Close Caption reading assignment 1

   Crowdsourced - Pool knowledge together within a group for mutual gain to create better answers answer(s) to a problem or question

    Conceive - in the passage, create a thought, speculation, or assumption about something

    Credentialing -  trusting those with credentials to be more knowledgeable about a subject, and therefore create better answers to a problem than if everyone helped to make the solution together

3. The first sentence states that the two ways of thinking are different, while the last sentence is giving the author`s opinions on crowdsourcing and credentialing, saying how crowdsourcing knowledge is better than credentialing to answer a problem because it is different from credentialing.

4. "Part of our failure rate in contemporary education can be blamed n the one-size-fits all model of standards that evolved over the course of the twentieth century, as we narrow the spectrum of skills that we test in schools, more and more kids who have skills outside that spectrum will be labeled as failures.As what counts as learning is increasingly standardized and limited, increasing numbers of students learn in ways that are not measured by those standards. This is the lesson of attention blindness yet again: If you measure narrowly, you see results just as narrowly. In other words, the more standardized our assessment, the more kids fail. Their failure is then diagnosed as a learning disability  or a disorder. But they are failing when assessed by a standard that has almost nothing to do with how they learn online or - more important - what skills they need in a digital age" (Davidson, 61).

      Important words: Failures (used to describe children who fail to meet standardized tests, very negative connotation, used again later in the passage as a verb describing what the kids did not achieve because the standards are, in Davidson`s opinion, irrelevant)
                                   Standardized - used to put contemporary US educational methods in poor light, by making the system sound very strict and ridged; sounds sort of negative the way the author`s tone is and how it is used throughout the passage
               Both words are used to place the reader in an 'Us vs. Them' mindset by using polarized words that make the system sound to be very rigid without any give to it or leniency whatsoever to it, despite the fact many schools are adopting or relaxed methods of teaching and trying to integrate technology into classrooms without it being a distraction.

    This passage is important to the essay as a whole because the author uses it to describe how our country is failing as an educator because of the standardized style of testing to see how education is are progressing. As the author states, "as we narrow the spectrum of skills that we test in schools, more and more kids who have skills outside that spectrum will be labeled as failures" (Davidson, 61). This quote explains how despite many students having skills across a wide variety of skill sets, the state is only concerned with the skills of any particular student in a few areas, so even if a student is a fantastic artist, they still fail school if they cannot pass math class, and will be labeled as a student who is not a good enough student or smart enough to continue until their math skills improve. It also furthers the author`s argument against standardized testing as a whole and how credentialing has many pitfalls and draw backs. In addition it reinforces the 'Us vs Them' mentality of the essay, as stated above, through its tone and vocabulary usage, and like the rest of the essay, is very ironic in its tone and message in that the message is that rigid, strict standards do not work and just listening to experts is not the way to learn, despite the fact the author is expecting her audience to do just that. Also, this passage is important to the essay as it begins a part of the essay, focusing on the lacking of the 19th and 20th century school models that the US has yet to fully detach from, as many jobs after high school were industrialized jobs where workers did one or two repetitive jobs for ours on end 5 days a week at a factory in previous decades, if they were not farmers or a few other types of jobs. In the current US workplace now, however, creative thinking is deemed more important for engineers and scientists than being taught to follow rules given from a higher level and leaving the decisions up to them.