You are being presented with an enviable opportunity: to provide feedback to the developers of a digital research curriculum for high-school students. Your first task is review the premise for this program. Respond to the following prompt in the RAVE format.

The authors contend that high-school students approach online research in a perfunctory manner at best and cite studies to support this position. Do you think that the flood of online information has eroded or enhanced the research skills of you and your peers? Be certain to cite a source to support your position.

Restate question in format of topic sentence;
Answer all parts completely
Vocabulary--use relevant terms
Examples and evidence -- include them

MAY 9, 2013, 2:36 PM

Reading Club | Digital DistractionBy KATHERINE SCHULTEN and AMANDA CHRISTY BROWN

How many times will you check Facebook, Twitter, your e-mail, or another tab on your Internet browser as you read this post, and what does that do to your ability to absorb what you read?

How does this “rapidly toggling between tasks” affect our brains in general? Does dividing our concentration this way change how we learn? If so, what should we do about it?

...We offer a pair of articles — one from The New York Times’s Sunday Review and the other from the KQED Mind/Shift blog — that detail new research on the potential costs of this “rapid toggling” that most of us engage in every day.

Read both “Brain, Interrupted” and “How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn?”, then weigh in on how your own life experience meshes with this research.

Here are some questions that may help — though you can feel free to ignore them if you’ve got plenty to say on your own:

• Do you text, listen to music, watch videos or check Facebook, Instagram or Twitter while doing schoolwork at home? At school? How do you think that “toggling” affects how you learn?
  
  
• How easy is it for you to ignore digital temptations while reading, writing or doing other kinds of schoolwork? What examples of that can you share?
  
  
• In your experience, are “interruptions making us dumber”? Do you think toggling between tasks affects your ability to do thoughtful work, or do you think you have trained yourself for distractions?
  
  
• Have you, your parents or your teachers set limits on when and how you use technology? How have those limits affected you?
  
  
• Which of the many studies cited in these two articles seem most interesting or relevant to you? Why? What questions do they raise for you?
  
  
• How should teenagers, teachers and parents respond to these studies? Why?
  
  

Post your complete response to the class website using the RAVE format by September 5, 2013. Your submission should cite supporting evidence from at least one of the articles online source to support your opinion and, if practical, build upon the previous entry.

Do you think the Federal Government, under the proposed CISPA regulation, can clearly define and defend the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that would be released in the interest of protecting against a cybersecurity threat?  

• Do you have any concerns? Why/why not?
• What safeguards, if any, should be put in place?
  

Support your answer with evidence from your research.

In their 2007 book Consider the Source, Broderick and Miller state: "Knowledge is power. In the information age, that knowledge comes, frequently, from the Internet. The better that source of knowledge -- its credibility, its clarity, its utility -- the greater the power. With almost incalculable speed new Web sites, new sources of knowledge, are becoming available to anyone with access to a computer. But is all this information a good thing? Can there be too may places on the Web to seek information? Post a response using the RAVE format. Your submission should cite and online source to support your opinion and, if practical, build upon the previous entry.