Tech essay - Topics and ideas

  • Due Feb 12, 2021 by 11:59pm
  • Points 1
  • Submitting a file upload

 

Overview of Technology Essay

Imagine you have secured your first full-time professional job after college, in your chosen career community.  At 5pm on Friday afternoon, your supervisor forwards you a recent news article about how some new technology is affecting your field, with the note "Need your reactions for Monday's staff meeting!"  

Over the course of these assignments, you will write a four-page, double-spaced essay, making an argument about how a particular new technology currently being discussed in the news might affect some aspect of your prospective career community.  

Your argument should not only be descriptive (what you think will happen and why), but also normative (whether the consequences will be good or bad).  And you must use scholarly concepts and evidence, from both your course reader and outside sources,  in making your arguments.  

 

Part 1: Topics and ideas. Search the professional news media for articles about three possible technologies to write about.

 

Steps to follow

1. Decide which news outlets you are going to search.  No matter what your chosen career community, a general, high-quality news source can provide information on new technological developments that might affect your professional work.  Here are some suggestions to get you started:

  • The New York Times 
  • The Washington Post
  • The Wall Street Journal
  • Bloomberg Businessweek
  • The Atlantic
  • The Economist
  • The New Yorker
  • Scientific American
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Wired Magazine
  • PBS NewsHour
  • NPR News

All of these news outlets have their own web sites that you can search for recent articles, but most of them (except PBS and NPR) keep their actual article content behind paywalls.  Fortunately, our campus library subscribes to all of these news outlets and more, so you can freely access them.  (Of course, you may also choose the news outlet you picked as part of your career community.)

You need to search at least two different news sources as part of this assignment.

To find a newspaper or newsmagazine in our library,

  • go to the UW Libraries home page (https://www.library.wisc.edu/)
  • select "Journals" from the "Search for" drop-down menu
  • select "Title" from the search box drop-down menu
  • enter the title of the desired newspaper or newsmagazine
  • click the "Available online" checkbox to ensure that the results you get point to the freely-accessible database of articles from that newspaper or newsmagazine.

Search for journals

 

Once you have found the database for the particular newspaper or newsmagazine, you can either browse issue-by-issue or use the search tools.  

Need more help?  Here is a custom resource page for more information about using our library databases with this course, put together by senior academic librarian Rebecca Payne: https://lgapi-us.libapps.com/widget_c.php?site_id=124&widget_type=9&output_format=3&widget_embed_type=1&guide_id=979673&page_id=7084503&enable_navigation=1&content_type_id=1&config_id=1599250974505&lti_id=26017&lti_placement_id=1382292 Links to an external site. 

2. Construct a search for each of your news outlets that combines "technology" terms with "career" terms.  Each news outlet will have a different search interface, but they can all retrieve articles based on keywords.  Your challenge is to come up with keywords that might lead to interesting examples of technological change in your chosen field.  For example: 

  • "machine learning" and "health care"
  • "digital" and "higher education"
  • "social media" and "real estate"
  • "virtual reality" and "public relations"
  • "self driving car" and "food service"
  • "gene editing" and "environmental restoration"

Sift through the search results for each of the news outlets you chose.  See if any of the resulting articles seem like they would make interesting topics for your paper.  You will probably need to click into several candidate articles and read them to determine this.

Please note: Your topic must focus on a new or recent technological development, so you should only consider news articles that have been published within the past five years.

3. Pick three possible news articles that you might use as the "seed" for your paper.  For each article, write down the following information:

  • the full citation of the news article, using APA citation format (see this UW Writing Center guide to APA format)
  • the exact search terms you used to find the news article
  • a one-paragraph summary of what the article is about
  • a one-paragraph description about how the article relates to your own career interests and why you think the article might serve as a good paper topic for this course 

It is crucial that your articles are listed in APA format for consistency and clarity.  For example, a newspaper article would be listed this way:

A newsmagazine article would be listed this way:

Listing your references correctly now is good practice, and will make it easier to add them to the reference list at the end of your final essay draft if you do end up using them as part of your paper!

4. Turn it in.  Upload to Canvas the document describing your three news articles which are candidate topics for your paper.  

 

Examples

Here are some examples of an online New York Times search of "machine learning" and "medicine" using the Factiva Links to an external site. interface provided by UW-Madison libraries: 

  • "Your Health Data Helps Everyone"
    The New York Times, 3 October 2019, 1115 words, By Oren Frank, (English)
    The future of medical research depends on all of our information -- mine and yours. If you're reading this, you've probably become increasingly concerned about your data, and for good reason: It seems that every day, we wake up to news about...
    (Document NYTF000020191003efa300049)
  • "Oh, the Monotony of Shifting the Tedium to A.I."
    The New York Times, 18 August 2019, 3306 words, By CADE METZ, (English)
    BHUBANESWAR, India -- Namita Pradhan sat at a desk in downtown Bhubaneswar, India, about 40 miles from the Bay of Bengal, staring at a video recorded in a hospital on the other side of the world.
    (Document NYTF000020190818ef8i00044)
  • "A.I. Can Be a Boon to Medicine That Could Easily Go Rogue"
    The New York Times, 25 March 2019, 1272 words, By CADE METZ and CRAIG S. SMITH, (English)
    Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved a device that can capture an image of your retina and automatically detect signs of diabetic blindness.
    (Document NYTF000020190325ef3p0002x)

Please note: These examples appear above just as they would from the search interface.  You must take the information and reformat it in APA style for this assignment!  Do not simply copy and paste the text from the search interface and turn it in for this assignment!

1613195999 02/12/2021 11:59pm