I just finished my last assignment for my freshman year english class!!!!!

After writing a research paper about diversity in high school and college, our last assignment was to make a “multimodal presentation” that encapsulated what our paper was all about.  I decided to make a short “Public Service Announcement” sharing with the community what I thought we should do to make our schooling better than it is currently.

Hope you enjoy:

Over the last quarter I’ve been contributing to this blog twice a week, either writing about something that’s going on in my life, or blogging about a prompt that I got in my english class.  In addition to this blog, we’ve had many writing assignments that have all contributed towards a big research paper that I finished last week.  While these papers are very different from my blog posts, both stylistically and content-wise, they have many similarities.  They’ve also built on each other and have made each assignment a little easier as well.

Multimodal/Blogging

As I wrote in a very recent post discussing the way that multimodal education has developed recently, blogging is a major part of multimodal writing.  Throughout the whole blogging process I’ve learned and developed many different strategies that have allowed me to keep my reader engaged and incorporate different forms of media.

My favorite form of media that I’ve incorporated into my blog posts have been gif’s or short videos.  I think they’re a perfect way to give the reader a break and hopefully by doing so they feel refreshed and then are able to continue reading my material.  Additionally, a good way I have given my readers a break is through the use of white space.  By keeping my writing to a minimal amount in each paragraph, there is less strain on the reader’s eye which keeps them interested and engaged.

Academic Writing

It’s incredibly important to keep your reader engaged in academic writing too.  However, after blogging I’ve come to realize how difficult this can be.  As opposed to blogs, where I can use extra indents or gifs to keep my reader’s attention, in academic writing I can’t use those strategies.  Instead, I’ve developed other methods that work pretty well.  Whether it’s starting off with an anecdote that hooks the reader in or writing about a relatively unique topic, there are many rhetorical strategies that can keep reader’s attention just as well, if not better, than blogs can.

Finally, I’ve been able to use my blog as a space in which I could “test out” my ideas with very little repercussions.  I’ve been able to sit down and write in a informal style which makes it easy for me to test out different writing styles that I hadn’t used before.  After getting them down on paper, I was able to see what was good about them and what needed improvement before I used the strategies in academic writing that “matters.”

Looking forward, I plan to either continue this blog or start up a new one in which I can continue to develop my writing and multimodal abilities.

Time Flies

Now, more than ever before, people have such short attention spans that they no longer want to sit down a read an article when they can spend a fraction of the time that would take and scroll through their twitter feed.  Instead of learning an in depth view of one aspect of the world around us, people are using twitter and other quick news sites to get a small snippet of many things in society today.  Who’s to say which way is better, but it’s incredibly important to realize what the preferred news form is in today’s culture.

Multimodal learning

One reason why I believe many people don’t enjoy sitting down and reading an article is because it’s boring.  Today’s society has so much stimulation all the time, whether it’s cellphones, television or just constant interaction with friends, that we need to find a way to keep our interest peaked while learning.  This is where multimodal education can be implemented.  Multimodal texts are:

“works that use more than just words and letters to communicate a thought–they may include audio, video, photographs, drawings–basically, any visual element used to supplement the text in some purposeful way.”

Because they are more than just words on a page, it’s natural that they are engaging and keep the reader’s attention in a different way than articles and books do.  Additionally, because they are so broad, while someone may not enjoy one form of multimodal text like a podcast, they may very well enjoy a collage instead.  It’s no wonder that blogs have taken off as a popular form of writing, they’re multimodal too.

Think about what a typical day is for you and I’m sure that it is full of multimodal activities.  Whether it’s reading your favorite blog, watching an educational youtube video (TED Talk, Khan Academy) or even just watching the daily news, these are all different forms of multimodal text that has captured your attention.  As society continues to have shorter and shorter attention spans, multimodal education and learning is going to become more an more important as well as common.

National Championships 

This weekend, the 20 best college frisbee teams from across the U.S. and Canada are meeting in North Carolina to play in the national championships.  They are held every year, with the location changing from year to year.  Typically, there are no major issues or complications with the location of the tournament, however, because North Carolina recently passed the HB2 “bathroom bill,” which “blocks cities and local governments from passing antidiscrimination measures that could protect gay and transgender people.”  This has caused major controversy across the nation and within frisbee circles.  The question facing the college teams, should they boycott the national championships?  Essentially what teams are wondering is if by participating in the tournament, if they are indirectly making an “argument” that they don’t care about the passing of the bill.

Result

USA Ultimate (USAU) has responded to the bill saying that they are unable to change the location of the tournament because of complications having to do with finding new fields and the costs of changing locations.  However, they have decided to make the game frisbees unique.  Instead of having the typical “National Championships” design on them, this year they will be rainbow colored.

For the most part, teams decided that it wasn’t worth boycotting the event and are all attending the tournament.  Additionally, USAU has recently put out a list of all businesses near the venue that don’t support the law that was passed.  They are encouraging teams to only frequent businesses that have declared themselves opposed to HB2.

Western Washington University

However, Western Washington University’s school board decided that they would not give the team any funding for their plane tickets or housing accommodations due to the HB2 law.  As a result, the team, Chaos, was unsure if they would be able to participate in the tournament.  After, hours of crowdfunding and fundraising, the team managed to scrape enough money to go.  They are participating at the tournament as an “independent” team, not representing the University while still being a team full of Western Washington students.

It is unclear to me as what the right decision would be if I was in this position.  While I understand why it’s important to stand up for what you believe is “right,” as an athlete myself, it would be truly amazing to see a whole team sacrifice a possible national championship, something they’ve worked all year for, because of a law that was passed in another state.

Almost Done!

My school year is almost done, and as the quarter winds down, I’ve got many final projects and tests that are coming up.  In my english class, I’ve got to make a “multi-modal” presentation of a paper that I recently finished.  I’m planning on making a short informational video, that combines pictures with words and information about the research I did on diversity in education.

Here are a couple videos similar to what I will be making:

What makes this video work as well as it does is the combination of words, pictures and sound.  The music keeps the audience engaged and the way that the text moves on the screen is also engaging.  I hope to make a video that is similar to this and I’m planning on using these same strategies to keep the audience engaged.

This video is a bit longer than the first one.  However, it keeps the audience engaged in a similar manner to the first one.  Instead of just having animation and words on the screen, this video has actual video interviews with people.  This is incredibly engaging, however if I am to do this, I need to be careful not to do it for too long and risk boring the audience.  Finally, the video has lots of text on the screen which can, if you’re not careful, make the audience not interested in the video.

Do We Need Diversity?

Whenever we talk about diversity in education, the first thing everyone thinks of is college.  Whether it’s colleges advertising how diverse they are or people conducting studies about the benefits of diversity in college it seems like people agree on the value of a diverse college.  However, I wonder why people don’t think about having diverse general education?  Why don’t we make a point of making our middle and high schools more diverse?

This is what my research paper for my english class is going to focus on.

Benefits

Many studies have been conducted showing the benefits of diversity.  Not only do students in diverse classes at diverse colleges have a higher GPA than students at less diverse schools, they also have a higher first-to-second year retention rate.  This shows the multiple ways that diversity is beneficial to students.  I would imagine that it would also apply to high school students.

Also, numerous studies have shown that as students are exposed to more diverse classes, they tend to seek out diverse jobs and “cross class interaction” after they graduate.  Additionally, they are more aware of racism around them and are more likely to make efforts to act on the racism that they see.  It seems like there is no reason not to make our schools diverse earlier, in order to expose the most people as possible to diverse classes.

This is the niche that my research will delve into.  Not only the benefits of high school diversity, but the ways that it could possibly be accomplished.

Research goals

Through my research I was hoping to learn more about how college students value racial diversity in an education setting.  I want to see the trends in the data that will argue which groups of students value diversity more than other students.  It will be interesting to see if those who value racial diversity go to diverse colleges or if they just wish they did.  Also, I want to see if the students who went to diverse high schools and lived in diverse cities tended to value diversity more, less or basically the same as other students.

Research methodology

Since I was looking to learn about the value of racial diversity at college, I decided to survey young adults who were either: about to go to college, in college or just out of college.  It was also important for me to survey a diverse group of students in order to have a good way to compare how the value of diversity changes as the group of students changes.

I was able to post my survey on my own Facebook page, and text some of my friends at colleges across the country.  By doing this, I got responses from many different colleges.  I also used the Santa Clara frisbee team’s “google group” in order to get responses from alumni who went to Santa Clara previously.  By asking many different groups of people, I was able to get 74 responses to my survey, which provided a big enough sample size to see trends in the data.

Survey Analysis

The following table shows how people respond to the statement, “I wish my college was more racially diverse.”  The data suggests that for many students, racial diversity is an important part of what they value in college.  This is seen because 64% of students either “agreed” or “completely agreed” with the statement.  Only a total of 7.4% of respondents either “disagreed” or completely disagreed,” which suggests that students tend to wish their colleges were more diverse.

When I started the survey process, I thought that people who went to a diverse high school would value diversity higher than students who went to less diverse high schools.  The following table corroborates my belief but to less of an extent than I thought.  While only 4 respondents went to extremely diverse high schools, which is a very small sample size, they valued diversity much more than other students did.  They valued diversity at a 4 on a scale from 1-5.  No other group of respondents valued diversity higher than 3.4 out of 5.  The other groups of respondents seemed to value diversity about the same, regardless of what type of high school they went to.  This seems to suggest that unless students went to extremely diverse high schools, the level of diversity at the schools did not affect how much diversity was valued.

This is going to be a wordy post in comparison to the others that I wrote, but hopefully you find it interesting.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about leadership and what makes a good captain for a sports team.  Just yesterday, I decided that I would run for captain of my frisbee team, which gave me the opportunity to build off what I wrote here the other day. In my earlier post, I describe the process of running for captain (in short you send an email to the team saying why you’re a good choice).  Here is my email to my team:

Deciding to come out the the first week of SCAB practices was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made.  It hasn’t even been a whole year yet, but SCAB has offered me a chance to make some friendships that I know will last way past my graduation.  Whether it’s writing gushy Instagram posts about my love for Crust, or seeing a picture of myself and Taz get the “meme-treatment” it’s clear that SCAB is a great group of guys who care about each other and want to watch each other succeed.

I’ve played frisbee off and on since 6th grade, and last year was the first time that a team I played on won a major tournament.  It was my senior season and we went to High School Westerns in Oregon as a team that few people thought would win.  Through the help of a couple stars and overall great teamwork and sheer will to win, we won the tournament. Ultiworld wrote about us and said something like, “Roosevelt shocked the field and won the tournament with two star players and a team of nobody’s.”  As one of the many “nobody’s” on the roster, I didn’t get any recognition from the Ultimate community.  Not only do I think that it was a blessing to be called a “nobody,” but I have a dream that next year, at about this time, Ultiworld will be writing about my teammates and me in exactly the same way.  Next year, we will look at Ultiworld’s website and see a post about us winning Regionals: the headline reads, “Team of Nobody’s Beats Stanford in SW Final, Nationals Next?”

I think we are just a few steps away from being the team to beat in our region.  Looking back at some of the games we played in this year, we were incredibly inconsistent.  Against Davis at Stanford Open and in the first half against Chico at sectionals, we played some the best ultimate I’ve ever seen.  Then, suddenly we’d play like we did in that game against USC.  If we want to be a team that is feared by other teams in our region, we need to change the way we approach practices.  In my opinion practice is where everything starts.  This isn’t to say that we can’t have fun, that’s the real reason why we play sports.  However, if we come to practice with the mentality that we will beat whoever that’s guarding us, I think we will become a much better team.

It’s been said over and over this year, but when we compare our roster with anyone else’s in our region, not only are we one of the most complete teams, but I think we are the most athletic team.  Regardless of whichever group of 7 people we put on a line, I know that we have the athletic ability to beat the other 7.  All we’re missing is the right technical skills and mental strength, which we can learn at practice.  We’re very close, and with a good practice plan like the other potential captains have mentioned in their emails, we will be an amazing team this time next year.

Lastly, I realize that as a sophomore I will be one of the younger players on the team.  However, I know that I will give my complete effort and attention to practices and make the success of SCAB my ultimate priority (Pun intended).  I believe this is the type of commitment that we are looking for in a leader and that is why I would be honored to captain you all next year.

Step 1: What do you want to learn?

Whenever you decide to make a survey, you’re always interested in learning what a group of people thinks about a certain topic.  However, it’s extremely important to make sure you realize specifically what it is that you are interested in.  It can be really easy to think that you know what you’re looking for, but then after making your questions, realize that they need to be changed so you can actually gather the important information you want.  By making it clear to yourself initially what you want to gather from your survey, you can eliminate the need to dramatically change your survey questions.

Step 2: How are you going to ask your questions?

This isn’t to say that your first draft of questions will be left unchanged for your final survey.  You absolutely need to make sure you are being clear.  This is probably the most important step of making a good survey and one that I struggled with when making mine.  It’s really easy to think your question is easily understood even though it isn’t.  For example, when writing my survey about diversity in colleges, I initially asked:

“How much did the diversity of the student body affect your decision of where to go to college?”

This isn’t a very good question.  First of, there is not good way to measure the results, so once I realized this, I decided to put the question on a scale of 1-5.  This way I can at least have a good way to measure the results and keep them somewhat relative.  Also, I didn’t qualify “diversity” enough.  Since I want to learn about how racial diversity impacted students’ decisions of where to go to school, I needed to add “racial” into the question to make it clear that I was asking about racial diversity and not gender or sexual diversity.  After making these changes, my final question ended up being:

“On a scale of 1-5, how much do you value racial diversity in a college student body?”

Step 3: Where are you distributing it?

Lastly, you need to find a place to distribute your survey.  You need to ask yourself what the right audience is for your survey and then figure out a good place to reach that group of people.  For me, my audience are college and high school students.  A good way to reach a young audience like that is through social media.  I will use Facebook to send my survey to my college and high school friends who hopefully will help me by completing the survey.

This week my club frisbee team is voting for three players who we want to be captains for the upcoming year.  Anyone who wants to be in the running sends an email out to the team, with what is essentially his “campaign speech.”  In it, players explain why they will make a good captain and what they would do if they were to become captain.  It got me thinking about what I, and other teammates, value in a leader.

Some of the most inspirational and best emails had the following in them:

“I want to be captain because I know that I can be the standard-bearer for this new mentality. I want to set the tone for what I see as a new era for Santa Clara ultimate. Whether it is getting in extra throws before practice, leading intense work-outs, or watching endless hours of film, I will always lead by example.”

This really struck a cord with me because although the person who wrote this email isn’t the best player on the team, he is always showing up to practice early, clearly putting in effort to become the best player he can be.  It’s clear that he really wants to succeed and I can tell that this is an extremely valuable asset in a leader.

“I love ultimate, I love this team, and I am excited for what this team can accomplish not only next year, but beyond. This is a team on a Mission, and I hope that you think I’m fit to be one of its leaders.”

This is just a simple closing remark.  However, it comes across as incredibly sincere.  The team is full of players who absolutely love the sport and that’s exactly what this player will bring as a captain.  He’s not running for captain because he feels like he’s better than everyone else, he wants to be our leader because he simply loves the sport and wants to give everything he can to the team.

To my surprise, I came to the conclusion that a captain doesn’t need to be the best player on the team.  This is something that I’m not used to thinking.  Through all of my sports career, the captain of my teams has always been the best player on the team.  However, I’ve come to realize it’s more important for a captain to be a strong leader than a good player.  They need to be the tone-setters for the team, it’s their responsibility to make sure everyone gets along and has fun while still pushing the team in a positive and winning direction.  This is what makes a leader respected by their peers.