Peer Review 15

For this blog post, I will be peer reviewing Kelly Reager's editorial report 15B that shows a transcript of her video essay. The blog post that I'm referring to can be found here!

• Starting off with what I found really effective: I think the transcript shows a willingness to identify past weaknesses in Kelly's writing and how she has improved and become a better writer over time. I think it's very important to properly identify your strong and weak suits so that you know when you're developing you're writing as opposed to remaining stagnant. Additionally, I think the tone of the transcript makes it sound like the ultimate video essay will be quite relaxed which will make it easier to listen to. Personally, I struggle to incorporate such a relaxed tone in most of my writing, which is why I tend to lost points in regards to how interested the intended audience would likely be. 

• As for the areas with room for improvement: I think that the transcript itself lacked a bit of honest stick-it-to-it regarding the english assignments we've had. Although many of the assignments were likely helpful in improving Kelly's writing in meaningful ways, it'd be helpful to see the aspects of the course that she didn't enjoy as much as well. I suspect that these viewpoints are actually present in the final draft, but that this particular clip just didn't express a negative viewpoint--which is completely fine!

Editorial Report 15A

Well, I've already posted the nearly-final draft of what I have, so there have been plenty of edits and changes since the last time I blogged about it. Without further ado, then, I'll go over one such edit in detail:

• Since my project has been finalized, I don't have small individual clips to present for the editorial report. However, I can say that initially my introduction included a long video segment of me talking. I decided that there was no need to do a video podcast like that in a video essay. 

• Instead, I replaced this video with still images that helped move along my description of the projects we had done. Although I typically don't like replacing video with still images, I think this helps the video essay become more of a story (book) and less of me just talking into a video camera and calling it an essay, which I think is not a typical genre convention when done excessively. 

Open Post to Peer Reviewers (Project 4)

Well, it's time to post what I have. At this point, this version is nearly a final draft because the assignment is due this evening. However, if I happen to get any critical peer reviews I will definitely do my best to update this with such suggestions. So, here is what I have:

My Project

As for answering some questions:

• I would like peer reviewers to know that creating a video essay was a new task for me. I've never made one before. It turns out that the best software I could find was the iMovie, which uses Apple (clearly). I rarely if ever use Macintosh computers, so the whole experience was pretty difficult for me. At the end of the day, getting the technology part down is half of the challenge and I recognize that, but this was pretty rough for me.

• Major weaknesses in this cut include the fact that there aren't as many video clips versus still frames as I would like. Most of the movie involves images with voiceovers and occasional text overlays, but not a whole lot of moving video fragments made the cut.

• Major strengths include...Well, I'm not sure that this is an exceptionally strong video essay in most regards, and that's mostly because I'm a novice who spent a lot of time figuring out how to do every small bit of the video. However, I feel like the greatest strength of this project was how much I learned in terms of making videos. I believe that in future projects I'll truly have a good understanding of where to start, whereas I really had no idea how people made Youtube videos that weren't simply video podcasts. 

Production Schedule for Project 3

Although Project 3 has passed, I did have a general production schedule in mind as I was working on my project. For that reason, I've included a copy of what I did and when I did it for that Project. Here goes:

Time	Activity to Complete
April 5th	Research articles that can be used to show that public school students are harmed by the divestiture of funds into charter schools
April 9th	Create an outline for the essay with evidence and citations included
April 11th	Reformat outline as a preliminary rough draft
April 12th	Post Rough draft for peer editing
April 14th	Make edits as per peer review feedback, and begin to include genre conventions in regards to formatting and works cited
April 19th	Submit final draft of Project 3

Project 3 Research Report

I'm going through some old blog assignments that I forgot to do the first time. For this one, I'm focusing on the research report, where we gathered 10 sources of evidence for Project 3 and analyzed the author and context clues for reliability, and figured out the source's purpose and main audience. Well, here goes, I'll start with the sources I had already gathered for the essay I wrote:

• Is Your A Student Really Ready For College? This article came from CBS Moneywatch and was written by Lynn O'Shaugnessy.
• Lynn seems reliable because she is a consultant and speaker for parents with college-bound teenagers. This seems to indicate that other parents view her as credible, and since parents tend to be heavily invested in their children that is a good sign. Additionally, she has successfully published several guides to getting your kids through college both financially and emotionally, so she is likely well-versed in the topic of high schooler's college-readiness. The fact that the article was hosted directly on the CBS site (cbsnews.com) suggest that a major news source has vetted the author as well. Also, the fact that MoneyWatch typically targets older adults looking to save for financial retirement suggests that this is likely focusing on the parents of college-aged children. The article tries to convince readers that high achieving high schoolers often don't have high GPAs during college, and uses summary statistics as confirmatory evidence. 

• Make College Affordable by Ending Subsidies and Mandates This article came from OnTheIssues, a Libertarian guide for policy makers and politicians looking for the stances of the libertarian party on various issues. One of the authors was Robert Jallon.
• Robert Jallon does not appear to be a particularly reliable source. It was difficult to find alternative articles that Jallon had written in any format, and there is no biography of him listed on the site. For this reason, I wouldn't consider Jallon particularly reliable. However, the news site it is listed on is well known for highlighting the major beliefs of the libertarian party. In addition, these opinions are cited from the 2015 State of the Union Libertarian Response platform, suggesting that they are official party lines. The site is targeting politicians and policy makers who want to make sure they are towing the party line properly, and who may also need statistics to back up the opinions they are stating. The source wants to ensure that freedom of choice is always highlighted in discussions involving education, and that parents should have control over their child's learning. 

• Disengaged Students and the Decline of Academic Standards This essay was written by Paul Trout in 1996 and published originally by the Yale University Press in print edition. 
• Trout is a college English professor at Montana State University. He seems to be a credible source for discussing the decline of student's academic interest and abilities because he teaches such students on a regular basis in his role as a professor. Additionally, he cites several other professors, including another Physics professor at the college, who corroborate his thesis that academic standards are declining. The essay is certainly addressing other college professors and lecturers, because it encourages university-level instructors to not allow their courses to be dumbed down by the demands of students. The essay also addresses college administrators because it suggests that they need to step aside and put less pressure on professors to appease students by weighing student evaluations less heavily. The ultimate aim of the essay is to convince administrators and professors that they need to expect more of their students and not less, and they need to value student evaluations less than they current do. 

• Giving Students Ownership of Learning This journal report was written by Deborah Perkins-Gough in 2008 in the journal Educational Leadership. 
• Deborah Perkins is a senior editor for Educational Leadership, which is a publication magazine focused on improving education. This suggests that she has at least a strong familiarity with the topic at hand because she is likely editing such articles in her day-to-day job. Additionally, Ms. Perkins is a member of ASCD, which is a trade organization dedicated to helping teachers. The article itself is a special report indicating that many students who are achieving high GPAs in high school are still taking remedial courses upon entrance into college. The article is targeted towards high school curriculum creators who are advised to consider upping their standards to better match the expectations of most 4-year colleges. In addition, there is a public policy PSA-vibe to the article, in that it abhors the fact that many students are paying college tuition fees to learn what they should already know from high school. The article reveals that its agenda is to improve high school standards because it cites summary stats suggesting that these expectations are not being met.

• The Common Core Explained This QRG is written by Catherine Gewertz in the magazine Education Week.
• Catherine Gewertz's LinkedIn profile suggests that she is an Education Week associate editor who studied at Stanford University. The fact that Ms. Gewerz is an editor at Education Week suggests that she likely has strong familiarity with education-related matters, including Common Core. Additionally, her rise from staff writer to associate editor at the magazine means she has made a career working on education-related news. It can be seen that the QRG is not completely unbiased: there is a clear agenda to encourage parents and students to accept the common core standards as a way to even the playing field across states. Additionally, Ms. Gewertz hoped to make the new common core seem like it raises the bar in terms of expectations from students. The articles is targeting parents, students and teachers who are unceratin about whether common core standards are a good thing for their local school, and it tries to convince them that it is while explaining how the common core would work.

• College Rankings List by USNWR is a ranking submitted by US News and World Report editors (individual authors are not listed)
• Since this ranking does not have an individual author claiming ownership, I cannot evaluate the credibility of the individual person. However, the US News and World Report ranking is widely known, and the magazine is considered a credible news organization. Additionally, their methodology is widely available to the public, although some question whether their methodology has any objective basis. In this particular case, the rankings provide many important details about many colleges for high school seniors looking to attend colleges. It may also be targeting students seeking graduate or medical degrees, as there are separate ranking systems for these narrower fields as well. In my particular case, I used this as a source to identify the selectivity of elite schools and to confirm that the past couple years have been some of the most selective years ever. 

• The Truth About College Acceptance Rates: How Low Can They Go? is written by Kat Cohen in the Huffington Post College column.
• Kat Cohen is a college admissions counselor who frequently contributes to the Huffington Post. She has also written several books on the college admission process. This makes her both a reliable source but also a potential liability in terms of bias. On the one hand, Ms. Cohen is very familiar with the college admissions process as it involves both her writing job and her counseling career. On the other hand, though, she is deeply invested in getting people to buy her books (the title of the article is even a play on one of her book's title). This article was targetting parents of high school students who may be unaware of how competitive college admissions processes have become. This has an ulterior motive of also encouraging these parents to buy her book on how to better the odds for such students. 

• Charter Schools are Hurting Urban Public Schools is written by Niraj Chokshi for The Washington Post, a well known newspaper publication company.
• Niraj Chokshi is a general assignment reporter for the Washington Post. This does not necessarily lend him any specific credibility in regards to the clash between charter schools and public school systems. However, the fact that he was hired by the Washington Post suggests that 1) he is likely a highly skilled journalist and 2) his findings are fact-checked and edited by other personnel in the organization. For this reason, the post itself is considered very reliable even though the author himself is not necessarily so. In this newspaper article, Niraj Chokshi is targetting a fairly wide audience that reads the daily paper. This is not intended primarily for those alreayd heavily invested in the debate, because it goes over the basics in terms of the demographic and financial shifts that are pushing people towards charter schools and the financial effect this is having on public schools. Here, the people of Philadelphia are likely intended readers, because the focus is unexpectedly on philadelphia public school systems, which would seem to be a fairly niche are for such a widely read newspaper.

Rhetorical Analysis of Project 3

It's a bit late in the game for me to be analyzing the rhetorical strategies in project 3, since I've completed the project itself, but in order to properly complete the assigned blog posts I'm going to throw it back to mid-April and try to give an assessment of what Project 3 was all about:

• For Project 3, I drew on my personal experiences as a TA in chemistry. Since I've gotten to see a lot of freshmen students coming straight out of high school, I felt like I had an unusually good understanding of how prepared high schoolers are for college-level chemistry. That is why I felt it was appropriate to talk about how the achievement gap for high-schoolers is likely exaggerated and being used as an excuse for why public schools are being replaced by charter schools.

• To be honest, my personal bias in this project was somewhat limited. I don't have particularly strong opinions about charter schools versus public schools. However, when I did the research into the effects that shutting down public schools has on urban students, I felt like spending more federal dollars on charter schools likely punishes those students. At that point, I started thinking about whether this transition from public to charter school was really necessary, and the people who would actually be interested in making that change. However, I am quite liberal socially, so I am certainly opposed to most conservative libertarian viewpoints, so using them as a scapegoat in this argument likely stemmed from that bias.

• My audience for project 3 was primarily liberals who support the creation of charter school systems. I was appealing primarily to them because I was targeting those who might be swayed by people posing arguments in favor of charter schools that really have an alternative agenda in mind. I assumed that my audience was against such notions as liassez-faire capitalism and the privatization of education. Thus, by trying to show how the charter school debate is being used to privatize education, I assumed this would be viewed as a negative by most readers.

• After reading my essay, I would want my audience to oppose the creation of additional charter schools with federal funding. Perhaps just as importantly, I would want them to ee how the unpreparedness of high schoolers for college is primarily a myth (at least from my perspective). Students today are diligent and in a highly competitive environment that likely hasn't been emulated before. Instead, this type of propaganda is spread to continue divesting money away from poor-performing schools and towards high-achieving schools that supposedly are underpreparing their students for college. For this to work, I needed them to understand what the propaganda being spread is, and how this is being misinterpreted today as pro-charter schools when it's really anti-urban students.

• For this project, I used the standard college essay genre. The audience definitely expects my sources to be cited at the end of the paper, with citations in-text. Additionally, they expect a title that describe the purpose of the essay but is still relatively catchy. A double-spaced paper is likely appropriate (and it is the style I chose). Finally, there should be an introduction that clearly states a unique thesis, so that the essay is not merely descriptive but rather argumentative. I think important conventions in this genre include the argumentative nature of the thesis that allows for a strong viewpoint. Additionally, the active citation of sources adds credibility to the format, because it is presented in-text and these sources are immediately accessible. 

• There are certainly historical events that were relevant to my project. The enormous rise in the number of charter schools and their relative proportion of the education budget has had a tremendous toll on public school systems. This effect on public schools has particularly hit certain communities hard. When I researched the topic, I found that Philadelphia was particularly affected and I focused on that city's school system for several of my statistics. I was able to find many media sources focusing on the controversty, including the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Education Week and CBS

Peer Review 14

For this peer review, I focused on Nick Hernandez's plan to create a Quick Reference Guide to the personal project. I thought this was a very interesting genre and format to use for the final project, and I was very curious as to how he would do it. Here is a link to Nick's plan.

• Although there is not a complete project up for Nick, I would recommend he consider what he wants the 'guide' to be about. Since this will partly be a how-to (in the sense that it's a QRG) and partly be a self-reflection from the point of view of the assignment, I thought the most important aspect of the project would be finding a way to mesh these two things together. A self-reflective QRG would have to be unusually focused, because many of us are doing video essays which give a little more leeway to maneuver between different topics that we want to address. However, that could be a positive because the QRG won't let you meander around aimlessly--there has to be a focus to what you are writing about.

Production Schedule

Since this project is a video essay, I'm going to need to spend some time learning new skills. For example, I don't really know how to use video-editing software, and I'm not particularly adept with recording devices as is. So, I expect that some of this project will be devoted to simply learning as opposed to creating the final project. With that in mind, I've posted a production schedule below:

Time	Activity
May 2nd	Checkout Library Recording equipment. Get any takes where I will be in the recording
May 3rd	Begin to gather images that will be part of the video and piece together. Add voice-over and background music
May 5th	Learn to use video editing software and create a final draft of the video
May 5th	Post video to blog site so that peers can review
May 6th	Submit final D2L copy at 3:30 to the Dropbox

Content Outline

It's time to begin preparing for Project 4--the final project of this semester! I am pretty excited to be nearly done with college altogether, and am starting to become more focused on activities beyond this semester. However, it's crucial to piece together a presentable project, and here's an outline of what I hope to accomplish:

Introduction
In the introduction, I'll introduce myself and describe the purpose of the self-reflection project. I might highlight some key things that have happened over the semester and what I have learned from them, but this would be a broader focus that I would expand upon in the body sections


Body Section 1
My first point would discuss how my writing has changed in the past 3-4 years, and how that has affected my writing in this class. For several years now, my writing has been almost exclusively focused on science. I write a lot of lab reports for classes, manuscripts and abstracts for work, and formal and informal emails. However, I no longer write exclusively for the sake of writing and I haven't written creatively in a very long time. This has affected my writing style both negatively but also positively as well.


Evidence: I will show samples of my writing today and compare them to blog posts and submissions from peers to show that perhaps my writing is a bit more rigid than it needs to be for these type of assignments.

Body Section 2
My second point would discuss how my writing developed during the actual course. I want to focus specifically on how my style changed and how I was able to become more personal in my writing. I think this was a prerequisite to developing the personal style  needed for a self-reflective essay such as this one.

Evidence: Refer to the original QRG, show how it was actually more formal than the standard college essay I wrote for Project 3 which should likely have been the one with a more academic tone.

Body Section 3
My third point is still a bit undefined, but I am leaning towards including some collaborative activities we did as a class and addressing how (or whether) these helped me become a different kind of writer. I think this body section is an opportunity to gather what we've done as a class throughout the semester and try to figure out whether all the work was worth it--what did we really gather from everything?

Evidence: TBD

Conclusion
Since this is a video essay, the conclusion will focus on summarizing what I've learned this semester. The conclusion may be the time that I actually present footage of myself as well.