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Assignment 3
Due: Wednesday, September 21, in class
Reading:
Chapter 4 of "Understanding Digital Culture," by Vincent Miller
Assignment--Interpreting difficult text
Background
One of the things you will encounter in college (and perhaps later in your life) is being asked
to read and understand a challenging text. We have been working with a rather challenging text
in this class, "Understanding Digital Culture," and we have been working together to understand
the main ideas. Initially, I gave lectures and summarized the main points for you in class.
With chapter 2, you worked in groups in class to answer some questions about small portions of
the text. In this assignment, you will work to determine the main ideas in a portion of
chapter 4, "Digital Inequality: Social, political and infrastructure contexts." The idea is
this: In reading a high level text, even if you cannot understand every detail, it is often
possible to identify the main ideas or arguments. A good way to approach this is to imagine
you need to explain the reading to someone else, who is intelligent, but may not know about
the particular topic you are explaining. You want to get across the main ideas without
confusing them with jargon (specific terms used primarily in a particular academic discipline)
or extraneous details.
Making an outline of the chapter
1. In this assignment you will pretend that you will be teaching the class about
digital inequality (you won't actually have to teach the class!).
To do so, you will need to make an outline of the chapter, indicating
the main points covered, and any details that are important for understanding those points.
In determining what to include, think about how you would explain the main ideas to a
class of first year students at Holy Cross (e.g. our class). This is similar to the work
we did in class for chapter 2, but without the leading questions. To make this assignment
more manageable, limit your outline to cover only pages 98 - 104 of chapter 4.
2. Here is how I go about outlining a difficult piece of text:
- I read the text once, looking up any vocabulary words I do not understand.
- I read the text a second time, underlining (in pencil) what I deem the most important
ideas.
- I go through the text a third time, creating my outline based on the underlined
parts (and any text around the underlining that may help explain or give examples).
You should create your outlines just as systematically.
Here are some more things to keep in mind:
- You may discuss the main ideas with your classmates (and I encourage you to do so),
however your outline must be
your own writing.
- Try not to use Miller's wording--paraphrase as much as you can.
If you feel his wording says it the best that can be said, use quotation marks around
the part you quote, but limit the direct quotes as much as possible.
3. The length of your outline should be about 2 double spaced pages.
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Constance Royden--croyden@mathcs.holycross.edu
MONT 112G--Computers and Society
Date Created: September 4, 2011
Last Modified: September 15, 2011
Page Expires: September 4, 2012
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