Reflective Blog 3

As the final reflective blog, and given that this is supposed to represent the cumulative experience I have acquired, I wanted to wait until close to the end of our unit to post. I have put in roughly twenty hours at the Discovery Center and enjoyed every minute of it. The atmosphere is welcoming and the exhibits are fun and interesting even with repetition. Of all the observations I have made while there, parental involvement, creative freedom, interactive learning, I never quite noticed the one that tied them all together: community.

It wasn’t until I started researching sources for my unit two revision that I discovered what my observations had in common. It is the community which determines what is important and places emphasis on what it values. When I say community I mean everything, from television to conversations to what is celebrated and why. When the community comes together and builds something, we are saying that is worthy of our attention, that is important. The message children get is by what “that” is: is it a stadium or a research lab? A university or a golf course? By having a place which is dedicated to lifelong learning and interest in the sciences, we as a community are saying that it is something we value. Children see this and understand it, whether we think they can or not.

The observations I made of the interactions between children and their parents are a direct reflection of this understanding. A child asking how something works and why tells me that they think it is important to know, and that gives me hope for our future. Because it shows that intelligence and culture are still viewed by their parents as important, and children are seeing that. The community decides which skills and characteristics are important by deciding what is worthy of its attention. My desire is that we as a country will eventually realize that the only thing that really matters is the development of our youth and their education.

Ancient Sparta valued only the physical: strength, combat skill and courage. They were the pinnacle of military might and power in their time. Few stories and fewer historical figures are known from their culture, and but for one awesome movie, even fewer Americans would know Sparta even existed. Athens valued both the mind and body: culture, art and science. They were the creators of the modern democracy. Ask yourself: to what extent and in what area has each of these civilizations impacted the modern world? What did each community value and how was it displayed in their community? Which civilization contributed more to our way of life? Now ask yourself this: what do we value and how is our community showing that? The discovery Center is one shining example of our community showing that it values knowledge and intelligence. I hope that it continues to do so for a long time.

Reflective Blog 2

Sorry these didnt get posted sooner, had them saved.

So the other day at the Discovery Center it was something of a madhouse. Sundays are fairly busy anyway, but that day there were three different birthday parties. The first started early, so there were kids there for the entire five hours I was there. While its usually not a problem, it was very hectic. Once each group was done in the backroom, all the kids spent the rest of the time out on the main floor, meanwhile the parents kind of wandered around with them. It seemed like more than a few of the kids were completely unsupervised by their parents, which meant I had to make sure they weren't completely out of control. At one point, when I was in another room, a few of them actually knocked down one of the heavier exhibits. When I got there, it was fallen over and none of the kids that did it were there. When I picked it up, it had actually shattered the tiles underneath. I later learned that a mother of one of the kids complained that the exhibit almost "fell" on their kid. We figured it had to have been because of the kids, but parents wont hear that.

Busy day.

Reflective Blog 3

I just got back from the discovery center. It was a rather slow day not that many people again. I'm hoping that I can go on a weekend because most of the times when I go its very slow. I just now reached over my 15 hours I have kind of lost track how many hours I have done. There are some people that have been volunteering for years and have about 5000 hours. That is a lot of dedication to one company for free. The green room for the camera is pretty cool. I always wondered how on tv they had the background and ect.

Reflective Blog 2

Yesterday at the discovery center it was pretty busy there were school field trips in and out all day. I helped one of the guys fix the tornado simulator. That changed my day up a lot. I would really enjoy to have there kind of job and just work on experiments all day. I helped in a class room for a while try to keep all the kids in line and teach them how to do experiments. I must say I'm not much of a kid person but it was pretty fun.

Reflective Blog 1

My time at the agency has been great. I noticed i few days ago that when i went in that weekdays are pretty slow. Sometimes they have classes come in. The other day it was silent. There wasn't a whole lot of people. Maybe because it was so nice and warm outside. I did get the time to mess around with all of the experiments. I had the change to kind of talk to the people that have been working there for a while.

Reflective Letter

Compared to the beginning of this semester and this unit, my writing has changed a lot. Before this class, I used a very general format for my writing. It followed the basic five-paragraph form, like most writings in high-school. I suppose the one thing that I consciously kept in mind was always presenting both sides in my writing. I would cover both my side and the opposition, and then compare the two to show why mine was better. Through this class so far, however, I have taken the audience into more consideration. It hasn't necessarily changed the content of my writing, but more the tone and style, based on the audience. For example, my blog posts have been made keeping my instructor and peers mostly in mind. With the other four members of this blog focusing on the same main ideas around the Discovery Center, and from our discussions, I would categorize my writing for the blog as being less formal and basic. I don't really need to go into depth about some of the concepts concerning the Discovery Center because they already know them.But when I write for my website, my audience perspective completely changes, as does my style. With the website, my audience goes way beyond the classroom. The audience, for my website, is based around professors, teachers, parents, government officials, etc. with an interest in improving education. To that end, I tried to keep my message clear and simple, but sound authoritative and serious enough for more administrative and academic readers.

While speaking on the website, the actual research topic I had in mind changed constantly. I started with something along the lines of "Does providing interactive experiments help students learn?" and ended up around "How interactive learning benefits students and why it needs to be expanded." As I was researching from one topic to the next, I kept coming up with realizations that made my current topic obsolete, and so I had to change it, make it fresh and actually research-able. In fact, my works cited for my website doesnt even include all the sites I wanted to use, just the ones used in my most recent topic. While this was frustrating, I think it was good that my topic was evolving. It was becoming more defined and specific, enough to write about without being too vague.

Part of the problem was I was trying to make some connections with my volunteering at the Discovery Center. I usually walked around, talking to visitors and asking them questions about the exhibits, if they understood the exhibits, and generally getting them to think about the whys. Due to the interactive method of the Discovery Center, most visitors could figure out how the exhibits worked themselves. I saw lots of parents teaching their kids, or the kids trying to teach their parents. It made it very difficult for me to help or get visitors thinking, mainly because the exhibits were already doing that.

The link to my website is: http://re-dsicoveringdiscovery.weebly.com/

Unit 2 reflective letter

Tim Mattson
Jeremy Brandstad
English 102
27 February 2011
Reflective Letter

In the beginning of this unit I was unsure on how what I would write my question on. By doing all the exercises in class and talking to other people about their work it became very simple. Everything just seemed to fall into place by the end of this unit. I had some technical difficulties with the website. Sometimes the solutions to problems were right under my nose but it always took forever to find them. As an example when I was trying to change the background of the picture, that took me forever to figure out. All I had to do was click in the right spot to change the background color. I ended up taking a few hours just trying to figure some way to change the html code for the color. Instead it was so simple. Of course this is expected when using technology it usually never works the way you want it to.

My research strategies have changed drastically. Ever since we learned about finding an article and then looking at those articles sources, it’s great. I keep asking myself why I never thought of that myself. It’s obvious, but no one ever thinks about checking the sources. I started to use this tool and I noticed my time I take researching on the topic is cut by about 40%. That’s a lot more time that I could use doing something else. Wikipedia can be a good source finder. I would never use the information off of Wikipedia. I would use the sources that were listed on Wikipedia. With Wikipedia anyone can change the information but the sources are cold hard facts most of the time.

The way I write and think about my audience has changed a lot since the beginning of this unit. I use to never think about what my audience cared about. I would only think about what I thought was funny. For example if I was going to add a picture normally I would add the one that I thought was the funniest regardless of the vulgar language. When I was working on the website, I saw many pictures that I wanted to added. Then I stepped back and thought twice if I should add them or not. Yes, they were probably funny but what kind of am I giving to my reader? I would always think about what we talked in class. Would this picture distract my reader? Would this picture make my reader not want to read what I have to say anymore? My different outlook on my audience has changed the way I consider what to add.

With the different course readings they have been helpful in forming how I finished the unit project. I have received many helpful hints. The source hint was probably my most favorite I use that more out of everything. This is something I won’t ever forget I will always use it. Overall I felt I learned a lot from this unit. I enjoyed building the website that was a fun new experience.

Here is a link to my website enjoy! http://pcvsmacwhichoneisbetter.weebly.com/
For some reason the internet linking is not working sorry.