Extra Credit

Top 10
1. Page 14- People feel fine stealing his bagels but not his money.
2. Page 19- A president actually said, "Government is not the solution, government is the problem."
3. Page 27- At least half of college students have admitted to serious cheating.
4. Page 28- About the same percentage of college students cheated in the 1960's as in the 1990's.
5. Page 35- A rich girl paid her roommate thousands of dollars to do her homework.
6. Page 52- It is crazy that so much work is being put into stopping plagiarism on the web.
7. Page 37- A student was flunked on a state test for having a cell phone open in the bathroom during a testing break.
8. Page 40- 90% of high schoolers cheat on something.
9. Page 42- The author thinks that good teaching stops cheating.
10. Page 30- A student covered her test papers just so that other students would not cheat on her.

A good article that everyone should read is Everybody Does It by David Callahan.

Research Topic

Just how involved will computers be in our lives in the future?

You're 16 Article

The article You’re 16, You’re Beautiful and You’re a Voter by Anya Kamenetz focuses on her beliefs that teenagers should have more rights. She includes many different laws that should be made and many effective ways to carry out those laws. Kamenetz’s main point is that the voting age should be lowered to 16.

The 2008 primaries are starting to bring this younger generation to the polls. The lines that divide who can be killed for their country and who can vote are becoming inadequate. These age requirements should be paired with educational necessities.

Driving laws in many states allow 16-year-olds to get a learner’s permit, letting them drive with restrictions. In about a year, they get their full driver’s license. If 16-year-olds can do this, they should be allowed to get an early voting permit by passing a test that shows them fit enough to vote. This would help to reinforce voting as a privilege.

Since many teens already drink and have sex, laws should be made to allow them to do this openly. 16-year-olds would get a drinking permit after passing a course about alcoholism. This permit would allow very moderate drinking at public gatherings for two years. Credit cards for 16-year-olds also could work with restrictions. They would be required to pass a financial literacy test and have a parental co-signer. This would install more confidence with money when teens leave home.

Young people should start to think about their futures in their late teens. But it is hard for them to do this when they have limited rights. Kamenetz believes that we have to start treating teens more like adults in order to ensure that they are qualified to solve the problems of life.

A majority of the students believe that computers change the way we think. The most overwhelming reason given for this is that with computers, the world is at our fingertips. We are no longer limited to the knowledge of ourselves or of our friends. We can log onto the internet and find all the knowledge of a lifetime. If we do not know something, we can find it online easily. This easiness also comes to us very fast. This fast arrival time causes us to think differently. We think that we can finish a project or homework very close to the due date because we are used to everything going fast. We no longer have to try to visualize weird objects in our heads. We can to computer programs to create a 3D image of whatever we desire. We also use online calculators or spell check to get the right answers fast.

Computers have allowed us to improve our research and reading skills, to write with ease, and to stay better informed with the news. These are things we learn from and filter through our minds to either confirm our original thoughts, or enlighten us on something new. Now the task is not finding information, it's weeding out all of the irrelevant and invalid information. When we actually find the information that we are looking for, we absorb more than what is just on their screen. We are involved in so many things on the computer at once that we are able to think in a whole new way.

Humans are inevitably affected by the opinions around them and more often than not, we conform to the majority. Our thoughts are inevitably changed. We are influenced by those around us. We are bombarded with hundreds of advertisements, opinions posted on blogs, and information through online articles or encyclopedias. Exposure to certain websites can also change the way we think about a subject.

With new websites that are created every day, we get to stay informed and learn new things that personally interest us. We can hear the latest music, watch movies, or get the weather updates without turning on the television. Computers give us access to this information with speeds faster than ever conceived. We wouldn’t be half as informed on the world if we didn’t have a computer and the internet.

Not everyone thought that computers change the way we think. These people have good points as to why this is true. We think and behave in several different ways. Computers cannot change that no matter how sophisticated they become. They will change the way we interact with each other and conduct our business affairs. But no matter how involved computers become in our day to day life, in the end, we control what the computer does. Some things that we see on the internet may or may not change the way we think about a certain issue. Sometimes we believe what we see, yet sometimes we fully disagree and continue to feel the same as before. In order for the computer to change us, we must have some good knowledge of how it works. Without this knowledge, the computer is just a box full of electronic parts.

Research is a huge part of our college careers. Some people use the internet for research instead of the library. This is a result of growing up at the time of computers. This can be a drawback for some because they don’t have the ability to find all the information that might be beneficial their research. In these cases, computers did not help people to think differently at all.

In the article How Computers Change the Way We Think, Sherry Turkle describes her belief that computers have changed the way we think. Turkle first shows how our views of privacy have changed. People who grew up before the time of computers were very cautious about privacy. But the youth of today seems to be less concerned with privacy. We give out our information very easily to websites and social networks. We do not understand our privacy enough to care if we give out our names to unknown people.

Turkle also talks about how things such as avatars can change how we perceive ourselves. We create an avatar online so we can act out different scenarios in a controlled environment. These environments usually do not exist in the real world. This can cause us to not develop a social life outside of the internet. This affects how we think about ourselves.

Turkle also talks about how PowerPoint’s have changed methods of teaching and how they can give a teacher more authority. They can be a powerful tool in obtaining knowledge for older students but can be bad for younger students. Turkle also explains that word processors are a powerful tool. Word processors can improve organization and revision to make good writers better. However, they can make bad writers worse because they allow us to write without thinking before hand, so our work can become an absolute mess.