Expository WritingSyrek

First Reading Assignment

Cathy Davidson. Project Classroom Makeover (47)
Read the essay at least twice. e rst time, read it all the way through. e second
time, read more carefully, and take noteshighlighting alone is not enough. As
you read, consider the following questions:
Why was Duke Universitys iPod experiment so controversial? What made
it dierent frommore traditional, or what might have been more acceptable,
initiatives?
What are the advantages of crowdsourcing as Davidson articulates them?
How are they applicable to the iPod experiment? What other examples of
successful crowdsourcing can you think o? Are there any disadvantages to
this method of solving problems?
What purpose does the lengthy example of Inez Davidsons rural school-
room serve in the essay?
Writing Exercise for Monday Sept. 8
Read the following passage from Davidsons essay, and write a short response to
the questions that follow:
Im not going to argue that the interactive task of surng is beer or worse
than the reception model that dominated mass education in the twentieth
century. Beer and worse dont make a lot of sense to me. But theres
a dierence and, as we have seen, dierence is what we pay aention to.
Said another way, we concentrate in a dierent way when we are making
the connections, when we are clicking and browsing, than when we are
watching (as in a TV show or movie) or listening or even reading a book.
Indisputably, the imagination is engaged in making connections in all of
those forms, as it is in anything we experience. It is engaged in a dierent
way when we ourselves are making the connections, when were browsing
fromone to another link that interests us and draws our aention. We dont
need a beer or worse because we have both, and both are potentially
rich and fascinating cognitive activities. But the relative newness of the
surng/searching experience drove our interest in the potential of the iPod
experiment; in 2003, educators already knewhowto mine traditional media,
but we had not yet gured out how to harness the new forms of aention
students who had grown up surng the Web were mastering. e Web does
not prescribe a clear, linear pathway through the content. ere is no one
way to move along a straight-and-narrow road from beginning to end.
e formal education most of us experiencedand which we now oen
think of when we picture a classroomis based on giving premium value
to expertise, specialization, and hierarchy. It prepared us for success in the
twentieth century, when those things maered above all. Yet what form of
education is required in the information age, when what maers has grown
very dierent? What form of education is required in a world of social net-
working, crowdsourcing, customizing, and user-generated content; a world
of searching and browsing, where the largest-ever encyclopedia is created
not by experts but by volunteers around the worldas is the worlds second
most popular Web browser (Mozillas Firefox), the worlds most massive on-
line multiplayer game (World of Warcra, with over 11 million subscribers a
month), and all the social networking and communication sites, from MyS-
pace and Facebook to Twier?
Another way of asking the question is: Howdo we make over the twentieth-
century classroom to take advantage of all the remarkable digital benets
of the twenty-rst century?
Davidson frames her advocacy for digital technologies in education as a response
to the world we live in rather than a choice between mutually-exclusive alter-
natives. Her point is that the interactive model is not necessarily beer than
the reception model, just more appropriate to our current social circumstances.
How does she make a compelling case for this argument? Do you nd it convinc-
ing? Why or why not?
One key word in this passage is aention. Davidson describes the susceptibility
of the iPod, a commercial product, to consumer customization as a hybrid of old
and new thinking and as a metaphor for aention in the digital age (Davidson
53). What is the denition of aention in this context? How is aention in the
digital age dierent than before?
Strategies for Writing
In formulating your response, you should draw on the rest of the reading,
but do a close reading of this passage specically.
Pay careful aention to the way Davidson structures her arguments. Con-
sider her logic and her use of evidence to illustrate or support her claims.
Compose your response on Google Drive and put it in our shared course folder.