TIME TO START YOUR GOOGLE DOCS ACCOUNT

Note:

This is NOT a blog entry to ‘respond to’ for credit for Monday.

This is an assignment in addition to the weekly blog entries.

Due: next Wednesday (9/17)

Assignment:

1. Required: Start your own Google Docs account (which you can start here for free). You can either use a Gmail email account (which you can start for here for free also) or any other email address you may already have. Let me know if you have trouble getting your GDs account started. We’ll figure it out together.
2. Optional: If you haven’t watched the short video on the start page, watch it now.
3. Required: Send me an email — longchristian@gmail.com — telling me that you’ve successfully started your Google Docs account. This will also be the email address you’ll always use to ‘invite’ me to read and comment on all of your Google Docs essays this year.
4. Optional: Consider keeping an eye on the “Official Google Docs Blog” to learn some cool tricks and ideas that may help you using GDs in all of your classes.  And if you find out anything interesting, tell us about it.
5. Optional: If you want, you can create a “new” document and send me an invitation to “read” or “collaborate” (i.e. comment/edit) to see how it works; look under “Share” in the upper right of any document you’ve created or uploaded. Note: If you do this, make sure you unclick these 2 options: a) “Collaborators may invite others” and b) “Invitations may be used by anyone” so that you can be assured that ONLY the person/people you invite have access to this specific document.

Explanation: Starting next week, we’ll start using Google Docs on a regular basis. The purpose is to:

• give you a way to submit papers to me digitally/on-line (as well as turning in paper copies)
• give me a way to leave comments ‘inside’ your paper
• give you a way to easily revise formal essays and send updates to me
• give you/I a way to review all of your old essays throughout the year

W4, #9: LIKE “LOST”, JUST NO ADULTS

Set-Up: By the time Monday rolls around, all of us will have read the first chapter — “The Shell on the Beach” — of Lord of the Flies. Like the boys who crash-landed on the beach/island, we readers are trying to get our footing in the sand (so to speak).

Like the boys, we are trying to figure out what it all means, what will happen next, and who everyone is. In some respects, we are actually on that same beach/island with them.

With this in mind, we readers begin to pick up on potential foreshadowing, metaphors, symbols, allusions that William Golding has woven into the first chapter to hint at what the boys will experience during their ’stay’ in this strange new world.

Challenge: You have 2 choices for this one.

1. Identify 5+ author tricks (foreshadowing, etc.) that you think might play a role in the future of the story and what happens to these boys.  After you have done this, write 1+ sentence for each explaining what you think it might mean, or…
2. Identify 1 author trick (foreshadowing, etc)…and write 5+ sentences about this to help all of us understand why we should highlight it in our own books.

Length: Depends on which option you selected, my island-bound friends.  All decisions have consequences.  (wink)

W4, #8: THE OVERACHIEVERS

Set-Up: Alexandra Robbins — author of a NYTimes Bestseller, Pledged, a complicated look at the culture of college sorority life — has also written a book entitled The Overachievers: The Secrte Lives of Driven Kids that chronicles what life is like for more and more high school students given today’s pressures to achieve and be accepted by top colleges.

Snippets: From the inside book jacket, these caught my attention:

“You can’t just be the smartest.  You have to be the most athletic, you have to be able to have the most fun, you have to be the prettiest, the best-dressed, the nicest, the most wanted.  You have to constantly be out on the town partying, and then you have to get straight As.  And most of all, you have to appear to be happy.” — C.J., age seventeen (one of the real students followed for this book)

and

“High school isn’t what it used to be.  With record numbers of students competing fiercely to get into college, schools are no longer primarily places of learning.  They’re dog-eat-dog battlegrounds in which kids must set aside interests and passions in order to strategize over how to game the system.  In this increasingly stressful environment, kids are defined not by their character or hunger for knowledge, but by often arbitrary scores and statistics.” — editor’s comment

Challenge:

• Share your reaction to these two ideas given what you’ve already experienced in school up to your 10th grade year.
• While some of this may reflect what you’ve literally experienced at this specific school, you should feel free to refer to ‘life in general’ as an adolescent in our society.
• Just make sure you are keeping in mind the implications re: school and the pursuit of college (and life after high school).

Length: 7+ sentences

W4, #7: FACEBOOK & “AMBIENT AWARENESS”

Disclaimer: If you’re short on time or do not even take a look at the blog until late Sunday night (in hopes of grabbing a “C” this week), skip this entry.  In fact, run from with it with all of your youthful passion.  Grab your iPod.  Find a happy space.  Open a bag of super-hot Cheetos.  IM some buddies.  And forget you ever saw this.  Caveat emptor, and all that intellectual blogging jazz.

Set-Up: My strange blog post title aside (until you figure out what it means — wink), this entire entry is all about Facebook.

[insert stunned adolescent expression here]

Yup…he went there.  Facebook.  Said it again.  Might say it a few more times, too.

So, this one is all about Facebook?

• Or at least something kind of intriguing about what FB’s founder Mark Zuckerberg (and his team) has done to our modern social brains through a certain updating feature they’ve added to Facebook in the last 2 years (which has become quite well-received since allowing the masses to join the FB realm).

• Or at least something that Facebook, Twitter (huh?) and a dozen other Internet-based ‘micro-blogging’/social media applications (huh, again?) like them that are re-wiring the way we relate to ourselves, our friends and our world.

What?

Did some teacher-dude just hint that we get to talk about Facebook…for a grade? And what is this Twitter thing?  I thought this was English class with dusty books and stuff?  We actually get credit for being FB experts?  Really?

Yes.  Sort of.  But I think you guessed that little catch-22.

Will Richardson — a mentor/buddy of mine who happens to be an author and one of the leading experts/speakers on the ‘future of learning” and “emerging educational technology’ in the world — grabbed my radar this afternoon.  While spending a little time on his education blog (note:  you might want to hang out there a bit and see if anything grabs your attention over time), I ran across a cool piece of writing of his entitled “Ambient Awareness” (see, I didn’t make my title up entirely – wink) which supposedly talked about how Facebook is re-wiring our brains. Along with this Twitter-thing, too.

And you just know I just had to follow his breadcrumbs and see where his rabbit hole took me.

Where it took me — besides to a cool part of my brain that likes to learn — was to a New York Times Magazine article entitled, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” (aka “I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You”) by Clive Thompson.

That’s where I found the following lovely gems I just had to share with all y’all:

“Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.”

…and…

“Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.”

..and…

“Boyd sighed. ‘They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.’”

…and…

“Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.”

…and…

“’It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. ‘The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.’”

…and…

“Or, as Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London who writes regularly about ambient tools, put it to me: ‘Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?’”

Phew. Now that’s a brain-full.

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the ‘challenge’ yet, sportsfans!

Challenge:

• Read the original New York Times Magazine article.
• Say something utterly profound and eye-catching.  Not just in a cute, off-the-cuff, skimming sort of way.  Go deep.  Connect the article to your real life.  But don’t forget to really analyze the article.
• If you’re really curious, do some hunting to see what Twitter is all about.
• If you’re even more curious, spend some time with Will’s blog.  Heck, even subscribe to it.
• If you’re even more curious squared, see if you can find (2 or more) unexpected literary allusions I made in this post.  (wink)
• And if you’re really, really, really madly curious, maybe you can ask me to introduce you to the guy who started Facebook with Mark back at Harvard when they were just a few years older than you are now.  He has an interesting story or two about what it was like ‘back in the day’ and what ‘went wrong’ once it went public.

Length: Far more than 140 characters [insert laugh track here -- LOL, ROFL], although that would be very meta of you.

Instead, let’s go with 7+ sentences (’cause I’m crazy that way).

Seems expected, although I suspect we’ll see a few students push way past this minimal requirement in a blink of an micro-blogging, IM’ing blink of an eye.

W4, #6: OUR NEED FOR HEROES EVERYWHERE

Set-Up:  If I’m doing the math correctly, most of you were about about ready to enter Kindergarten or 1st grade in 1998.

This was the year — summer, actually — when the then-Cubs player Sammy Sosa and the then-Cardinals player Mark McGwire dueled it out all season to break the seemingly-unbreakable Major League Baseball single-season home run record.

To baseball fans, this was a big, big, big, big deal.  To non-baseball fans, this became a big, big, big, big deal.  It was about home runs.  Bigger than that, it was about one of the oldest ‘records’ in our culture on the verge of being broken…and everybody was drawn in.  Even bigger than that, it was a classic tale of 2 ‘heroes’ facing off.

Game after game after game as the entire country watched.  Held their breath.  Leaned forward.  Wondered.  Wondered.  Wondered.  Cheered…

…until something unthinkable happened after the record was broken.

Challenge:

• Read the following article — “Mark McGwire’s Summer of Love” — about that season, about that record, about those ‘heroes’, about what came next.
• Share with us what you noticed about the discussion of ‘heroes’ in this article.
• Suggest what this says about our need — as a culture — for heroes and what happens when our heroes let us down.
• Optional:  suggest what you think this might have to do with our discussions the rest of the year in terms of heroes and audiences — good, bad, and mysterious.

Length: 7+ sentences

W4, #5: COLLGE PROFIT VS. WONDER

Set-Up: As 10th graders, the “prepare for college” drumbeat seems to be playing a bigger and bigger role in all of all of your lives with each passing day.  Hard to spend a single day at school without this being brought up, I would imagine (just like now — wink).

Needless to say, the major priorities typically are:

• what will it take to get into a ‘good’/'dream’ college?
• will I enjoy the experience once I’m there?
• how will my life be better once I’ve had that experience/degree?

Beyond just being about one’s individual ability to leave home (to grow as a person, see the world, etc) and earning a degree (to be in a position to develop a career, earn a living, etc), the entire focus on “getting to college” also say a great deal about our culture/society.  It also invites us to look into the ‘business’ of colleges/universities.

Challenge: Read the following 2 page New York Times editorial entitled “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder” by Janet Rae-Dupree.  Do the following:

• Share one quote that caught your eye that looks at the conflict between research universities being places of ‘learning’/'wonder’ vs. ‘profit’/'patents’.
• React to that as a big idea in general
• React to that in terms of what it means to be a ’student’ at a university that has to make such a decision in terms of how professors spend their time, the purpose of a university education, etc.

Length: 7+ sentences

Note: This article is not meant to be representative of all research universities, nor suggesting how you should view the two goals. It is merely offered as a way to consider the deeper issues that go on at universities every day that may have an unexpected impact on what it means to be on campus in your future.

W4, #4: A STICKER IS WORTH 1000 IDEAS

Set-Up: Hard to imagine anything more American — on some level – than the ubiquitous bumper sticker found on the back of cars, trucks, and just about anything that hits the road.

Challenge: If you were legally forced to place one — and only one — bumper sticker on the back of your own car that expressed your personality, life philosophy, and views about the world around you, what would it be?

• Identify the quotation or expression. Be appropriate (which should be obvious).
• Explain what this phrase would say about you and why you’d want to have it on your car.

Hint: Be creative but keep in mind that your answer should be taken seriously by your reader.

Image: http://tinyurl.com/5kokgc

W4, #3: PG 300 OF YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Set-Up: Next year — as an 11th grader — you will begin to think about the process of applying to colleges and universities around the United States (or beyond).

Part of the application process requires writing essays to help the university learn something intriguing about you. Not only do they want to learn facts (grades, SATs, etc.), they also want your creativity and attitude.

One of the typical essay questions you may have to answer asks you to write “page 300″ of your autobiography. Strange, huh?

This means:

• you have to decide what would be taking place on page 300
• you only have one page to write everything
• you need to figure out how to make your reader interested in the process

Challenge:

• Creatively begin “page 300″ of your life story — aka your autobiography — in such a way that it will catch the attention of a college admissions team
• Be creative.

Length: 10+ sentences

W4, #2: A STORY OF A PASSIONATE LIFE

Set-Up: Ever heard of Ben Dunlap?

Well, Mr. Dunlap — the President of Woffard College — tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian man he met at Wofford College years ago, a man who has much to teach all of us about justice…and what it truly means to be a lifelong learner.

If you have 20 minutes, watch this video. What is it about?

Well, I’m going to let you discover that out on your own.

Challenge:

• Watch the video. You’ll need about 20 minutes.
• Share your reaction to the story of Sandor Teszler.

Length: 5+ sentences

Additional: Want to learn more about other speakers — like Mr. Dunlap — who speak every year at the world famous TED Conference held in California each early spring? Try this link. I think you’ll find some amazing voices, stories, and ideas, many that you may never be able to forget once you see/hear them.

My only request?

If you find another TED video that you love, share it with me. Thanks!

W4, #1: VISUAL VOCAB STORY

Set-Up: Every week you will be given a series of random images and 10 new vocabulary words (to prepare you for an upcoming quiz) that will require you be able to use the words ‘in context’ or to use them to write a short story.

Vocab for the Week of September 15 (Spirit Week) quiz:

• adversary- opponent
• audacious – daring; bold
• ebullient – showing excitement; overflowing with enthusiasm
• embellish – to ornament; enhance; to beauty
• fervor – extreme intensity of emotion
• levity – lack of seriousness; frivolity; behavior intended to be amusing
• paragon – model of perfection
• profusion – a large quantity of something
• sage – celebrated for wisdom
• zealot – fanatic, person who shows excessive enthusiasm

Challenge:

• pick (1) of the (3) images found below
• write a paragraph+ description (or story) based on it using all 10 of the words on the list
• add the part of speech in parenthesis [note: you have to look this up based on the definition]
• make sure all words are used so that the definition is understood/implied

Length: There is no set length, but make sure that you use all 10 words. You are free to write sentences that do not include any of the word to help you develop the overall description/story.

Hint: Go with the image that a) either grabbed your eyes first or b) seems to have a hidden story in it.

Note: Please review words from last week; they will also show up on the next vocab quiz (on Tues). All vocab words (once studied) may be used in future quizzes.

Image 1 (link: http://tinyurl.com/57f4w2)

Image 2 (link: http://tinyurl.com/62bkqw):

Image 3 (link: http://tinyurl.com/68gyq8):