Reflection for project four.

    For project four, we are required to recreate one of our former essays, transforming into an alternative digital form. When I first knew that we were going to create a small movie, I became very very nervous, even though the professor said it was not difficult for several times. The reason is that I just could not get along well with computers, and I totally had no idea how to make the pictures moving and put music into the video. Fortunately, the professor introduced us a very simple and funny program called IMovie. After playing with it for a short time, I found it really interesting.

       I chose to remix the second project which is mainly talking about the benefits of contact lenses into digital form. The purpose of this video is to encourage more people to use contact lenses instead of glasses, and the audiences for the video are those potential users of contact lenses. First, I used two interesting little video showing the funny mistakes that caused by the glasses in order to capture the audiences’ attention. Because most customers of contact lenses are adults (eye doctors encourage teenagers start using contact lenses after maturation of their eyes), I pick the love topic to interest audiences. Then, I point out the purpose of my movie: “Contact lenses can change your life. Please join us!” The most difficulty and the most time-costing part is interview. It took me a lot of time to persuade ten of my friends to be the artists of the video and to find the available time to interview. After completing the interview, I put together those ten interviews; however, I felt a little boring to hear ten people keep talking about their experiences of wearing contacts. Therefore, I add a short funny video which showed a cute puppy. In the movie, I tried my best to be humor so that I can capture my audiences’ attention at any time.

       This is the first time that I expressed my thoughts through digital form, and I love it! I hope I have chance to di it again in the future.

Reflection for project three -- Music Literacy.

Music seems to be a natural need for people. People start to get into touch with music from when we are newborn baby until we die. When it comes to music, the first thing come into my mind are nursery rhymes since I really get alone well with children. Being born in an “educators’ family,” it seems that there is a “teacher blood” flowing in my veins. It is interesting that the majority of my families are teachers. For example, both of my maternal grandparents are university professors; and my paternal grandfather and my mother are lecturers in university. As a result, I enjoy telling children what I know and help them. From my perspective, nursery rhymes are extremely essential to children as a communication tool and also education tool.

In the essay, I want to tell my readers that there are countless advantages of using nursery rhymes in helping children develop, expressing emotions, and not forget important historical events. There are even other benefits that are still waiting for us to discover. I used three main subtitles in the essay in order to give readers a better understanding of what I am going to talk about.

At first, I begin the essay with an interesting experience with my little cousin. I think I can trigger the audiences’ interest about nursery rhymes by doing this. Next, I briefly introduced the history of nursery rhymes. In the third page of my essay, I argued that the nursery rhyme is more than a simple babyish song which makes children happy. In many cases, these children songs help to teach the children by telling them what's acceptable and what's not, and many nursery rhymes have hidden meanings and origins. Then, I used three nursery rhymes (one is Chinese and the other two are came from England) to support my argument. Also, I use lots of source either from library database or from the reliable website. At last, I illustrate the influences that nursery rhymes may have on children from three aspects: language development, memorization, and raising emotions. In this part, I use plenty of personal opinions and sources to convince readers that how nursery rhymes can affect children. Thanks to the telephone interview with my aunt, who has been a senior kindergarten teacher for about twenty-five years, my point of view was supported by her experiences.

I think the most challenge parts are work citied page and paraphrasing the source. Although I have done the citation for several times, it still cost me tons to time to figure out how to write it correct and complete. I also want to mention that because of different culture, it is hard for me (an international student) to tell the difference between first name and second name. Therefore, I always put the name in wrong order.

Reflection of Project two -- Cultural Artifact Analysis

When it came to popular culture artifact, I started thinking about some objects with long history such as writing brush, necklace, embroidery, Chinese knot and things like that. As a result, I became so nervous because I am not familiar with these things, not to mention we have to write about it. Luckily, the definition of culture artifact is not that narrow. Almost everything can be culture artifact even including human! “Probably the best way to choose a topic and artifacts for this project is to think about those artifacts that interest you or affect you the most—perhaps something you have particular experience with, prior knowledge of, or strong feelings about,” Barb wrote. Thus, after reading assignment description, I decided to make a list of culture artifact that I could see, I could touch, or even I eat. This did help me a lot; I found plenty of significant artifacts. At last, I choose to write about contact lenses. Contact lenses are gaining increasing popularity these decades. They are popular cultural artifacts that are incredibly widespread, but very controversial at the same time.

The audiences for this essay are users of contact lenses and also the potential user of contact lenses, and therefore, I began the essay by introducing some authoritative statistics data in order to attract the reader’s attention. Then, I introduced three different types of contact lenses and the different function of them.

In project two, I want to argue that contact lenses have more advantages than downsides and we cannot blame contact lenses because we misuse them. Although contact lenses may cause some effects to users’ eyes after long-term use, it is inappropriate to negate contact lenses entirely based on this reason because everything has risks. In the rest of the essay, I list tons of advantages of contact lenses, and I not only use my true story but also many source form database to support my thoughts.   

I am weak in grammar, so I made lots of mistake in the essay at first. After listening to my partner’s (Alexa) suggestions, I want to Writing Center for help. The TA there was so nice, and she helped me to clear up these issues. Also, when doing Eli Review, my partner, Alexa, told me that it might be a good idea to define what myopia is. Thus, I add an explanation in parentheses behind “Myopia” so that way the reader wouldn't have to look it up while reading the essay.

The Song Decoders

Reading:  Invention

·What is invention?  (What activities did the writer have to engage in to create the text?)

 ·What is being invented? (What ideas, practices, arguments, etc. are created by the text?)

In order to write this article, the author must have done lots of research to collect resources about Pandora. In the article, Rob first described “The Music Genome Project”, which was the back end of Pandora and was also the technical support of Pandora. Then he even talked about how the Pandora be set up. Without researching, author cannot know such detailed and technological thing about Pandora. Besides, the writer also used several feedbacks form different users of Pandora to show readers how this app works. These feedbacks might be collected from the Internet or form author’s friends. Also, Rob must have tried the Pandora by himself.

In the article, the author came up with a question that "are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out – like what's considered awesome by your peers, or by music taste-makers, or by anybody else?" Rob believed systems that connect people with their friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match our music-consumption habits with those of like- minded strangers. People trust their friends or trust “the crowd”. The writer was trying to persuade people that the computer technology might help them find out their favorite songs and the Pandora may influences users’ habits.

Reading:  Arrangement

·What is arrangement?  (What is being put in relation to what?)

 ·What is being arranged? (How are the things being put in relation to one another?)

Tip:  It may be a good idea to make a visual of the arrangement of the essay.

In the article, the writer mainly talked about an Internet radio service called Pandora, which could help users to find music that they really like. Rob first described “The Music Genome Project”, which was the back end of Pandora and was also the technical support of Pandora. Then, he introduced some background about Pandora. After that, he came up with several questions, which is the invention of this article, and he used several either positive feedbacks or negative feedbacks form different users of Pandora to show readers how this app works. These reflections came from real users, so readers will believe him more and also will understand the idea more clearly. These are all evidence whcih helps readers to consider the author as reliable and credible, and the reader might respect the author’s views.

Reading:  Revision

·What is revision? (What is the writer trying to change?  For example, what ideas, practices, etc.? What is the author’s argument?)

 ·What is being revised?  (What strategies are engaged specifically to help the writer achieve the revisions?)

            Most of people did not notice the existence if the interaction between public favors ("social influence on listening habits"). Thus, the author tried to revise this phenomenon, so he emphasis the significance of this social influence. In the article, he devoted a great deal of time to discussing technology behind the Pandora in order to show readers they can experience new music on the basis of the music and not the influence of others.

Reflection of Project One.

At first, I thought I could begin the essay with some brief background about the experience that I studied far away from my motherland; then, I could get to my point immediately. However, after reading some sample work in class and some articles in Reading and Writing book, I found it might be better to start my essay with a detailed story that related to my literacy thesis; therefore, I made a big chance in my arrangement. I pull the story which I wanted to put in the middle of my essay originally to the front of the essay, and I do my best to reappear the story to my reader. After finishing describing the personal experience, I found that the entire two pages are all description of events, but I just use one paragraph on my interpretation, which means that I did not maintain a good balance between the two parts. Thus, I decided to write more about my thoughts. I explored my thesis statement further.

In the essay, I intended to inform my readers that: “Only when I put home language and school language in the right position will everything goes in the way that I expected it to follow.” And this essay is written for other students at my age, so I choose using an interesting tone to tell the story happened in school so that I can capture my readers’ attention. Also, I used lots of examples that students will come across frequently. The reason is that I want them to think, think about how they act differently between school and home. In this way, they might be understand my thesis more clearly. Finally, in the last paragraph, I used a vivid analogy to help explain how the two languages work in my life; I tried to use a familiar object to help reader to understand the function of home language and school language and how they can work together.