Technology and Media Habits

Welcome to a new year and a new session! This session we will be using the textbook Insight: English Skills for Academic and Professional Purposes and we will be discussing topics such as the media, social networking, global warming, language protection, and preparing for professional careers. Since the first theme will deal with Media Literacy and Interpreting Media Messages, I would like ÉNA students to fill out this survey about Technology and Media Habits, and Longueuil students to fill out this one.

Comparing Commercials

Click here to see assignment

Feedback on Insight

Please fill out this survey on your text, Insight: English Skills for Academic and Professional Purposes. The information will be very useful to help me develop texts that are of high interest to students.

More about Bitter Chocolate

You read about Malick Doumbia's terrible experience as a slave labourer in the chocolate industry in Ivory Coast in the excerpt from the book Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's most Seductive Sweet and you listened to the interview with the author, Carol Off. If you would like to learn more about the situation, here are some videos:

A Dutch man (from the Netherlands) named Teun van de Keuken was so angry that governments were not doing anything about slavery in the chocolate industry that he tried to have himself convicted of a crime for eating chocolate, saying that he was guilty of promoting slavery. This video shows some clips from this experience.

A montage called Blood Chocolate shows pictures from the slave industry with text to describe the situation. This report from Wales shows the positive effects of fair-trade chocolate grown in Ghana, which borders Ivory Coast.

What can you do about blood chocolate and child slavery? Write to your Member of Parliament to insist that farmers be paid fair wages and that the chocolate we receive is not produced by slave labour.

Creating Your Survey

Your session project is to create an online survey (using the tool Survey Monkey), analyze and interpret the data and write up a formal report. In order for you and your classmates to collect data for all of the surveys, you will need to answer the surveys for four different groups of students. Please click on each of the following links and respond to all of the surveys by clicking on the title of each survey. You will need to click the "back key" (précédent) after you have finished each survey to get back to the original page.
ENA CEF students
Longueuil CEF Students
ENA CEE, Group 3010
ENA CEE, Group 3020

When it is time to analyze the data, you and your partner will post a short 100-word summary of your findings so that the people who filled out your survey can read about the results. Your final written project, however, will be an individual report where you carefully analyze and interpret the results and include appendices that show all of the statistcs and graphs.

Analyzing Websites (Due Week 5...scroll down for Wk 4 assignment on Commercials!)

On page 34 of Insight, you will find some guidelines to help you determine whether a website is a reliable and useful site for research. Some of the questions you should ask yourself are:

- Who posted the website?
- What is the subject matter of the website?
- When was the website last updated?
- Where does the owner/creator of the website come from?
- Why was this website created?
- How is the website supported and arranged?

Below is a list of links to various websites that are hoax sites or sites set up as a front organization. Analyze them carefully to explain in class how to detect that they are not reliable sources. Choose one and explain in a blogpost the features that indicate the site is not reliable. You will find that some of them are very sophisticated, making it more and more difficult to determine reliable and unreliable sources.

Public Water Supply
Boilerplate
The Truth About Belgium
Friends of Science (read this after looking at the site)
Dog Island
Clones R Us
Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division

Your reading this week was about Wikipedia. If you would like to see an example of how changes are made in wikipedia, watch a few minutes of this video about the "Heavy Metal Umlaut"

Go to the English Wikipedia site and answer the following questions:

1.How many English articles are in Wikipedia today?
2. How many languages have a version of Wikipedia today?
3. Look up a controversial topic (such as Abortion Debate) and see how Wikipedia deals with it.
4. Look up a topic related to your program that is very current such as the Bombardier C-Series . How does Wikipedia treat it?
5. Click on "History" for one of the articles. When was this article last updated?

Analyzing Commercials

You have read about and seen videos about some of the more manipulative aspects of advertising, and you may not like these strategies. Nevertheless, advertisers have a job to do which is to interest you in the product, and hopefully, persuade you to buy it. Some advertisements are enormously successful in entertaining, creating interest and leaving an impression. Watch the following ads and reflect on how successful the ad is at delivering a message. Consider the following questions:

1. Does the ad tell a story? If so, what is the basic structure—what is the sequence of events or actions?
2. Is there dialogue? How do the actors interact?
3. Is there a narrator (a voice of someone that you do not see)? If so, is it a man or a woman? Old or young? Authoritative, playful or matter-of-fact?
4. What is the tone of the ad—is it humourous, playful, serious, informative, etc?
5. Does the ad use music? What role does the music play?
6. What other technical devices are used in the ad: Does the ad show close-ups of the characters or long-shots (a picture taken from a distance)? Is lighting used in any special way? Are there unusual camera angles?
7. Are printed words used in the ad? What effect do they have?
8. Who is the target audience? Who is the commercial trying to reach?
9. What is the message? Is the intention to convince you to buy a product, inform you to do something or something else?
10. Does the commercial succeed in delivering the message? Do you feel inspired to act?

Berlitz (Germany)
Use Seatbelts (USA)
Samson Batteries (England)
Guinness Evolution (Ireland)
Chevrolet (Brazil)
Molson Beer (Canada)
Funding for the Arts (Canada)

How do these ads compare to other ads you have seen? Why are some ads more successful than others? Take a look at a short video called How to Write a Boring Ad that makes fun of traditional commercials.

Homework: Choose an ad that you like and one that you don't like (from this list, or from your own experience) and try to determine why "the good one" is more successful than the other. Compare the two in a 250-300-word essay. Your essay should include:

- An introduction in which you briefly describe each ad and the service or product being advertised.

- One or two body paragraphs in which you compare the two ads and explain why "the good one" is successful and why the second one is not. Use the questions above and some of the points mentioned in How to Write a Boring Ad to give you ideas. Provide enough information so that someone who has never seen the ads can imagine what they look like, how they sound and what happens. Use at least five descriptive adjectives or adverbs in the simple or comparative form.

-A conclusion in which you not only confirm which ad is more entertaining, but also whether or not the ads would influence you to buy the product or service.

Your essay should be typed, double-spaced and between 250 and 300 words. It is due at the beginning of class next week.