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Joel Foley, Journal #3

From my first read I learned that learning a foreign language is an essential part of future globalization. The article said that the notion that English is the universal language is nothing more than a fairy tale. Sure it may be common in airports and business, but if you find yourself away from those settings in a country that doesn't use your native language then you are out of luck. It also pointed out how learning a first foreign language opens up the pathways in your brain to learning a second or even a third with relative ease. This is why children raised in a multilingual household are more able to readily take on a third language to their first two. I feel that my topic has been solidified by reading this source, it is now a tangible report that I will be able to do and not just some idea I cooked up on a piece of paper. This source reinforced my belief that learning a second language is important in today’s world. This source brought up the question of whether or not the government will realize this need for language and stop cutting funds from school programs dedicated to foreign language. This information strengthened my own views on the issue because I felt that the government should not discourage linguistics in schools because it will most certainly hurt us in the long run. The author speaks from the academic point of view and almost certainly is biased towards their side of the issue. I could easily go into detail with future sources about how the government’s cuts are affecting the language programs and how this has affected me and my learning.

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-second-language-berman-050611.html

From my second article I learned that there are more students in china learning English as a second language than there are total students in the United States. This highlights two things; one how vastly outnumbered the number of English speakers in the world are, and two how far behind the rest of the world the united states is with regards to education and language learning. I learned that language and culture are going to be part of the global economy for the next century and that the rest of the world is striving to learn English quickly in order to do business, meanwhile we are doing nothing and hoping that English becomes the dominant language. Completely disregarding the other cultures and assuming they will have no effect on the United States in the coming future. Businesses are looking for people who can communicate with clients directly and create a bond not formed through an interpreter with them. These skills are shown as the most important in the coming years and raised questions about the education standards in the western world which is vastly outnumbered by the speakers of the rest of the planet. This article is biased towards the side of global education and the author is involved with many language organizations leading me to believe that he is both credible yet heavily biased at the same time. I am noticing a very obvious trend in the world of education and business towards increased leaning in language and culture. This trend should be followed by the academic system of the united states if we want to remain competitive in the near future of business.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triad/stories/2005/08/29/editorial2.html?page=all

Kevin Stefanye Journal #3

            My first source was extremely informative. It talked about the definition of procrastination, the history, why people do it, how many people do it, and many more things. I think that finding out why people procrastinate is actually an interesting process because I can see a lot of myself in this study. It talks about what goes through people’s mind when they give themselves excuses to do the work later, and to be honest, a lot of what they are saying goes through my mind as well. This source actually brought up a lot of aspects of procrastination that I would not have thought of, such as organization, mood, and gender. These new topics will strengthen my argument by giving me extra talking points and factual information to support my argument. As this is a scholarly source, the author speaks from experience, as the author has extensively researched procrastination, the motives for procrastination, the effects of procrastination, and the people who procrastinate. The author is speaking for himself, I suppose. The author has done an incredible amount of research, and clearly knows every detail about what he has studied, but the author cannot speak for everybody, because perhaps others have contradicting research, and his sample size is not large enough to speak for an entire population. His audience would be anybody who is looking for an extensive account on procrastination. The audience would also have to have some previous knowledge about procrastination, and would likely need at least a high school education to be able to finish the article and comprehend its contents. The author may have a bias in that he does not procrastinate, therefore it is difficult for him to really get inside a procrastinator’s head and tell what they are thinking. I am seeing a trend in age, as young people with less responsibility tend to procrastinate more than older people with a larger consequence in waiting should they fail to complete their work. I think I may be able to delve deeper in that last idea, because I’m thinking that procrastination may be correlated with maturity, especially brain development.

            My second article focused more on student procrastination than the previous one, which did talk about students, but also went on to broader topics that included more than just students. I thought the last one pertained to me, but this one was even more so relevant to my life. I can see how a lot of the key ideas in this article were familiar to my own thought process. This source talked more about the brain process, and the motivation behind procrastination, and also provided some case studies. It made me think about what really goes on in our brain to tell us to do that, and how much of procrastination is from the way we are raised versus the electrical impulses in our brain telling us to do things later. This new information strengthens my topic by giving me a new insight as to why people procrastinate, by talking about the workings of the cognitive brain and how the tiniest things that go on inside of our brains have a massive effect on what we do. The author speaks from the point of view of a psychology professor at the University of Houston, so he is truly an expert on the topic. I think this source has the same exact audience as my previous source. It is a scholarly journal, so this would be directed at somebody who wanted an in depth article about procrastination. The only difference is that this source was more focused on student procrastination rather than general procrastination, so perhaps this source would be more helpful to young students than it would be to adults who procrastinate in the working world.  The audience would have to have at least a high school education to understand some of the terminology of this article,  as well as to get through the whole thing, as it is lengthy. There does not seem to be much bias, but one possible bias would be that since he works with the inner workings of the brain every day, he may think that it plays a larger role in procrastination than it really does. This source has a lot of the same points as the last source, and I am starting to see a lot of common factors that many professionals can agree on. I think I can focus my argument even more on the brain, and how the occurrences inside the certain lobes have a crucial effect on what really goes on inside the conscious brain.

Jake Bustamante Journal #3

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/110862/data-mining-the-ineffective-future-affirmative-action-in-education#

The first source I found was interesting in that it looked at Affirmative Action through a technological standpoint. The debate whether to end Affirmative Action has been going on for the majority of our lives and many courts have banned racial preferences for students going to universities. After the university of Texas and the University of California were unable to get enough diversity through alternative means, a new plan was a adopted called data mining. Advertisements companies use data mining to calculate the potential socioeconomic status of a resident living in a certain area. The more data collected, the more a company will know about one's socioeconomic status and race. I learned that the College Board adopted this technique to search for potential students using algorithms from a program called Descriptor Plus, giving colleges the edge in searching for diversity. The program takes "clusters" of neighborhoods that encompass certain groups and gives them priority without relying solely on race. This is because there is a factor of misrepresented students that is taken into account.

http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/14/0002831212470483.abstract

In this article, I learned that when Affirmative Action is withdrawn, not only does the diversity of undergraduate students decrease, but the graduate students population's diversity dwindles as well. Some of the most important fields are being affected in this lack of diversity, making the United States unable to "compete effectively in a global market". The studies that are suffering the most from this change are engineering, the natural sciences, and social sciences, three critical areas of study where jobs are competitive after one finishes their academic career. I also learned that there is currently a court case in process called Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin in which the Supreme Court will debate whether race should be a factor in a student's acceptance to an institution of higher learning. Also, eight states have banned the use of Affirmative Action, even though legally, it is allowed to be practices, albeit under strict guidelines.

Mickenzi Schank Journal #3

Giulianotti, Richard, and Roland Robertson. "The Globalization of Football: A Study in the Glocalization of the ‘Serious Life’." The British Journal of Sociology 55.4 (2004): 545-68. Print. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu:8080/doi/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2004.00037.x/full

I learned several new things after reading this article such as the fact that since soccer (football) is such a widespread sport that it is sometimes used as a baseline in some sociological studies and analyses, especially pertaining to globalization.  I also learned that the widespread popularity of soccer was not only a result of globalization, but also is a reciprocator of this process.  Finally I learned about the phenomena of “glocalization” which is essentially the bridge between globalization and local communities, where local communities pick and choose which general ideas and practices best apply to the particular community and then adapt these ideas and practices to best fit their needs and wants.  This article definitely reinforced many of my views about how widespread soccer is in the world and how it involved in with a large percentage of the world population.  But I was surprised how complex and intricate this involvement is; whether it is economics, culture, recreation, ect.,the interaction depends on so many things that outcomes are not uniform globally or even locally for that matter.  I do not think that this article has challenged my topic rather it has it has challenged my preconception of what I would find, because I figured that if soccer rose to popularity that it has in Europe the soccer would play a similar role in American culture, but according to this article, the correlation of cultural impact is linked to much more than popularity.  This has given me more to explore because I have more root causes to look for.  The authors are speaking from an informative and objective point of view.  I believe that his intended audience is for people who plan on doing sociological research about globalization and culture because they provide a new perspective to globalization through soccer.  Also there is the use of the word glocalization which, apparently, is well known in the field of global sociology.  One bias that I noted was that the article chose globalization as the key reason that soccer has been spread throughout the world, but places like central Africa where there is minimal use of cell phones, computers, the internet or the things normally associated with globalization, yet soccer is very popular in Africa so other reason must be used to explain this fact.

Carter, Kelly. "A New World Order on the Soccer Field." Emerge 1996: 72-72. Print.

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu:8080/docview/230831650#

I learned that race played a very different role in soccer before I started playing.  This article was published in 1996, just before I started playing.  The article focuses on displaying the great leaps and bounds that soccer in America has taken to be fair to all races.  I never experienced this issue or felt race was a means for exclusion in my soccer career.  But apparently if I had grown up playing in the 1970’s things would have been much different.  This raises the question what else has soccer done as a sport to not only to be diverse but to promote equality.  This article reinforced my views about soccer as a progressive sport and its ability to be a platform of equality.  The author speaks from a point of view that seen the progress of soccer to become racially indifferent and she thinks highly of this progress.  Whereas I had never given it much thought because I experienced this issue first hand.  This article is intended for a much more broad audience than the other article.  This one is much shorter, it uses quotes from well-known players, it does not include technical terms and it is not structured like a research paper.  In the indexing detail the journal subject is tagged under general interest periodicals.  A bias that this article could have is that it only focuses on top level soccer in the U.S. for example the men’s and women’s national team, L.A. Galaxy a MLS (Major League Soccer) team and the Cosmos (another MLS team).  It does not address the youth and high school programs which are a large part of soccer in America.  I am considering looking into the history of soccer in the U.S. to see what other information I can discover.

Brandon Kang Journal #3

Brandon Kang Journal 3

                The first source elaborated on what critical period is considered in psychology and what is expected to happen during critical period. It has been found that kids have been more successful than adults in learning a new language. The lack of teaching the language at the age could be an underlying factor, but an experiment showed that deaf kids that got hearing devices at age two learned a language faster, then the kids at age four. After reading this article, I feel that there is a greater chance the correlation between learning at language is easier at younger age is easier, whether it’s the extra attention parents pay to their kids at their young age or whether a critical period of learning actually exist. This article explains to any curious reader what a critical period, and its correlation to language acquisition. This article also explains some theories and hypotheses about the critical period. This article was written to inform how and when people learn the best. When reading the second source, I found that it agreed with the idea that the older a person gets older, then harder it is for that person to learn a new language. Although correlation does not mean causation, the correlation between age and learning allows us to consider the critical period as a viable reason for difficulty of learning a new language, while considering other options, such as parenting, location, or language difficulty. This article is unbiased, so it appeals to both sides of an argument. The article also states that older kids learn syntax and morphology quicker, then little kids. This statement can disprove the critical period theory or be explained as a person having different critical periods for different types of learning. I feel that this article is more appealing to someone who doesn’t know what critical period or a person debating on what theory is correct.

https://www.boundless.com/psychology/language/theories-language-development/examining-critical-periods-and-statistical-learning/

https://www.boundless.com/psychology/language/theories-language-development/examining-critical-periods-and-statistical-learning/

Sofia Gasperino Journal #3

I learned that a large percentage of people polled thought that diversity education is necessary. I learned that many firms have training on diversity issues. Women are more likely than men to see the positive side of diversity. This is probably because women understand what it feels like to be in the minority or treated like it. However, men don’t have more negative views towards diversity than women do. There are many positive aspects to diversity in the workplace but there are also many negative aspects. I learned that the diversity training they received wore off after about a year. I think that diversity training is less impactful than forming relations with people of different cultures on a more personal level because you are learning to respect the differences but you might not understand exactly why they are different. However, not everyone is interested in doing this. For those people, a mandatory diversity training class might be the only way to help people work together. It challenges my view because it brings up the fact that there are some negative aspects to diversity in the workforce. The author is reporting the procedures and results of his study. I think his audience might be corporations who are thinking about implementing a diversity-training course for their employees and how to go about it. I want to expand my inquiry past diversity in the workforce.

The Effects of a Diversity Learning Experience on Positive and Negative Diversity Perceptions

Todd J. Hostager and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Journal of Business and Psychology , Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (Dec., 2008), pp. 127-139

I learned that the majority could sometimes feel misrepresented, dismissed, or even left out. I still feel that it is important to learn about other cultures. This new information makes me more sensitive to the way people in the majority may feel. I also understand why they would not want to study literature only about other cultures. I think that people can be afraid or uninterested in things that are different from them and so they would be more comfortable reading literature based on their own culture because they can relate to it better. I did not develop any new questions about my topic after reading this. This information strengthened my views on my topic because it reinforced the idea of coming out of your comfort zone and opening your mind to new things. Not everything or everyone you come across in life is going to be familiar to you. The author is speaking from the point of view of a teacher and third party in the conflict. She is speaking for teachers who have students that struggle with the culturally diverse literature they give them.  The bias she may have might come from the nature of being a teacher. By this, I mean that teachers are supposed to be well educated and knowledgeable about the world. Also, many literature pieces are from another time period or culture and so naturally they are learning about these other cultures. I want to delve further into why many people are uncomfortable in learning about other cultures. 

Carol G Nelson - The English Journal