R.W

Research papers have never really been my favorite thing, as seen in my other posts. But when I find a topic I am truly interested in I find it easy to write about because it is easy to research because I want to learn about it.

When looking through the archives the other day and today, I saw a lot of articles in the newspaper about sports. Now I am not the biggest sport guy in the world, but I enjoy watching them and playing them, and I think that would be an interesting topic to research.

I feel like I could delve deeper into this topic and come up with interesting questions that I can look into. Like how much the student body was involved with sports and compare them back then and today. I could explore how important the role of sports was back then and how much students were involved and how school spirit was. I know that they used to have a football team, but I think there are more differences besides that.

Another topic that interests me was how student life was affected by war. I looked at the Santa Clara newspaper from times like the early 40s and the late 60s when WWII and the Vietnam war were taking place. I feel as though it would be interesting to look into how these wars affected the way of life at the time and how the student body as a whole reacted. I found interesting things about the Vietnam War.

This was some of the most interesting things I found, because the Vietnam War was highly debated especially by college students. World War II will be interesting to talk about, but it was more of an unanimous decision to fight. It was very common to in support of WWII but not in support of the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War in a lot of places it was students vs. the “man”. If you are not familiar with it, the Kent State Shootings were something big that happened at this time. A time of civil unrest. I would like to explore how santa clara students reacted to this. 

Our assignment for my CTW class has been to research the archives of Santa Clara University. I have never really done anything like this before or to be honest been interested too in it. But when I visited the the archives and actually looked around I was intrigued. These archives were probably the best way to see how life was actually lived back then. I got to experience how these people got their information.

In this day when these paper came the best source of current events, they did not have the access to instant information like we do today. Today at any time I can open twitter on my phone and catch up on all the news, what my friends are doing, or research any topic known to man. But through these articles I was able to see how these people became informed. And the change that has occurred in the past 75 years is ridiculous. It is truly stunning to see how far we have come and how much data we now have access to. I could not really imagine a time when the only form of getting any current events was looking through the newspaper.

Seeing all of these old documents, especially the newspaper, gave me an idea how students lived back in these days. The more I dive into these archives, the better I understand and the more interested I become. Going through these is really the best form of looking back in time and experiencing how these people actually lived. ANd compared to my student life now, that is extremely different.

My least favorite type of writing is research papers. I find them dry and difficult to read and write. Unless the topic is incredibly interesting, I do not think I have ever enjoyed reading or writing a research paper. But when I do have to write a research paper, when I am assigned one, I generally try to choose a topic that interests me most.

That is my first step, finding a topic that holds my interest. I generally have some sort of background in the subject, at least enough where I know I am interested. I then turn to the internet for all of my research. At least that is what I used to do. In college so far I have worked on one research paper. I wrote a 12 page paper on street art for my art history class. I have always been interested in the topic and therefore the paper was not too difficult to write. But what I did not like about this paper was that I had to physical texts as sources.

Like the reading we did in class on Wednesday, I, like Liw, generally get my texts from the internet. Now when I heard that I needed physically books for my research paper, I immediately thought I could easily find some online sources that will get the job done. Unfortunately I actually did have to go to the library and talk to a real person and ask them for help finding subject books. It was a nuisance to say the least.

But I eventually did get it done, just not in my normal matter.

My normal routine is along the lines of what Liw did. I do not make things up when they are incomplete or so they integrate into my paper better, but I do use the research strategies he does. Google scholar is, in my opinion, the best way to find reliable sources in the shortest amount of time. It is way better than the library. I also use wikipedia, but never source it. It is just useful to gain a better understanding of a subject.

Although writing research papers is not my favorite thing to do, I do consider myself quite decent at it. That is probably just because I am a good googler, which is all research papers really is.

IN my CTW class, my assignment was to recreate my formal analysis essay into a blog, which you can read here. I basically translated my work from academic language to language I would actually use. I thought the end result was quite nice. It felt more personal to me because it sounded like me, it was my voice, rather than a fake academic language that I used to get a good grade(It worked too).

I have found that posting on blogs is significantly different than writing an essay. That may seem pretty obvious to most people, but I have never really done it so I never knew first hand how different it is. It is nice to be able to use language that you wouldn’t be able to in an academic essay. It is much less pressure to sound smart, which lets you really focus on your topic.

What I did to rewrite my essay as a blog post was just open it in a document and have a blank one by its side. I literally went sentence by sentence, cut out what was not necessary for my argument, and translated the rest into how I would actually say it as if I were talking to someone. This is what I like about blog posts. They seem more genuine because they are not made up with all this fancy language, they are more like a conversation than anything else. So I added a little bit more of my own opinions and observations on my topic. I transformed an education essay about education to a relaxed casual post by saying what I wanted to say and not dressing up the language. I feel as though I could get my point across much better in the blog post versus the essay.

When I first discovered the Internet, I would read a lot of blogs about random things. I thought they were interesting, but I kind of lost touch with that when I grew up a little more. But for this project, I started reading them again to get a feel for the styles and strategies used, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. A blog has so much more power to reach out to people than an essay. It can connect with your readers. You can tell a story, a joke, or anything that you would say in real conversation.

In my previous blog post, I included a story about me almost taking a gap year that was not in my original essay. I did not include the story in my original essay because it would not of been appropriate. However, I was able to include it in my blog post because it went along with my argument and was appropriate. I feel as though this is what blogging is about; your story.

If blogs were only focused on academics, no one would read them. But they are not, they are personal, they have a human touch and a real audience. Stories are often included in blogs because they add a factor of excitement and they also connect the author and the audience on a deeper level. The first thing you see when you google blog is the blog.com and the tagline “What is your story?”

Well here is my blog, and I will be sharing my stories with you. The great thing about posting a blog like this is that, even if your stories are bad, you still get to express them and yourself. If you have no readers who cares. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get to share yourself with people, whether they are interested or not.

This is how I felt writing this.

In previous years, our technology has advanced exponentially, making quite a few things obsolete. Tech is advancing at a rate that has never been seen before. We are creating a world where almost every problem is solved with technology. Our lives are influenced significantly by technology and it is rare in this day for someone to not have technology on them. Even this post is written through technology.

One thing that technology has changed a lot is education. We can now search the Internet at any time to get any sort of information we want. With the power of the Internet we can learn almost anything with just a few clicks of a mouse.

For example, if I wanted to learn the skill of coding, I could go to a website like CodeAcademy and learn almost everything I would need to know about coding. All of this information is available online and through free resources. If everything you would need to learn is online, one might wonder if it is still even necessary to attend a school.

The current college system is currently setup so that rich, smart high school kids have the best chances of succeeding. If someone comes from a less fortunate financial standpoint, or a bad schooling system, it is significantly more difficult to get into a good school and actually attend a good school. But in this post I will explore the idea of college becoming obsolete because of all the technology out there that can educate us and potentially replace the college system or at least modify it. Technology makes education more accessible for people who do not have the means to attend college and therefore it yields a good alternative to just study online rather than drop half a million dollars to get educated. Yet here I am at one of the most expensive schools in the country, and I cannot even seem to follow my own argument. But that is a different story that I will come back to later. Let me first prove my argument.

The first thing I should touch upon is whether or not college is right for everybody. On the one hand we hold that college is a good choice for everyone because it makes you grow as a person. From this perspective, money should not be a defying factor in your college career. On the other hand, however, others argue that going to college is not a sound investment for everyone and some people’s skills would be put to better use in the workforce rather than in academia. In the words of Charles Murray in “Are Too Many People Going to College?” one of this arguments’ main features is, “It remains taboo to acknowledge that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expectations among the next generation”(251). Murray is saying that not every one should go to college because not everyone will benefit from spending lots of money on 4 years of education. They would be better off going straight into the work force.

Personally, I believe that an education is very important for succeeding in this world, but it does not necessarily have to be from a typical 4-year college. I think it could be just as lucrative to learn the same things online in less time for a less amount of money. But the only problem with this method, and the reason I am not doing it myself, is that it requires a tremendous amount of self-dedication and motivation. You would have to make it your goal every day to learn what you wanted to learn, and have to spend a lot of time online researching and learning. But this is defiantly possible. It has actually crossed my mind a few times.

When I was going through the college process, I was very close to taking a gap year and traveling the world. What my plan would have been is to go around the world, with my computer and learn how to computer code. I thought, and still do think, this would be one of the coolest jobs ever. You could become a freelance programmer and work wherever you want as long as you have Internet access. I flittered with this idea for a couple of days, and then my dad asked me, “Why don’t you pretend you’re abroad and show me what you would do online to benefit you?” Typical dad question. But he was right. I spent a couple hours trying to learn to code and the rest of my time on Netflix and Facebook. Clearly I do not have what it takes to teach myself enough so I can get by without going to school. But it is definitely possible to do so. Once again, you just need superior self-motivation.

So for those who are in high school and believe in themselves and their self-control, and who also do not have the means to attend a 4-year college. It is could be beneficial to turn to the Internet for schooling. The Internet has an almost infinite amount of information on it, plenty of it free. Nicholas Carr expands on this knowledge haven, saying, “The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded”(315). Having almost all the information at the touch of a button makes learning infinitely easier. For a self-motivated person, the opportunities are endless through technology. If one wanted, they could go online and achieve a similar education or possibly even better but defiantly more diverse than one at a university. There are countless educational resources through technology and the Internet. For example, MIT, one of the smartest schools in the country, offers thousands of courses online that are available to literally anyone with Internet access through its opencourseware program. So you can be educated by one of the best schools in the country for free on over 1000 topics.

Some people argue that by attending college they have a higher chance of succeeding and making more money in their life. And I do not disagree with this statement. But I do think that if college is not the best option for you, an online education, either through a program or through yourself, could be a credible alternative and potentially even better, depending on your self-motivation. These people would also probably argue that college helps you grow as a person, making you more mature and more cultured. Again, I agree with this, but I think there are other ways to become like this, for example, through hands on working, somebody could achieve similar skills.

I believe that it is very possible, although difficult, to get a good education without ever attending college. No matter what people choose in their life, they should strive for an education and try to set themselves up for the best future, whether that is going to college or just learning important skills online.

Attached is a reddit post of some of the best online resources for learning.

Online Education

Here is an interesting video discussing the pros and cons of attending college

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad_gVhBOGzI

Hello world, it is me, Rowan Whalen, coming to you live for the first time. I hope you guys enjoy my blog.

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