Journals
In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He shows How intellectual technologies have changed the way that humans process information. Humans brains is replaced by technology almost. I believe that we depend on technology way too much, which makes our brain idle and affects our critical thinking immensely in a negative way. We are loosing our patience and less focused on specific task that we do because we know that we have google. We can easily get the information that we need in a second. This hampers our deep reading with concentration. Like as Carr.s mentioned he can no longer concentrate on long reading easily. So that we can say, We are becoming shallow thinker rather than going deep.Carr’s also demonstrates how google or internet is just making us not to learn anything ourselves because we have the internet to do that for us. Overall I would say, technology could ruin our potential ability of critical thinking that we have in our life .
- Unspun
In reading the excerpt of Unspun by Jackson and Jamieson, I learner how to evaluate information and what not to do while evaluating. There are several lessons, one of them is “Don’t confuse anecdotes with data”. So Anecdotes are stories based on real incident or person. It is not enough evidence to support the claim. Like our own life experience is not necessarily very good evidence. Its not always credible. As we can see in the second lesson “Blind men and the elephant”that each person can have different opinions on the same exact thing. So anecdotal evidence can mislead us in the bigger picture. Another lesson from this reading is “Not all studies are equal”. Which means that before taking the information as solid, we need to know some background information about the information. We should not believe the evidence directly just because it came from some re-known source. We need to ask some questions on it. It connects with the next lesson which is saying it does not make it so. If we get the information from source, it could be wrong or false. Sometimes it could be biased which is not acceptable most of the time. It needs to be justified by our open mind. Overall, in this reading, It shows how to evaluate evidence, information and we should follow some rules before evaluating information
- How my approach of writing has changed over the semester
My approach to writing has changed this semester because I used to submit my first draft as a final essay without any revision. There was no pre-writing or outline for the essay. Whatever comes to mind, I used to put it. However in this semester, I learned how to organize before I write anything. Because I am not that good at keeping the flow when I write an essay. So I started taking notes for every paragraph that I will write.. That helped me a lot to organize the writing. Another thing that I learned is choosing reliable source and citing the source properly. Which I was not aware about that much. For me the biggest takeaway from this course is if you want to be a good writer , you have to keep on practicing, nobody is perfect. It gets better gradually.
