25 Using google+ during this class

Google+ was another thing that I had never used before this class. It was pretty easy to use. I liked how it had drive and blogger on the same site because it made it pretty easy to knock out all of our assignments in the beginning of the class. I didn't use the social media aspect of it too much but it is good to know that if you had a question, its really easy to get a hold of other people in your class. It was a really convenient way to talk to Mr. Hamon too cause if I had to miss cause I was sick, I knew that I could still get on the chat and ask him what it was we had to do that day. It turned out being a lot easier to use than I had expected, which was good because at the beginning of this course, I was not looking forward to having to use a computer every day for assignments.

24 using Google Drive in the class

Google Drive is a program that I had zero experience with before this class and after using it for this class I can honestly say I plan to use this in the future as well. It worked out really effectively for the group paper that we had to write, and not that I'll have to do a lot of those in the future hopefully, but if I do at least I know I can use this. To me it's just really helpful because this way if you start working on your paper at one place, you don't have to save it on a USB drive to bring it somewhere else. Just make sure to share it with yourself on drive and then you can access the paper tha you're working on anywhere. I remember at one point in this sememester I was literally looking over my rough draft on my phone in line for chipotle. Pretty handy.

23 personal learning networks in college

Whenever i first went away to college I remember thinking that it was a waste of time to try to form study groups or anything like that because in high school I never had to do any of that. Long story short, after coming back to college after taking a few years off of school I can say that the personal networks I have set up have helped me dramatically. I took A&P 1 at PBSC last semester and me and a few people from class established a study group early on and I can say hands down that it made that class one of the easiest I've ever taken. Especially since I'm one who finds it hard to study on my own. Even here, I talk to a lot of people who have the same classes as me and it helps us all stay up to date on what homework we have or tests coming up in class.

22 statistics that mislead

Statistics can be extremely useful to give you quick facts about useful information. The problem nowadays is that anything can be made up and statistics are no exception. It's very important to make sure that if you choose to quote some statistics in a scholarly paper that you're writing, that you make sure that the statistics are also from a noteworthy source. The other trouble with statistics is when they are used to push a particular agenda. Statistics are wonderful tools to use for those who want to persuade someone to feel a certain way, because seldom do they actually tell the whole story. Often, these stats will be used ton only represent a very specific set of data, but are then used in a very broad fashion to work towards the persuader's agenda. For example, using the issue of police violence from our doc 1, statistics can be gathered in a way that is biased towards the speaker's agenda. Taking a poll of people and asking them "Don't you think that the police are going too far?" will end up in far more "yes" answers than stating the question, "Do you believe that police are adequately handling themselves in confrontations?" It's important to realize where your statistics are coming from and how they were gathered before you choose to believe them.

21 Impact of Big Data on my life

The idea of Big Data, or that we are surrounded by a lot of correct and incorrct information, is something that impacts our lives probably more than we think. All day between tv and other social media people are having information constantly shown to them that may or may not be true. Think of all of the articles that people post to thier walla on facebook. You want to believe most of the articles that you read but how do you know if any of them are actually true. In this way, sometimes the massive amount of data that we can access is bad because with so much information on a single topic, it could be hard to distinguish between whats true and what is not. For this paper alone it was inportant to look at the sources that author's of the articles that I used, pulled from. Some people on the internet could have articles that sound scholarly, but maybe they havn't done their research yet. Anyone can post on the internet.

20 problem/solution argument

In a problem/solution argument, you present your reader with a problem and how to solve it. You start by describing the problem, convincing the reader that the problem needs solving, and then giving ways of how to best fix it. A perfect example of this would be the doc one paper that I wrote about police violence in America. In this paper I took the stand and said that there was too much violence against people by the police, which was the problem that needed solving. I used some examples of times where excessive force was used unnecessarily to show the reader that it is a problem that needed solving. The rest of my paper was spent giving many examples on how police currently train, and ways in which they could improve their training process to cut down on excessive violence.

19 Difficulties with APA

Obviously, as we all have no doubt run into problems formatting our papers, APA format can be very hard and confusing at times. I know I've spent a lot of time changing my references. One time I think that I have it right but end up finding from another source that what I initially thought was right was wrong. The Perdue Owl source that Prof. Hamon gave us was really helpful in allowing me to fix my references and get them in the right format. Unfortunately, for the in-text citation portion I was still having trouble finding exactly what to do. This is where the handbook that we had to buy for this class really came in handy. There's a lot of useful information in there on how to cite sources depending on how you introduce your source in the paper. I found that instead of just putting a quote in there and the author's name and date after each one, it's good to change up how you present them, such as introducing the author or institution that you are citing from before you mention your data. This way it makes your paper a little more interesting to read and can even help the flow of your paper overall if used correctly.