Some of the words that stood out the most in this reading were "expertise" and "hierarchy." Davidson uses these as a way to frame the elitism that stunted advancement in education techniques. When crowdsourcing is used, everyone is allowed to contribute and fine-tune the project to their needs. This makes the overall product accessible to a variety of users and also makes the participants passionate about their project. This also works as a contrast between formal education of the past and modern education based on collective effort. This excerpt helps to further the author's argument for integrating technology into the classroom. This pattern of orthodox versus progressive continues for the rest of the passage. For example, Davidson states that "The current passion for national standards is reminiscent of the conversations on education at our country's beginnings (Davidson 56)." This illustrates the author's opinion of stagnation in the classroom today. This juxtaposes the advances made with the iPod in education, medicine, music, and more.
Davidson also uses the structure of the passage to indicate a slow start to the use of technology in the classroom before showing a quick adoption of the iPod in other fields. She spends several pages on its initial integration before devoting a few paragraphs for each new progression in its use. This helps to convince readers that the program was a success, and that it should be implemented nationwide in order to see this progress everywhere. However, this structure also reveals the author's bias. She consistently derides the traditional classroom while failing to mention any of its merits.
I was intrigued by the way that you immediately focus on the words that Davidson uses. Rather than provide background, you jump right in and explain how Davidson's word choice was essential to her argument. Like I did, you discuss her bias, but you go about it in a different, yet effective manner. At the end of the first paragraph, you discuss how the author's points were contradictory and showed blindness to obvious advances that have been made. By not actually mentioning the word "bias" until the very end, you force the reader to create their own conclusions based on your writing, which you then go on to confirm your agreement with. It was certainly refreshing to see that I was not the only one who recognized Davidson's bias.
ReplyDeleteI liked your immediate framing of Davidson's parallel between elitism and educational advancement, and the contrast between modern education and traditional techniques. Also, the way you describe the way Davidson constructed her essay based on bias by describing the iPod's integration and multiple paragraphs on its new useful progression, which was particularly interesting to me because I had not picked up on that either of the times I read the essay.
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