English Undergraduate Conference

Panel 11………………………………………………..Leonard 214
Moderator: Judy Bertonazzi
“Raising Awareness About Our Roles in Diversity: Implications for Becoming Agents of Change.”
Haley McComb, Heather Black

The presentation introduces the problem of racial discrimination and prejudice as well as negative stereotypes existing in all societies today as a result of the globalization. Because of our skin color, because of our disability or other negative features that we possess, we are assumed inferior by other people around us, even ourself, we tend to have some kind of a negative impression of those who we consider to be inferior before we even get to know the real truth.

What I learn from this presentation is the way to make a change, that is to be the change yourself. At the end, four key elements to success in rasiing awareness about our roles in diversity are introduced, and they are: awareness, analysis, action and accountablity.

Panel 15……………………………………………….Leonard 210
Moderator: Tracy Lassiter
“Transcendental Meditation and the Internet: Two Approaches to Omniscience, Their Expression In, and Effect On Literature”
Damon M. Boykiw

Somehow I found this presentation extremely abstract, and the speaker appearted to be lazy-looking and speaking in a drowsy fasion, and he hardly made any eye contact with the audience. To make the matter worse, he came unprepared, no hand out, no slide show, but a piece a written draft. I believe the presentation is about meditation adn the internet in today's world, it's about using how internet can be found anywhere around the world right now, meaning that everyboy is connected to one another, and therefore making it difficult for people to have some real peace and quiet. This leads to mediatation, I learnt that mediatation can be praticed in many different forms besides sitting quietly and closing your eyes. Actually, when we focus our attention on doing something such playing a videogame or watching a soccer match, that is also a kind of mediatation since it relieves us from those stresss and allows us to forget life problems for the time being.

Group-blogging-Stickiness Factor (Narong&Katlyn)

We do think that children's television shows like Sesame Street and Blues Clues are more educational and stickier than books simply because there is interaction between the children watching and the shows, e.g. there's a host in Blues Clues asking questions now and then to attract attention and interest to keep the kids watching and trying to work out the answers and anticipating what is going to happen next; children learn better this way with entertainment and interaction while gaining knowledge at the same time.

Chapter 2: Reflective Writing

The author talks about three important elements constituing the the law of the few: connector, maven and salesmen. The most interesting argument in this chapter to me is that nonverbal expression can have the same impacts as the verbal counterpart. The type of data that the author collected is from a few studies and researches conducted by people other than himself, and also from his personal conversation with some certain individuals.

Comparing

The genre that I am used to reading is narrative. The major contrast between my favorite genre and that of the Gladwell's book is the source of information presented. Gladwell refers to a great many sources of information to support his own arguments and at the same time tells stories of his own experience and interaction with various individuals, whereas in a narrative, the author would normally just describe an event or tell a story out of his own account.

Summary of Introduction and Chapter 1 (Tipping Point)

Macolm Gladwell raises the phenomenon of Tipping point with the purpose of anayling and find out the factors behind the outbreak of this social change which he refers to as social epidemic. He argues that a social epidemic is actually caused by a small group of people begining with tiny changes in their behaviors or trends by introducing two remarkable Tipping points which took place in the United States of America, namely, the return of Hush Puppies and the dramatic decrease in crime rate in New York. Finally he concludes that the law of few, the stickiness factor and the power of context are the three rules of Tipping point.