Thursday, October 14, 2010

Unit 2 Pre-Writing Exercise + Homework for 10/19

Hopefully all of you have had time to think about what behavior you will modify for your Unit 2 Project. Begin by sharing your behavior with your group members; let them know why you're choosing to change this behavior and why you think it will be appropriate for the assignment. (Note: you may want to look over the Unit 2 assignment sequence to make sure you've chosen a behavior that will work for this study.) Once everyone has talked about his or her behavior, collaborate with your group members to build the following chart in a new Google Doc titled "[your name]'s Unit 2 Pre-Writing." After you create the Google Doc, click on "Table" and then "Create Table" and make a table containing 3 columns and 1 row.

In column 1, spend at least two minutes listing everything you think you know about your behavior. These things don't have to be verifiable scientific fact; for instance, if you're trying to drink more water, you might write down that being properly hydrated gives you more energy, even though you'd probably want to do research to verify this fact. In listing everything you know about your behavior, you want to consider what kinds of things trigger your behavior, what happens after you do your behavior, how it makes the people around you feel, etc. There are no boundaries here… just get as much down on the page as you can.

In column 2, spend at least five minutes listing everything you are wondering about your behavior. This is the place for unanswered questions: you might question some of the things you assumed in the first column, you might wonder about previous research into your behavior, you might think about the consequences of changing your behavior… you chose to modify this particular behavior for a reason, so hopefully you are curious about many different aspects of it.

In column 3, spend at lest five minutes write down (as specifically as possible) how you will find out the answers to the questions you are curious about in column 2. Do you expect that some of your questions will be answered in previous research? How will you find this research (i.e. in popular sources, scholarly sources, etc.)? Will you be able to answer some of the questions with your own study? If so, how will you design your experiment so that it gives you a definitive answer to your question?

If you finish before the end of class you can either begin work on the homework assignment (please use headphones if you begin listening to the podcast) or begin research for your Feeder 2.1 assignment.

Homework

We'll be working with the RadioLab podcast titled “Lucy.” You can hear it here:


or you can download the mp3 directly here: 


Read through these questions before you listen to the podcast, but answer them after you listen. As you are listening, compose a retrospective outline of the podcast. Post this outline along with your answers to the following questions in a new Google Doc titled "[your name]'s RadioLab assignment." Share this Google Doc with me.

1. What kind of “hook” do they use to draw in the listener? (Note: ignore the plea for money that precedes the podcast.)

2. Estimate what proportion of the program is based on extempore speech and what seems to be read from a script. How can you tell?

3. Note any background music or sound effects that seem to have been added in post-production. Why were these things added? How do they make the podcast clearer or more interesting?

4. Note any terms or concepts that you learned about from listening to the podcast. How were these explained? How did the authors make these complex ideas and terms easy to understand? 

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