Tag Archives: class

Nic’s Presentation

Nic asked if she could send a paragraph about her project to share since she was absent for the in-class presentations. Below is what she sent:

“The project I have been working on is about false reports & how they are handled. I feel as though false reports are not taken as seriously, especially since there is no statistics on how many reports were reported as false. Due to my personal experience with wrongful reports I feel as though this is something that should be brung to light, especially with the amount of wrongful incarceration thats going on which also ties along to false reports since it is considered on of the most known effects.”

Descriptive/Reverse Outlining (Class 11/27)

More detailed directions here: Descriptive Outlining Instructions (from Kim Liao)

For this Peer Review Day, you and your group will be making “descriptive outlines” or “reverse outlines” of each other’s papers. It’s called “reverse outlining” because instead of outlining a paper before you write it, you are outlining a paper that already exists. It’s “descriptive outlining” because in addition to outlining the content of the paper, you also describe the rhetorical purpose of each paragraph.

Choose whose paper you will outline first. For EACH paragraph, the other group members should collaboratively discuss two things/answer two questions:

  1. What is the paragraph SAYING? (One-sentence summary of the paragraph)
  2. What is the paragraph DOING? (The paragraph’s role/purpose in the paper as a whole)

The writer should write down what the group members decide for each one, even if the writer disagrees with their answers. The writer will then have a reverse outline of how their paper comes across to readers.

AFTER that, if you still have time, you can discuss other aspects of the paper as a group.

Scripted Interview Instructions (11/18)

Today (11/18) we will be working on the “Scripted Interview,” one of the 8 assignments the English department requires from all 101 students. If you are unable to finish this during class, please complete it for homework (Due Monday 11/25 by 8:00am).

Instructions

  1. Review the sources in your annotated bibliography (by re-reading your annotations and reminding yourself of what each one says!)
  2. Choose two or three sources to work with for this activity
  3. Write an imaginary conversation where you interview the authors of your sources about the topic of your final project.
      • You should ask at least three open-ended questions that allow the authors to give complex, interesting answers (3 points)
      • Each of the authors should respond to each of your questions, giving a complex, interesting answer (6 points)
      • One of the authors should respond directly to the other author’s comment at least once (1 point)
      • The assignment should be turned in on time (2 points)

Total: 12 points

For people who conducted their own interviews: Don’t rewrite your actual interviews with the people, but ask new questions in this assignment and imagine what your interviewee might have said based on their responses to your real questions.

To complete this assignment, you must think seriously and carefully about each author’s point of view (based on what they wrote/said in your source) in order to imagine (as accurately as possible) what they would think/say about your questions.

It also might help to consider, if you were actually interviewing those two people, what would be interesting to hear both of them talk about?

Format the interview like a script. For example:

Scripted Interview Formatting Example

Olivia: What is the most important thing you have learned in college so far, and why?

Student 1: I learned that I have to be really careful about planning my time, because it’s easy to get behind, and if you’re behind, you don’t have time to do a very good job on your assignments or think about them a lot. So you learn less, even if the material is easy.

Olivia: I agree, that’s super important!

Olivia’s “Our Data” Reflection

We ended up talking about Facebook and its categories in my evening graduate seminar too, so I looked at my own Facebook data, and thought I should do the same reflection assignment that I asked you to do.

What did I find?

Some stuff that was not surprising: Facebook’s top category for me is “away from hometown,” they know I work in education, they know I’m a government employee, they know I’m a frequent traveler, they know I use Facebook on mobile a lot but also on wifi, they know I’m a commuter. (That means they notice I access Facebook in regular location-based patterns on weekdays!) They know my political views (ish)

The thing that was most surprising: One of the categories they have me in is “Friends of Soccer Fans.” There’s a whole advertising category just for people who are “top 2 friends” of people who display a deep interest in soccer. Why is that even a category??? Two of my cousins are big into soccer, and neither uses Facebook very much, so I assume it’s one of them. Also they know what model phone I have and that I fairly recently changed mobile networks. Also “birthday in October” is one of their ad categories– I’m not sure what they would advertise to me differently based on that.

What is accurate, what is not accurate? Everything was accurate except perhaps two things. There is a category called “Multicultural Affinity: African American.” If that means they think I’m Black, they’re wrong, but if they just think I display an above-average interest in African American issues, I suppose that’s probably true, I do try to be aware.
They also marked me as Top 5% and Top 10% of richest zipcodes, which is wrong. I am far away from the top 5 or 10% of richest people, but I Googled which zipcodes are the richest, and it seems that I’m in these categories because they know I live in New York, but their algorithms don’t know where I live, just where I spend a lot of my time (in midtown! Which is pretty rich!)

What changes to my privacy settings? None to my privacy settings, but I am going to remove more of my “liked” pages that I liked when I was like 13 and wanted to Like every page.

I think what I think the advantages and disadvantages are about this should be pretty clear to you by now.

Class 11/11

Finding Your Data

Click on the links below for directions on how to view your data on each site.

Google: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/all-the-data-google-has-on-you

Google ads specifically: https://gizmodo.com/find-out-what-google-thinks-you-want-to-see-in-ads-and-1677941497

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992?helpref=hc_global_nav

Facebook ad preferences specifically: https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892

Instagram: https://help.instagram.com/181231772500920

Apple: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/find-out-what-data-apple-has-on-you/

If you have another site you want to look at, let me know and I can find directions for you!

Analyzing Your Data

During class or after class for homework, write up answers to the following questions (and email them to me or post them to the blog):

  1. What did you find about yourself? 
  2. What surprised you?
  3. What was accurate, and what was not accurate?
  4. What changes do you want to make to your privacy settings, if any?
  5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of websites keeping this data on you?

 

Targeted Ads in Real Life

What a coincidence! When I got home today, after our discussion on targeted advertising in the mail, I checked my own mail and found an Amazon gift catalog addressed to my partner (pictured below). Because the intended audience seems to clearly be couples, I wondered if this was a targeted ad, and if there were other catalogs that other kinds of people were receiving. (PLEASE post a comment if you get one in your mail and tell us how it is different!!)

Magazine cover featuring a white heterosexual couple posing in winter clothes. Text reads “Holiday Together: 2019 Gift Guide. Fashion” with an Amazon logo beneath

I looked up Amazon holiday catalogs online, and all of the top search results were about their Holiday Toys catalog(s) and how they are probably sent to customers who buy “back to school” items on their Amazon accounts, because that’s a reliable indicator of having children, and therefore of buying toys for Christmas. So definitely there are other ones, which means this one was specifically for us!

Here is how I know this catalog is targeted toward us:

There are clearly other holiday gift catalogs that Amazon is sending out, but we got the “adult couples with no children” catalog as opposed to the “children live in your home” catalog. We also use the same Amazon account because we only have one Prime membership, so it makes sense that they noticed that there are two kinds of purchasing profiles mixed together in our buying history, plus our saved addresses are two different names for the same address. So, a couple.

But we also got the fashion-specific one. Most of our purchases on amazon are my books for graduate school and individual clothing items for specific events (like the several weddings we’ve been to in the last year and Halloween). So, the algorithm decides we are interested in fashion and that is the category of purchase we are most likely to make. (Where is my academic book catalog though??? Probably they know I only buy a lot of books twice a year, at the start of each semester.)

There are also a lot of ads for sweaters, hats, and jackets—I bet people who live in warmer climates get different ones.

There’s a couple ads for baby clothes, but I’m not sure what’s up with that—we are definitely not having a baby. Maybe it’s not that hyper specific and they figured adult couples sometimes have kids, but we didn’t score high enough on the “probably have kids” scale to get the toys one.

 

 

Some Examples of Final Portfolios (in Progress)

While we will talk about this more on Wednesday during our computer lab session, I wanted to share with you some examples I found of final portfolios (in progress) by John Jay students in other English 101 classes.

Many classes use Digication for their portfolios, and you can search the John Jay Digication page for way, way more examples of current and past student portfolios!

John Jay Digication Database: https://johnjay.digication.com/portfolio/directory.digi

Some examples of current English 101 portfolios in progress.

https://johnjay.digication.com/jesus-robles-eng-101-fy02/home-1

https://johnjay.digication.com/leslie-pelchor-eng-1014/home-1

https://johnjay.digication.com/asadbek-alijonov-eng101-fy19/welcome

We will not be using Digication, but CUNY Commons/Wordpress instead. This is because while Digication is specifically designed for ePortfolios (and therefore probably easier), it’s also really only designed for use in schools. WordPress is the platform behind about 30% of the entire internet (the CUNY Commons is just one network of websites that uses WordPress), so more practice using WordPress will give you a much more marketable and personally useful skill.

(Personally, I’ve used WordPress in 3 different jobs so far, including teaching at John Jay, and I used to use WordPress for my personal website until I rebuilt it.)

More on Pathos

Pathos is all about appealing to people’s emotions. A commercial featuring sad puppies (ASPCA), or cute babies (some cleaning products, all baby products), or young adults having fun (Coca Cola) is trying to get you to buy the product (or donate money) by associating that act with the emotion that the commercial gives you. You want the puppies to have homes and be loved, don’t you???

People who are asking for money/food/other resources on the street or on the train usually use pathos as their main rhetorical strategy. They often appeal to our sense of moral decency and empathy for other human beings. Or perhaps our sense of guilt for not helping others when perhaps we could.

Mattress and bedding ads appeal to pathos! Because nice new fancy sheets that probably smell nice make you think of being in your cozy bed…how nice would that be? Wouldn’t you like to be in bed right now? Pathos.

Calls for political action often appeal to pathos, because they call out something horrible in society to make you angry and then ask you to (donate, vote, volunteer, etc) as a way of dealing with that anger.

Sex appeal is also pathos. You want to be sexy, or be with someone who is sexy, or do sexual things, and this product will help to be sexy/attract sexy people/help you have sex! All of that is based on feelings.

Nostalgia is also pathos. We will see a lot more ads appealing to nostalgia as we get closer to thanksgiving and Christmas.