'd like to know how YOU think I should start off my intro. The topic is so vast I'm not quite sure where to draw the readers attention to first 

Blog 19

Question: Do cell phones keep us more connected to social communities or do they isolate us from each other.


In the last couple of decades, our world has seen a rapid growth of technology, not just in computers, there is technology in almost everyone's daily life, whether its a GPS to navigate, or solar panels on your roof, technology is all around us.

More specifically, cell phones, have evolved so rapidly over the past few decades, so much to the point where they have become a necessity of life for some, because they can make certain tasks very convenient. However as we know, everything has two sides. Cell-phones have presented us with an entirely new set of problems. If cell phones are there for the sole purpose of communication, is it possible that this generation and the ones to come are over-communicating? The increase of cell phones and social networking over the past couple of decades are meant to make it easier for us to communicate, but do these advances in technology really make it more complicated to express how we truly feel? Are we moving towards an age where humans have limited contact with each other?

Blog 14

My Research Question: What features of comments asking for change, actually help the student make changes to their writing.


When you work hard on a paper and think you have put down your absolute best work, and all you get back are comments asking you to change your paper, some students may be crushed, while others are uplifted to do better and improve upon what they had written. With my question I want to take a look at what it is about those comments(asking for change) that effect if the response is a negative or positive one.

First I must categorize the comments that make a request of some sort. There are comments that ask the student to change their position of what they said. Example: "This paragraph should be said later on in your essay" those can be coded as positional change. Then there is the types of comment when the teacher  requests change/asks question. Example: "Can you provide more information in this paragraph". Then there are comments that are very direct in the form of a statement while demanding change. Example "You should change your closing paragraph" these could be coded as change/statement. 

I've been a student for quite some time now and have gotten hundreds of papers back and graded, most of which always have comments on them. From my own personal experience  the type of comments that have a positive effect on my writing is the change/question. When a teacher asks you to change something but doesn't hint at what they want changed, it feels as if your in a pitch black room and need to find the light switch  you know exactly what you must do, but do not know how to find it. That is why when a teacher makes a request to change your writing, but then asks a question, it gets you thinking and is a big hint to what they want to see on the paper.

I still have work to do in finding other examples and opinions other then my own and the couple of literacy narratives i will also use

Blog 13

There wasn't any information in the two chapters I read that was hard to understand. I enjoyed how Gee talked about how we speak differently in certain situations, and how you can't just walk the walk you have to talk the talk, although a cliche saying, its very true in a literal sense. Although I did understand the point he was making with the "real indians" I just feel as if he could of used a better example, it took me several times to read it over to fully grasp the essence of what he was saying.

Blog 12

For my essay I want to use the data set we worked on with teachers comments. A few research questions I found to be quite interesting

1) Does a teachers age effect the type of comments she leaves
or
2) What features of negative comments make then encouraging

I'm interested in if young teachers are more tolerable and understanding that different people have different writing styles, rather then a teacher who is older and set in his or her ways of teaching and grading. OR I would like to look at what is it in a negative comment that makes a student want to improve. Certain negative comments have the ability to crush a student while others seem to be very useful in a students revision process.

work in progress

Research Question

Do cell phones make people think less, or do they make you think more(more access to knowledge)

Cell phones....some people cannot live there life without them, and others dont see the need to have one. I personally fall in the middle, i own a cell phone but it's not a smart phone, it makes calls and can text people thats all i need a phone for. A study like this makes me think back to about 10yrs ago. No one was texting each other or sitting behind computer screens to communicate there was more face to face interaction, and if face to face couldnt be possible, they would call each other. Fastforward to present day time, no one seems to want to call each other anymore, a majority of younger adults and kids feel more comfortable when they text someone rather then call them. Is it because when someone texts you there isnt a need for an instant response? Maybe there is something in those 3-5mins of thinking time from when you receive a text to when you actually respond that people really like. 

A recent study from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business finds that even though cell phones are generally thought to connect people with each other, they make users less socially minded. Their findings revealed that participants were less likely to volunteer for a community service when asked after a short period of using their cell phone, then those in the control group and were also less persistent in solving word problems, despite knowing their answers would result in monetary donation to charity. 

Technology is good to a certain extent, but people are relying on there mobile devices more then there own common sense and judgment. This study is important, because I worry what the next 20yrs will bring, and how people adapt to the ever growing world of technology. We live in an era of smartphones and stupid people, i cant help but feel that people who grew up without cell phones or GPS devices were better off, sure maybe it wasnt as convenient as we have it today, but they were forced to think and use common sense. There is also another saying "if you dont use it, you'll lose it" will we lose the ability to think on our own if cell phones keep doing half the thinking for us? All these are concerns of mine, which is why i would love to see if cell phones really are the culprits in the battle of dumbing down a society. 

In order to carry out such research i would need to find kids in the age group of 18-25, a few of which have never had a smart phone, and a few who have a smartphone and conduct a basic interview. Asking such questions like "How many hours a day do you spend on the phone" or "What function on your phone do you use the most". I would most likely be conducting these interviews at Kean University. Then i would find articles supporting the idea that cell phones make us think less, and then find some contrasting articles and analyze what both have said, so i would be using textual analysis as well. 

Research Topic

Do cell phones effect children s(age 5-10) grammar and literacy?

While 5 may still, in the eyes of many, be a bit young for a cellphone, the debate is one that all parents have nowadays: What is the appropriate age for a child to have a phone, especially one that can be used for video messaging and unfettered access to the Internet and social media? I'm beginning to see more and more children with cell phones, iPads and i cant help but wonder if that aids in there literacy because they are communicating with written language more frequently or does it diminish there grammar skills because of incorrect spellings and the phone automatically spelling words for them? The average age at which kids get their first phones has declined steadily during the past decade, according to a 2010 study by the Pew ­Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and ongoing research by one of the study’s authors. The purpose for this is to simply see if smart phones could make a child smarter, or could it make it a reliable tool that makes tasks too easy for them