Online Interactions

My biggest issue with the blog post comments are that they can be extremely confusing to keep up with, because of the way we organize when our assignments are assigned and when they are due, it can be confusing to distinguish which post to comment on depending on what week it was in and whether it was due on a Tuesday or Thursday. I think the comments have potential to engage good conversation outside of class but I don’t think we take advantage of it as a class. Most of us just comment on other people’s to fulfill our requirement and read the ones on our own. Back and forth conversation rarely occurs over blog comments, which I think is what the activity is aiming for. It would be helpful if we could set it to notify us when someone comments on our blog or comments on something that we previously commented on, somewhat like Facebook notifications. This would be helpful because it is too tedious to keep checking the blog links that we posted comments on, on top of checking our own.

            I think that blog comments are starting to get really impersonal now that they have just become a weekly task for us. We are just used to doing them so it seems like people put less effort into them now. The forum discussions are a new experience so when we have had to do them it didn’t feel like just another one of our tasks but an opportunity to try something new. I think we all put more effort into the forum because it was a new experience and we didn’t know what to expect. I liked the forum because we got to see what everyone else said and explore all the other opinions on just one page. I also thing forum could be really fun to do with interesting topics that everyone has their own strong opinion about.

            I’d like if some blog posts were substituted with forum discussions. We could have a number of posts to the discussion that we would need to contribute. If we did an open-ended topic, it could get interesting if the conversation was held over the course of a week. It would also be fun to be split into groups to be able to talk to a couple people from the class on a more personal level. Then it would be easy to keep track of the conversation and see who is talking to who so we’d be more likely to engage in real conversation.

            While I don’t think that the blog post comments are very effective, I still really enjoy writing the blog posts because I think they really allow us to dig into a topic. I also think that 500 words is a very reasonable lengths so they don’t get tedious. Whether I have thoughtful replies to what people say in their posts or not, I enjoy reading what other people write because I realize that their ideas are usually very different from mine, so it’s nice to look at things from a different perspective. 

Concerns with Qualitative Research

Qualitative research emphasizes on ideas and forming a picture in a reader’s head while quantitative research concentrates on numerical figures. Writing a qualitative research paper will be difficult for me because quantitative data is very helpful and easy to use when trying it make a strong argument but you have to manipulate qualitative data more to support a claim. I’m also worried that I won’t be able to come up with enough quality information to meet the requirements. With qualitative data, the author must dig deep to support their opinions because the amount of logos that comes from numbers is not as evident.            

            One of my main concerns with this paper is finding a good story to use that will have a lot to explore beyond the surface. I always waste so much time looking for a good article to use and then settle for one that I don’t even really like, which ends up with me having a hard time coming up with information to write about. I think I will have a good time with researching the motives behind the way a story has evolved but I think it may also be hard to gather other peoples’ opinions on it. Qualitative research is gathered in the form of interviews and in-depth conversations, not just surveying and gathering statistics. Going out into “the wild” to see how people naturally think and discuss on these topics may be hard so I will need to generate ideas of how to gather information on people’s opinions.

            I think this essay will be interesting to write and research because we can pick a story that we enjoy and therefore it will be more enjoyable to write about. I like digging deep beyond the surface of a text and seeing the motive behind the creator’s actions. I think it will also be fun to conduct research and see what other people write about the story and its differences in blogs and online chats.

            I expect to have some difficulty coming up with a sufficient amount of information and research to include, as usual. But, I plan to overcome this by doing a lot of brainstorming and writing down what ideas I want to include, before I start writing. This way I don’t have to think of everything as I go and I wont forget to include any ideas that come to mind. I also want to start on the paper early so I can leave and come back to it at my leisure and not be forced to just get it all down. I also want to interview a lot of people and do a lot of background research on the story before I write about it.

            Forming open-ended questions will definitely be a task because it is hard to create questions like this that are relevant to a story. To solve this I will read up on some good strategies to follow when forming these kinds of questions based on what kind of answers you want to get in response. 

Stereotypical News Article

In the “article” This is a news website article about a scientific paper, Martin Robbins playfully mocks the way popular articles about science are written an organized. I thought his article was very humorous, mostly because it is completely true. In the text the author shows how articles like this generally follow a bland and typical outline. It is interesting to see how so many articles really follow the general organization that Robbins is mocking. Robbins attacks the authors of this cliché type of articles and the people who read them in one essay, clever.

            Robbins’s witty comment about how audiences need a picture around every 400 words to keep them interested is a very valid point and is obviously utilized in many popular science articles. Although there is much truth behind his theories, many of them are stereotypical. Robbins also attacks the cliché vagueness of these types of articles. He shows how authors use this certain vernacular to make it seem as if what they are saying is credible and backed up by evidence. He also explains the motives behind the syntax of common sentences in these types of articles and they way they change the font and place paragraph breaks.

            My popular article is from a website run by the University of Michigan Department of Surgery. While its author probably has some credibility in the subject, it still follows many of the clichés that Robbins discussed. The article is separated by pictures and has paragraph structure similar to Robbins’ mock-article. It also has bolded headings which according to Robbins is the authors saying “This is a sub-heading that gives the impression I am about to add useful context” (Robbins). My popular article does not follow all of the typical things that Robbins claims these types of articles do but anyone can see where he is coming from and that his points are valid.

Scholarly Article

The topic I have chosen to explore for the second paper is the treatment of Neuroblastoma, a common cancer in children. My scholarly article is about a research project that had the goal of determining if surgery was enough treatment for Neuroblastoma. It was a study conducted by the SIOP Europe Neuroblastoma Group. The study yielded very high survival rates after surgery for patients without the MYCNA gene present but not so great survival rates for patients with the MYCNA gene. They used 427 patients that all had either stage 1 or 2 Neuroblastoma. Of the 288 stage 1 patients, there was a 94.3 percent survival rate. For the 122 stage 2 patients there was an 82.8 percent survival rate. The conclusion of the study was that surgery alone was very helpful for both stage 1 and stage 2 patients without the MYCNA gene but patients in both stages with the MYCNA gene were at a greater risk for relapse.

            My popular article is from the University of Michigan Department of Surgery. It discusses the basics of neuroblastoma and the effects of surgery on neuroblastoma patients. It also discusses how different stages of the cancer require different types of treatment. I would like to use multiple popular articles, if possible, because there are many with valuable information on the subject.

            My biggest concern with this paper is being able to come up with SIX pages just on this subject. I know there is a lot of information but I don’t even understand half of the scholarly article. It doesn’t seem to me like there is enough to discuss on this subject to fill up that many pages. I suppose to fix this problem I will have to search deep into all the elements of both essays. I will explore the context and rhetoric of my popular article, since I can actually understand what it’s saying. I will also have to dive deep into the tones and syntax of the sentences in each and explain how it is hard for any average person to decipher what the scholarly article says. I also plan on talking about the audiences for each and how this affects the way that the author of each writes his or her article.

Scholarly Article: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=19&hid=106&sid=112bcf35-0587-4210-8d5d-27b1b3d3c4a6%40sessionmgr111&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=aph&AN=34559232

Popular Article: http://surgery.med.umich.edu/pediatric/clinical/physician_content/n-z/neuroblastoma.shtml

APA Citations

Scholarly:

De Bernardi, B. (2008). Treatment of localised resectable neuroblastoma. Results of the LNESG1 study by the SIOP Europe Neuroblastoma Group. British Journal of Cancer, 99(7), 1027-1033. doi: 10.1038/sj.bjc.6604640

Popular: (couldn’t find an author for this one… do you just skip it like in MLA?)

(2010).  Cancer in children – neuroblastoma. University of Michignan Health System. Retrieved from: http://surgery.med.umich.edu/pediatric/clinical/physician_content/n-z/neuroblastoma.shtml