Author: cfenzel

The Impact Of Virtual Reality

The book Ready Player One discusses the countless applications that going to school in virtual reality can consist of. The protagonist, Wade, explains that school in the OASIS helped him greatly from being a poor socially awkward kid with no friends. He says that he actually enjoys school in the OASIS. In a world in poverty, famine, and wars, school in the OASIS was exactly what he needed. In real life he was bullied for things he couldn’t control such as being overweight, but in virtual reality he could just put someone on mute that was giving him a hard time. He would actually be in school, and he would be able to sit and learn without being antagonized. School in a virtual reality would be high beneficial for students by allowing them to grasp course material better, having classrooms be more discipline by giving the teacher complete control, and allowing for attendance to increase.

Ernest Cline uses Ready Player One as a tool of foreshadowing what the world could be like if we all were to escape into virtual reality, so he is referencing that schools could be like how they are in the book and how beneficial it could be to society. The educational opportunities are endless in virtual reality. For example, Wade discussed his daily routine and he explains how there are countless field trips. He claimed that he “was on Jupiter’s moon Europa to discuss the composition of the icy world”(Cline, Ready Player One)  Imagine how easily one could understand the surface of a distant planet because they are there virtually with no consequences of what actually occurs. I for one would be able to understand course content better by actually being able to see things by “actually being where the course content is happening”. I am a visual learner, so if I need to be able to understand DNA transcription and my teacher could take me step by step on a strand but not actually being there, I believe I would thrive as would others in school just because instructors could be able to appeal to everyone’s style of learning, something that cant be done now but for obvious reasons like there being too many students to appeal to at a given time. Being able to go to school in virtual reality would be very beneficial for the reason that instructors could help students better understand course content in an easier fashion that appeals to everyone.

Not only would instructors be able to help students more frequently and more easy, but they would also gain more control over the classroom. Middle school would’ve then been a lot easier for everyone then right? In the OASIS, Wade explains how in class if you do something wrong, for example talk, you are actually muted and the teachers wouldn’t be interrupted, instead a warning symbol pops up on your screen that tells you to remain quiet. Wade even fell out of his seat when he found the clue to the first key but his avatar didn’t move and the only thing that came up was “Please remain seated during class”(Cline, Ready Player One). Instructors could then be able to have classes where they can get through everything they need to as a class without having to waste time disciplining students. If everyone was muted and incapable of moving with the control by the teachers, students would also not be distracting one another, an aspect that would be appreciated by both students and teachers. School in virtual reality as inferred by Ready Player One would be beneficial by having teachers gain more control of the classroom and not have to waste time disciplining the class.

On top of classroom etiquette, classroom attendance would also increase. All you have to do was put on a visor and you would generate at your locker in virtual reality. Not to mention students would actually be more excited to learn because they can actually take field trips and not even have to pay. Having attendance increase could also allow for more activities in class because everyone would be in class and be included because you can make your avatar look completely different which could allow students that are more antisocial be themselves. By having school in virtual reality, attendance and classroom activities would increase because the means of how you get to school become more efficient.

Some would say that school in virtual reality would be less efficient for students because they believe technology has hindered peoples ability to learn. Writer Nicolas Carr states that “the Net seems to be chipping away at my ability for concentration and contemplation”( Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). He believes that because he can not focus anymore that he can not learn. Who is to say with that will not be the same with technology such as virtual reality? He then states that he “used to read like a deep sea scuba diver but now I’m just skimming the surface like  guy on a jet ski.”(Carr,” Is Google Making Us Stupid”). He can not process deep thought anymore because of technology. I believe that this will not be the case for virtual reality. Because of the applications such as teacher control and classroom activities like field trips, students will be able to think more deeply about material.

School in virtual reality would be highly beneficial because it would allow students to understand material better by classes being able to do more with no consequences such as field trips. Classroom etiquette would sky rocket due to teachers having more control in the classroom. All of this would contribute to class attendance being greater and the fact that students could actually be more excited to learn.

 

 

Level 2: Provocation

At this point Wade has discovered where the jade key is hidden due to a hint left by Aech in an email that has an attachment of the 1980’s game “Zork”. Wade then realizes there is a planet in the Oasis that is called “Frobozz” that is identical to the “Zork”. When he teleports there he is now playing “Zork”. He is placed in an open field west of the White House and comes up to an old Victorian mansion just like as he would in the actual game. Wade remembers the phrase “The captain conceals the jade key”(Cline, Ready Player One 229). He goes to the kitchen and empties the box of “Captain Crunch” and recovers a whistle and blows it. The whistle contains a message that he can only blow it once he’s collected all the trophies. He quickly realizes that he must collect the trophies in the video game and collects them from around the mansion, blows the whistle, and the jade key appears.

Will Wade ever get back to first place? What is he really going to do with the money if he wins? Will him an Aeech team up and help each other again? Why?

 

John Smith

My avatar would make a great gunter because he looks like me to establish credibility between other gunters. I would be hard working, persistent and reassuring. My avatars name is different because I would not want what happened to Daito and Wades hometown to happen to me. Anonymous is definitely the way to go in something as serious as the hunt. Also if I look the same, people might think my name is real too which would make it difficult for IOI to track me because it is such a common name.

Schools Should Be More Digital

Chris Fenzel
Dr. Licastro
Schools Should Be More Digital
In the digital age our lives are being bombarded with new technology and it has affected how we view the world in terms of our surroundings and what we learn in school. What some institutions fail to realize is just how beneficial technology really is. Because of the internet anything a student wants to learn they can type in a google search bar. Although what hinders a student’s ability to learn is the lack of use of the internet. This becomes a problem especially in college because I for one have not physically turned in a single paper to a professor yet, but in high school that is all we did. Starting at the high school level schools should become more tech savvy with the digital age by allowing more to be done online. Some critics do believe that the internet has been making us as a population less intelligent, but in this paper, I will explain why they are wrong.
One published author that believes these critics are wrong is Paul LaFarge. LaFarge uses a study in 2015 to back up his claim that reading online is beneficial by stating in 2015 a German educator Johannes Naumann “ gave a group of high school students a job of tracking down certain pieces of information on a website, he found that students who regularly do research online- in other words, students who expected web pages to yield useful facts-did much better at this task (and at ignoring other information) then the students who use the internet for email, chat, and blog”(LaFarge, The Deep Space Of Digital Reading). He is suggesting that because more information is at one’s disposal that a student will perform better when given a task. That being said, he believes that we should become more adapt to reading online because of the digital age. For example, in schools we should practice reading deeply online more by learning to annotate articles and books online as well as reading socially. Another way we could become more adapt is that all schools should teach students how to properly blog, critique work, and post their own work online to revise and discuss it. This would teach students how to become better peers to one another and prepare students for professional environments. As the benefits will be shown, schools should use the internet for more tasks like reading online, and submitting assignments online to assist students in learning more about a general topic and getting them prepared for college.
Both Ferris Jabr and LaFarge would agree that reading online prepares students for college and the real world. Reading online is quite practical for students who have little information on a topic due to the use of hypertext. Hypertext are the links you find in articles that redirect you to another place online to find background information, definitions, and various other things on a topic. LaFarge states that “The cognitive load imposed by hypertext doesn’t correspond in a s straightforward way to a number of choices presented at a decision point or to the total number of links of hypertext” (LaFarge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). This means there are more hypertexts then needed but who is to say that it is a bad a thing. There could always be something that some people may not know because they are unfamiliar with a topic. Information would be harder to find in paper text because a word you may not know is not a click away. Also, to help students comprehend more information instructors should teach students how to annotate online. This is beneficial because by breaking down a text piece by piece students have a better chance at understanding what is being read. Therefore, if more deep reading was done online students would have a better chance at comprehending material and could perform better thus preparing them for higher level education.
Following the benefits of reading online, imagine the benefits on the brain if work was submitted online. There would be much more ease on the brain and especially in the environment. By not having to print thousands of copies of assignments think of all the trees that would be saved. Not to mention how much easier on the brain it would be to have to remember to print something out and turn it in at a specific time 7:17 every day before school. Back to the original benefit of assignments and reading online, as stated before I have not turned in a single paper copy of any assignment in my short time in college. Therefore, collegiate institutions have already taken the step to become more digital. This should really begin in high school since its entire premise is to prepare students for college. In my experience I would say high school did not prepare me for college due to all the online assignments I have done. This would also help student’s grades by having extreme amounts of information at hand. If this started in high school it would lead to more students going to more prestigious universities. Although there is the factor of the amount of students that want to go to college, have the money, and have the drive to go to college. Examples of online assignments could be blogging, posting lab reports and papers, and critiquing those same works. Assignments like these online would also prepare students for the workplace. There is a myriad of jobs that require reports to be done online and then revising others so by doing this, students already know how to do all these tasks rather than having to learn on the fly. Nicolas Carr states that the workplace has become so modernized that “you could be sitting at home on your laptop and in one click you can open up your work email and be working” (Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid). Basically, if you have a report due at work you can spend as much time as you want on it at home and email it to your boss. In an essence if more work was done online starting in high school, we are preparing students for college and the workplace by allowing for more efficiency, and as an extra benefit saving the environment.
However, there are people that claim that reading online has hindered our ability to retain new information that has been given to us. For example, in Nicolas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Carr discussed how reading online has affected him from “being able to soak in many pages of an article at once” to “not even being able to retain a few paragraphs” (Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?). He believes that due to all the distractions such as advertisements, pop ups, and hyperlinks the internet imposes that we are losing are ability to read deeply. On the contrary, Davidsons book -Now You See It- discusses that because of the distractions of the digital age we have conditioned our brains to combat attention blindness multi-task. Attention blindness when you are so focused on one thing that you don’t see what is going on around you. We are multi-tasking whenever we are on the internet so what Carr is saying that when we read online the article or book it does not have our full attention. Although there are studies that show that people can block out information that is not needed due to the brain’s ability to multi-task effectively. Multi-tasking is exhausting to the brain but it uses time more efficiently allowing more time to rest. For example, in the beginning of the week I will do most of my chores such as laundry or cleaning during times I take breaks for homework or studying. By doing so I don’t have to do these tasks later in the week and I can do whatever I would like with my free time. While some claim that being on the internet has affected our to learning, I believe the internet has enhanced our ability to learn by allowing more things to be done at one time.
The education system should become more adapt to the digital age by having students, starting at the high school level, do more readings and assignments online. By doing so it will allow students to better comprehend a single topic by providing enormous amounts of information. Also, it will prepare students for college and the modernizing workplace environment. Tasks high schools should be teaching students is to learn how to edit and post work online to prepare students. Also by teaching students how to annotate online, they have a better chance at understanding an array of information by being able to break things down thus preparing students for higher level education.

Carr, Nicolas. Is Google Making Us Stupid? theatlantic.com, 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2017.
Jabr, Ferris. The Reading Brain In the Digital Age: The Science of Paper Versus Screens. thescientificamerican.com, 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2017.
LaFarge, Paul. The Deep Space Of Digital Reading. nautil.us, 2016, nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-deep-space-of-digital-reading. Accessed 13 Oct. 2017.

Rhetorical Analysis of “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”

Chris Fenzel
Dr. Licastro
Rhetorical Analysis of “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”
This article is written by Paul La Farge. La Farge is an American novelist that has been published multiple times, is an author for nautil.us online magazine, and in this piece; discusses why we should be leaving paper text behind to focus on reading online. He starts his article with a background of how reading used to be done dating all the way back to St. Augustine; he explicitly states that reading used to be done out loud then it shifted when St.Augustine walked in on his teacher, Ambrose, and “was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything” (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). He is implying that this marked a change in how people read, and it is happening again with the use of laptops, phones, tablets, and just about anything other piece technology of with text. LaFarge later refers to his claim which makes his purpose for writing this article clear that it is okay to be leaving paper books to proceed to reading online and what the benefits entail. He uses a new digital book called Pry in which the reader is in a virtual reality and is the protagonist in the book as an example. He states that Pry “is the opposite of Shallow Work; its whole play is between the surface and the depth of the human mind “(La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). Shallow work is a book written by Nicolas Carr; a writer who is against reading online, and explains in his book how it is making us dumber. La Farge is using this statement as a counter claim to defy Carr. La Farge is using Pry as a primary example to support his claim.
He addresses his audience by using data from experiments to inform the reader of why we should be reading online. His primary audience is adults and students that subscribe to nautil.us that have a scientific curiosity and are interested but uninformed of the topic. This article is perfect for people with a scientific curiosity but are uninformed because it provides both fact and opinion on the topic of how reading online is beneficial rather than just being exclusively fact like from thescientificamerican.com, or being exclusively opinionated like Carr’s article, which makes this very informative to people just curious about the topic. For example “The cognitive load imposed by hypertext….links in a hypertext“ (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). This statement exposes scientific fact on a counterclaim of his own claim, but later references a study that disproves the study he refers to in this quote. Then at the end of this article he states “ digital reading will expand the already vast interior space of our humanity” (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”), there is no way to prove that for certain so that statement is just his opinion on the topic. The secondary audience of this article could be students that were required to read this. I for one would have never heard of this article, even this topic, if I hadn’t been required to read this for school.
The author is definitely a credible source for both audiences. He has been published five times and has written on this topic before. Aside from ethos he also strengthens his claim in context by bolding historical quotes and important phrases to make what he is saying seem important like “Critics like to say the internet causes our mind to wander, but we’ve been wandering off all along” (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). He bolds this statement because he is implying that it is just in our human nature to wander off and find something different due to curiosity. By bolding this he is allowing the reader to know that this is a key point and giving context clues. La Farge also uses different types of pictures to show how some reading used to be done compared to what it is like now to read. In one picture he shows “the book wheel”, which was how they read in some libraries. La Farge states it “allowed the reader to keep a great number of books at once, and to switch between them giving the wheel a turn” (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”). He then shows a picture of a kindle, which can hold an even greater number of books, to compare how far reading has come.
The website this article comes from seems to also be concerned with other worldly issues not just reading online to inform the viewer what is going on in the world around them. The viewer can see an array of different information of issues going on in the “issues” section. The site is very easily accessible with other topics in the “topic” genre, and allows you to read what other people thought of the article in the “blog” section. The article as well as the site is very formal. Not as formal as the scientificamerican.com, but also doesn’t lack the quality information that some would need to supply an educated opinion on the topic like in Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. To make you interested, above the fold there is some type of mural along with the title, then below the title they italicized “Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.” (La Farge “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading”) to show what the article is about and then gives substantial evidence throughout the article that leaving print is the best thing for the future; so La Farge has his claim already written in the title.
La Farge stands with the idea that reading online is the best way to go, while he lists both pros and cons of the subject he makes it clear where he resides on the topic. His primary audience consists of adults and students that subscribe to nautil.is that have a scientific curiosity and are uninformed on the topic. His secondary audience is compiled of students in higher level English courses in college and high school that were required to read this. The context of the article is a credible author, a sophisticated font, historical background, bolded statements, and pictures both historical and modern to compare reading in text versus reading online. There is multiple genres on this site that informs the reader of issues, tragedies, and general news on the word. All if these factors combined is being used to persuade us by LaFarge on why we should read online and stop using paper text.
LaFarge, Paul. “The Deep Space Of Digital Reading.” nautil.us, 7 Jan. 2016, nautil.us/issue/32/space/the-deep-space-of-digital-reading. Accessed 26 Sept. 2017.

Literacy Narrative

Chris Fenzel
Dr.Licastro
11:00
Literacy Narrative
My name is Chris Fenzel, I am one of three boys that my parents worked hard to raise. I am from Pasadena, Maryland and currently I am a freshman at Stevenson University, which is outside of the city of Baltimore in Owings Mills, Maryland. I intend to be playing club lacrosse this fall and spring for the school. Of my family, I am the youngest sibling and the only one to be enrolled at a university. My eldest brother, Brandon, is 25 and works for a surveying company. My other brother, Jake, is 21 and is an apprentice at fire safety organization. I have a relatively large family and most of us live in the same proximity. I have been raised by both of my parents who both work for the National Security Agency for the Department of Defense in the United States. I believe my family had the largest impact on my ability to read and write. From as far back as we can remember we have soaked in information of the world that surrounds us. The most important tools that have helped us do that is reading and writing. These came to us throughout time from one stimuli to the next. It goes without needing to say that some factors had more magnitude then others. Not only that, but everyone learned in some different experience of their own, and quite frankly lead to some being more intelligent than others. Everyone is still learning because no one is ever perfect at reading or writing. For example, in high school my AP English Literature teacher, Ms. Nizer, always gave these thick packets of vocab words and we were tested on it. She was quite the eccentric teacher. She was about 5’7, a heavy set 65-year-old woman with dyed red hair, she talked as if she had three shots of espresso in a 25-ounce cup of coffee. She was the sweetest lady until you got on her bad side, luckily, I haven’t had that with most teachers. I Believe her test is a prime example a continuing experience because it made me think about all the words I really don’t know.
My parents have had three kids including me, I am the youngest so when I came they already had a pretty good idea of what to do. Even at the elementary level of school they harped on homework and they would sit down at our table and ask me various questions. They often asked me the meaning of words and how to spell them. Even today when I explain something scientific to them they like to play the game of 20 questions and ask the meaning of various terminology. When I was in elementary school my dad would sit down and help me with writing and urged in a sternly yet fatherly manner to better my penmanship. At the time, my father was about 5’8, black hair and goatee turning white so to a little kid he was always a bit scary when he was stern so I listened but improved in increments. Now in the car was where my mom would teach to read things. In enclosed space, my mom is a loquacious person. She had always asked me to read road signs and billboards, at the time I didn’t have glasses or even knew I needed them so half the time I really couldn’t see them, letters were just blurry but I made out the words from the shape of the letters. From them always pushing school is why I believe it has made the most impact on my reading and writing which in turn leads me to discussing being self-taught.
By support of my parents I believe that has had the largest impact on my ability to read and write, but it leads to then on being self-taught. They had gotten me started and I had taken over by myself from there. I began to just do required readings for my elementary school classes, but back then I was an extremely curious boy, even more so than I am now, so I wanted to read more sophisticated books, and so began my interest in space. This is where I believe I developed a love for science. At that point, my grandmother started buying me books about anything science and even took me to the Goddard Space Center in Maryland. I believe starting to do things for myself was the second biggest impact because I still had the support of my parents and even my grandparents, but that support is the sole reason I could do things on my own. A little optimism goes a long way for a kid.
Believe or not one thing that helped me write better quality was the tv show “Spongebeob Squarepants” on Nickelodeon. This is a cartoon that started in the nineties about a yellow, aberrant, and kind underwater sea sponge and his misadventures with his various friends and family. A certain scene somewhat stuck with me in the show, it taught me to write in better quality. Spongebob is in boating school to get his boaters license but he can never seem to pass anything in the class. He has a big paper coming up and he gets input from his teacher, Mrs. Puff, a puffer fish, on what he should write about. I don’t remember exactly what she told him but he did with the information I will always remember because it was humorous but still sent a message. The biggest paper he must do for his class and he spends all night writing the word “The” and made it look ornamental. What that taught me was to not spend so much time on little details. Work on the bigger picture first then go in depth as to get a better understanding of what you are doing. A show that had made me better at reading and understanding things as whole was the show “The Crocodile Hunter.” This was a show about an Australian crocodile hunter in Australia. The man’s name was Steve Irwin, he was tall, had blonde hair, and blue eyes, dressed in all kakis with a safari hat to top it off. This show helped me because I watched it with the subtitles on to learn how to spell the names of different animals (he wasn’t just a crocodile hunter, he loved animals) and learn about what they are and what they do. I believe for our generation media has had a strong impact on how we read and write. Between the social media, like twitter and facebook, to information mediums, like the discovery channel, we have all learned something important that effects our ability to read and write.
When we were young our parents always told us, we can be anything we want to be and change the world for better or for worse. To this day I still intend on trying to do that, hence why I am studying biochemistry to later go into research genetics- genetic mutation in specific. Genetic mutation is an alteration to the nucleotide sequence of the genome in an organism. I have had and still have to learn much terminology. Although I have a good grasp on the topic since I pushed myself to take many AP science courses in high school. School I believe is the most important in developing the skills to read and write because in my opinion its where you find what you want to pursue to further your knowledge in a particular area which means you have to learn more words and write exceptionally well which is what we are all trying to work on in this class as well as just fulfill our general education requirements, or the requirements that we need, but why not take the most out of the class and learn something that will stick. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful tool you can use to change the world.”
https://media.giphy.com/media/4ZSMVksS24R3O/giphy.gif
Kessel, Jaclyn, Writer. Billy Madison. 1999. Performance by Adam Sandler, Universal Pictures, 2015. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.