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When surfing my fellow classmates blogs, I came upon an entry written by Hudson Dougan that I had a contrasting view with. In his post, Hudson talks about how he believes that libraries will overcome the age of technology and still be an important part of academic culture in the future. He touches upon the points that physical books are important because people enjoy them over digital, as well as the fact that print research is more comprehensive than its digital counterpart. He also adds that the fact that libraries are free to the public is an important aspect that will increase the longevity of the “library”.

However, in my opinion the concept of a physical library is bound to die out in the next decade.

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In today’s society, everything we do has become about speed and efficiency that is achieved through innovative technological advances. Unfortunately, the whole aspect of monotonous work in the library reading and doing research doesn’t conform the this view.

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While libraries might be free, they are very dated and for that reason, younger people think that they are a waste of time. With the internet, people can now find sources and information at a fraction of the time it would take for them to search a library. Also, with the multitude of databases offered online today, people can be sure that the sources they are citing are reliable.

Well this might seem like “the easy way out” of research to many people, I think that it is just a shift in societal trends in the future. This type of learning will be considered the norm one day.

In my archival research paper, I spoke about a couple of facts that I wasn’t able to further research in the archives. One of these was how the diversity on campus now compares to the statistics stated back in the Multicultural Center Restructuring Agreement of 1997.

Source: Santa Clara University

In the Restructuring Agreement, it was said that the campus housed an undergraduate population that consisted of 37% minority students. In the class profile of 2020, given the minority population consists of all non-white students, then the percentage of minorities in the freshman class is 49% which is a huge increase from twenty years ago. Although the majority of the class is still white, the gap has been cut to a very small amount.

SCU Class of 2020 Profile (Source: Santa Clara University)

This equality was likely achieved with the help of organizations like the MCC who fought for the rights and morals of minority groups on campus since its creation in 1985. This sort of trend will be great to use in my paper since it can show how the implementation of certain policies and rules on campus resulted in an increase of diversity. It is also interesting to see how most of these policies stemmed from the pushes that the Multicultural Center made for diversity at Santa Clara University.

I am currently taking a course called Classics 188 which looks into the idea of justice in both the ancient and modern worlds. In the class, we get to dive into the origins of the court system in Athens and how those ideals and rules grew and changed overtime.

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We recently just wrote a paper that was supposed to compare the standards and execution of justice in the ancient world with that of the movie 12 Angry Men, which we had watched in class earlier in the quarter. To write this paper, I referenced many of the main concepts and ideas that we have used in CTW to create a thorough and and comprehensive argument in which I explained how the justice system in the modern world is much more intuitive then that of the ancient world due to the addition of the jury system.

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Throughout the paper, I used a lot of quotes to give hard evidence to support my argument. I used the hamburger method that we learned in class to make sure that I gave the most in complete analysis of my quotes and allowed the reader to have a full perspective.  I also provided a fair amount of metacommentary that gave my paper more depth and added some needed length to the topic. The use of these skills throughout the duration of CTW have helped me in writing better papers in my other classes which is very useful.

After lots of thought on what I believed would be an interesting question for my research paper, I came to the conclusion that doing an in depth analysis of the different groups/clubs that have been on campus throughout the years would be fascinating. I would not only be looking at the different kinds of clubs on campus and how they have changed and formed over the years, but also the correlation of new clubs with certain time periods throughout history and SCU.

Source: Santa Clara University

When doing my research on this topic, I am initially hoping to find out a list of clubs every year that were part of the school since the start of the University. I will then cross reference the lists to see which clubs were added or taken off in which years. This will give me some context in which I can use the years that clubs were added/removed in order to figure out some reason on why that occurred. For example, I am sure that when women were allowed to attend SCU, there were some clubs or organizations added so that they could be a part of that sort of student life as well. These sort of shifts can showcase how the University and their rules and views have changed over time.

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Obviously, I am expecting that there will be a small and exclusive number of these clubs at first, but as time goes on there will be a large increase in the variety of clubs and/or popularity of them due to what time in history it was. This plan is following the principle of cross referencing from Tirabassi because I will need to cross reference the clubs that I find with other events that were happening during that time period that might have affected their creation.

For this post, I am going to dive into a topic that I read an article about a couple of days ago by Tristan Coulter, a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland Australia concerning the routine and life of student athletes in college and how their schedule affects their mental state. Given that I am a student athlete here at Santa Clara and practice around five hours a day between the morning and afternoon, I was interested to see what this study unveiled about people who were experiencing a similar daily schedule as me.

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I related to a lot of the points that Coulter touched upon like how athletes are put under lots of pressures throughout a typical day both in their sport and in the classroom. Not only this, but most athletes try and keep up a social life as well which only adds to the juggling act of priorities. I also agreed with the fact that student athletes are not only expected to participate in all these aspects of their life, but rather they are presumed to excel in them all as well. These expectations can cause an elevated amount of stress because you want to please teachers, coaches and family/friends.

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As talked about in the article, student athletes learn to deal with handling all these pressures by becoming very good at managing and blocking time for all these different activities. However, making the transition from high school sports to coming to play a sport at a division one school is pretty tough and I know many people, myself included that have struggled at times with this change. On a more positive note however, the camaraderie and achievement that is reached by being an athlete on a team that you spend more than thirty hours a week grinding with is unmatched and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I have learned so much in such a short period of time and although being a student athlete comes with a little more stress during college, the skills and morals that you get from the experience are unparalleled.

When first tasked with creating a research paper, I am usually very overwhelmed by the large task at hand. But after taking a step back and thinking about the topic in a more compact way, the whole process becomes a lot less daunting.

The first thing I like to do when writing a research paper is to split come up with a specific question that I am going to answer throughout the paper.

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This lets me have some sort of guiding factor when doing my research.

After I figure out the overarching question, I usually go and figure out some sub topics that would compliment the question nicely. By doing this, I can go and find specific information and quotes that align with the subtopics I chose and then just add commentary from there. By doing this, the paper slowly starts to form.

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When looking into the article BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary, this sort of method for doing a research paper really coincides with my theory of how to approach a paper. Bizup talks about segmenting your sources into ones that provide different types of viewpoints throughout the paper (Background, Exhibit, Argument, Method) which makes lots of sense. This allows the writer to go into more detail about each argument which provides a nice segmentation throughout the paper.

**(You can read the revision of my synthesis paper in the post below. Hope you enjoy!)

Astounded.. That is how I would describe my feeling of being told to transform a 2,000 word synthesis paper on how the advancements of technology effect education to a mere 500 word blog post. How can one fit such a broad and intricate topic into such a short amount of space? 

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When asking myself that question, I decided that it would be important to focus in on the broad points of my original paper and then try to touch on each one throughout the blog. So in my paper, I broke the different sections down into…

1. Background/My view on how technology affects education
2. Conflicting views from other sources (More advanced technology is bad for society
3. Supporting views from other sources (More advanced technology is good for society)
4. Examples of technology affecting education/learning in a positive way + My views
5. Conclusion

This simple breakdown of general ideas allowed me to pick and choose what I thought was really important throughout the paper and put it into my blog post. By doing this, I made sure that my point was still being conveyed even though I was limited to about a quarter of the amount of words. With that limit I felt like I was really squishing my paper down.

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I could have narrowed my topic into something much more specific, but I felt like if I did that, I wouldn’t be giving the reader the full context of what I was trying to explain. So I tried to keep almost all of the points from my original paper in my synthesis and take out some of the unimportant stuff. For example, I gave a much less extensive background of the topic and instead linked some helpful articles throughout my blog so that the reader could dive into the topic more if they didn’t know much about it. I also tried to cut out a lot of the text concerning the conflicting views because I didn’t think I would need those specific opinions when trying to express my point. Rather, I just gave a sentence or two saying that there were people opposed to the view that education was a big help to education in society. Another big issue that I came across when trying to convert my original essay was the tone of the paper as a whole. Obviously the word choice and style of an academic piece of writing is supposed to be a lot more formal than that of a blog post, so when rewriting my ideas into the post I had to be consciousness not to use extremely proper wording and make the writing sound more like a conversation.

I felt like the transformation of the paper into the blog post was especially difficult because you are expected to convey the same message and convince the reader of your point, but you have to do it in a less serious tone. It definitely took me a couple tries to do!

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It seems hard from my perspective to be able to convince someone about a serious topic in less than 800 words. Also, given that blogs generally are used for pretty spontaneous writing, it felt difficult to incorporate all my sources and still have enough room for commentary about the topic.

Technology… it has come so far from the days where it was a novelty to own a big janky and slow computer. Now that technology is so cheap and accessible, almost everyone owns some sort of tech that makes their life easier. Not only does technology make peoples lives easier, but it also allows humans to thrive and become more knowledgeable. For example, there have been huge advancements in education due to the development of useful technology. Sites like Khan Academy allow students to learn topics at a more in depth level that might not have been able to be achieved by a teacher. (Read more HERE). We can now access more information than ever before, and are able to learn so much more through proper education and teaching.

But some people think that technology is making society less intelligent..

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They think that this new language of texting, combined with the vagueness of the internet is making humans have less intellect as well as very low attention spans. An example given by Nicholas Carr says that he is so used to reading short and compact internet articles, that he had trouble staying focused for more than five pages when he picked up a book. Carr doesn’t realize that society is transitioning to a new era, and along with that comes transitions in areas like literacy. Although the format of it might be different, I think that these new forms of literacy are allowing humans to process information faster and more efficiently which is a great advancement.

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Technology has had an even greater effect on education. It allows a wider majority of people to become more educated and influential citizens in society. People who might not have been able to receive an education previously due to a wide variety of reasons (money, time etc.) can now get an online college education and pursue their goals. This means that an education is not exclusive anymore to people of a higher class in society which has been a very prominent issue in the past. An increase in education throughout society allows for a smarter and more informed population which benefits humanity greatly. It is shown that the higher educated one is, the more successful they will be in life. According to this New York Times article, the income gap between a family with college grads as parents and a family where both parents are high school graduates is over $30,000. If more and more people throughout the world become more educated and therefore more successful, then the world as a whole will be better off in the future.

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All of this great innovation and advancement allows society to thrive. With the introduction of systems like the internet and texting, people around the world have been more connected than ever before. The cultivation of ideas and theories from many different people in separate cultures and backgrounds now have the ability to mesh and form more improved and advanced ideas about a variety of things between math, science and even political issues. The shift to a more technologically advanced society can help people become smarter and more educated as a whole. This change is one that can help the whole world greatly and set us up for more innovation in the future.

Hi all! I’m Jack Bedard and welcome to my blog! I’m currently a Freshman at Santa Clara University and I’m from a small town in New Jersey. Even though I’m pretty far away from home, I love the new scenery of California and wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’m on the mens rowing team at SCU and love exercise and the outdoors. Waking up at 5:15 every morning to row in the hills of Los Gatos allows for a sense of serenity that is unmatched by many other activities.

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I’m also known as a pretty funny guy and love to joke around and be lighthearted most of the time.

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Lastly, I’m big on adventures and enjoy exploring new places and traveling whenever I can.  Hope this gives you a little background on the person that I am! Tune in later to enjoy some future posts!