ENG 206 Final, Summer 2002

ENGLISH 206 FINAL EXAMINATION SUMMER 2001-2002 Time Allowed: 2 hours Part I: Letter Editing (40%) Directions: Re-write the given letter on page 2 in order to improve content, format, 'anguage, and tone. Ray Johnson 125 Pearl Street Laguna Beach, CA 92651 October 2, 2000 Marv Patterson Section Manager Hewlett Packard 16399 W. Bernardo Drive San Diego, CA 92717 Dear Mr. Marv: In December 2000, I will be graduating from Missouri Western State College with a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology. I am writing to explore the possibility of employment as a control systems engineer at your San Diego facility, if possible. Early in my course work at Missori Western, I seriously began considering future employment with your company, Hewlett Packard. We use a number of your products in our laboratory work, and their design, precision and reliability are impressive. More recently, however, I noted in a professional computing journal that you are undertaking a new project to apply microcomputers in automatic control systems. Many of my electives were in the fields of control systems and computers. L have also enclosed my resume which provides additional information about my undergraduate work and campus activities. | would appreciate the opportunity to meet with you to discuss how my education and experience would be consistent with your needs. Looking forward to meeting you soon! Ray Johnson ERICSON eR : SOM CERSTY Libr ARY AMERIC ss) CNIVERSIT OF BRET LiIBKARY OF BEIRUT yoy Part IL Report Writing (60%) Directions: Although the scenario of the given text is somewhat futuristic. the technology for it is already available. From the text. gather some ideas for a proposal to further enhance the teaching/learning experience in the Facuity of Engineering and Architecture. You mav focus on courses (including multi-sectic~ >nes) within the Faculty and/or on possible technology mediated collaboration with similar classes at other universities You mav also contribute any other technology-related ideas vou tind relevant Please note: While vou do not have to provide an accurate budget for this particular proposal, do include possible sources of funding for the project and, if possible, a rough cost estimate from “Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology” by Chris M. Anson In the educational realm, the new capabilities emerging from multimedia technology offer many alternatives for teaching and learning, and for assigning and responding to writing, particularly as “papers” and “written responses” are replaced by electronic data. imagine, for example, a college student (call her Jennifer) coming into the student union a few years from now. She pulls from her backpack a full- color, multimedia computer “tablet,” just half an inch thick, plugs it into a slot on a little vending machine, puts three quarters into the machine, and downloads the current issue of USA Today. Over coffee, she reads the paper on the tablet, watching video clips of some events and listening to various sound bites. She finds a story of relevance to a project she is working on and decides to clip and save it in the tablet’s memory. The she deletes the paper. Jennifer’s first class of the day is still remembered as a “lecture course” in history, but the lecture material has been converted into multimedia presentations stored on CD-ROM disks (which the students dutifully buy at the bookstore or download onto massive hard drives from a server, paying with a credit card). Students experience the lectures alone and then meet collectively only in recitation sections. Because her recitation begins in an hour and she did not finish the assignment the night before, Jennifer heads for one of the learning labs. There, she navigates through the rest of a multimedia presentation while handwriting some notes on her tablet and saving them into memory. She is impressed with the program, and justifiably: the institution is proud to have an exclusive contract with a world-famous historian (now living overseas) for the multimedia course. The recitation is held in a room fully equipped for distance learning. Cameras face the students and teacher. Enormous, high-resolution monitors provide a view of two distant classes, each located a hundred miles away on smaller campuses. Jennifer sits at one of seventy-five computer stations. The first half of the class involves a discussion of some of the multimedia course material. The recitation coordinator (an education specialist) brings the three sites together using artful techniques of questioning and response. After raising a number of issues which appear on a computerized screen from his control computer, the coordinator asks the three classes to discuss the issues. Students pair off electronically. writing to each other, some students at the main site pair with students at the distant sites, selected automatically by the instructor using an electronic seating chart and a program that activates the connections for eaca pair. After the recitation, Jennifer remembers that she is supposed to send a revised draft of a paper to her composition instructor. She heads for another lab, where she accesses her electronic student file and finds a multimedia message from her instructor. The instructor’s face appears on hex screen in a little window. to one side of Jennifer's first draft. As Jennifer clicks on various highlighted passages or words, the instructor’s face becomes animated in a videc <lip describing certain reactions and offering suggestions for revision. After working through the multimedia commentary and revising her draft. Jennifer then sends the revision back electronically to her instructor. Jennifer has never actually met her teacher, who is one of many part-time instructor/tutors hired by the semester to “telecommute” to the institution from their homes Because Jennifer is a privileged student who has a paid subscription to an online service, her own high-end computer system and modem, and the money to buy whatever software she needs for her studies, she can continue her schoolwork at home. There, she uses her multimedia computer to study for a psychology course offered by a corporation. On the basis of nationally normed assessments, the corporation has shown that its multimedia course achieves educational outcomes equal to or greater than those provided by many well-ranked colleges and universities. Jennifer will be able to transfer the course into her curriculum because the corporation’s educational division has been recently accredited. She also knows that, as multimedia courses go, this one is first-rate: the corporation is proud to have an exclusive contract with its teacher-author, a world-famous psychologist. As she checks the courseline via email, she notices that a midterm is coming up. She decides to schedule it for an “off” day, since she will have to go to one of the corporation’s nearby satellite centers to take the test at a special computer terminal that scores her answers automatically and sends the results to her via email. While this scenario may seem futuristic, much of the technology Jennifer experiences is already here or soon to be. The Knight-Ridder Corporation, for example, has recently developed a prototype of Jennifer’s multimedia news “tablet” weighing about two pounds. The Web now has the capability to send software to the receiver along with the actual information requested, and this software enhances the user’s capacities to work with the information. Programs are currently available that allow teachers to open a student’s paper onscreen and scroll through it to a point where a comment might be made to the student. At that point, an icon can be deposited that starts up a voice-recording device. The teacher then talks to the student about the paper Further marginal or intertextual icons encase further voice comments Opening the paper on disk at home, the student notices the icons and, activating them, listens to the teacher's response and advice. Computers with tiny videocameras are already enabling a picture-in-picture window that shows the teacher's image talking to the student as if face-to-face. The technology that now provides teleconferencing, when merged with the Web-like storage and retrie.al devices, will easily facilitate “one-way” tutorials that project audio and video images from a teacher. superimposed over typed text on which marks. corrections, and marginal notes can ”. -ecorded “live.” like the replay ara!-ses during televised tootball games. When demonstrated, such advances may dazzle teachers because we see them as a promise to simplify our lives and streamline our work. New technologies often seem to improve our working conditions and pro«‘de better ways to help our students. Teaching, too. seems if not eased, affected in ways that enhance students” experiences. Positive accounts already show that email can help students to form study groups, interact with their teachers, or carry on academic discussions with students at other locations all over the world. In one experiment, students in an all- black freshman composition course at Howard University teamed up with a class of predominantly white students in graphic design at Montana State University to create a 32-page publication, On the Color Line: Networking to End Racism. Using digital scanners and email, the students and teachers were able to bring together two classes 1,600 miles apart to critique each other’s work, discuss race-related views, and collaboratively produce a pamphlet. Many other accounts of networked classrooms suggest increased participation among marginalized groups. Curiously, these and other positive accounts almost always describe adaptations of new technologies as ancillary methods within classrooms where students interact with each other and with their teacher. At the college level, Rich Holeton describes his highly networked electronic writing classroom and its advantages, especially in the area of electronic groups and discussions, yet still sees face-to-face interaction as the “main action” of the course and electronic techniques as “supplementary.” Similarly, Tom Creed discusses the many ways he integrates computer technology into his classrooms, but finds it essential to create cooperative learning groups and build in time for students to make stand-up presentations to the class. Electronic innovations, in other words, appear to be carefully controlled, integrated into the existing curriculum in principled ways that do not erode the foundations on which the teacher-experimenters already base their instructional principles. Recognizing the importance of this configuration, some educators much prefer the term “technology- enhanced learning” to other terms that imply a radical shift in the actual delivery of education, such as “technologized instruction.” Because of improvements in educational software and hardware, however. our profession will feel increased sressure *~ >ffer technologically enhanced “independent study” courses. Some campuses are already experiencing dramatic differences in students’ use of communal spaces with the introduction of dorm-rcom email. Clifford Stoll, a former Harvard University researcher and author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, claims that by turning college into a “cubicle-directed electronic experience,” we are “denying the importance of learning to work closely with other students and professors, and developing social adeptness.” Students may by psychedvnamically separated from one another even while inhabiting the same campus or dorm building; even more profound effects may be felt when students and facuity use advanced technologies to link up with each other in a course without even meeting in person. Although many studies and testimonials affirm the ways that Internet chat lines, listservs, email, and other “virtual spaces” can actual’ increase the social nature of communication, there is no doubt that the physical isolation of each individual from the others creates an entirely different order of interaction. ee MEHKIO s UNIVERSTIPE LIBRARY GE BEIRUT