DISCUSSION: Week (6) articles and assignments

As always, you will meet for your Thursday discussion section synchronous and online using your TA's Zoom room.  Find your Zoom room URL from your TA, on your text Discussions board, on our Home page, or on the Zoom Rooms page.

Discuss scholarly articles and hear student speeches  

During the first half of discussion, you will discuss the scholarly articles for this week.  Each of the two students scheduled to perform speeches on the articles for this week will make their presentations and help lead a discussion on their article.  Your TA will likely refer to the reflections you all posted beforehand to your text discussion board.  Remember that the deeper understanding of these articles you are able to come to, the more readily you will be able to use them in your essay assignments.

Since this is the final pair of articles under the "technology in the workplace" theme, your TA may ask you to try to sum up what you have learned from these readings, or to analyze which readings were the most useful to composing your essay first drafts.  

Reflect on recent career assignments

During the second half of discussion, you will reflect on the results from your recent career assignments. You recently completed your Curate and share your online self assignment, so your TA may pose some questions like:

  • What did you find in your social media audit?  What kinds of assumptions -- positive or negative -- might a potential employer make about you based on this very limited online information?
  • How would you like people to perceive your online persona in the job-oriented spaces like LinkedIn, Handshake, and BadgerBridge?  What can you add to your site in order to achieve this?
  • What can you learn from visiting and reading the LinkedIn or BadgerBridge pages of others? What kinds of targeted searches might you do on these services?
  • What is the biggest shortcoming or silence on your LinkedIn page right now?  How might you address that?

Your TA may also ask you to start making connections between these initial career reflection assignments -- how your wanderings diagram connects to your strengths, for example, or how your CAR statements might help you write better bullet points on your resume, or how your resume and your LinkedIn site might differ.  

Your TA may also talk about your upcoming career assignments that involve career-related conversations with professionals -- Prepare and share alumni questions and Identify an expert to interview. For example, the work you did to set up your online LinkedIn site can be a stepping stone to searching for UW alumni trained in a particular field, employed at a particular organization, or living in a particular city who might be willing to speak with you in an informational interview.  Or the work you did exploring a "Wisconsin Experience" opportunity can point you to a professor, advisor, or other UW professional who might be a good person to interview, or who might be able to connect you with a professional in a particular area of work or study.   It is important to start looking for an informational interview subject early in order to stay on track with this assignment.

Check-in on essay assignments

Finally, since you recently completed your Tech essay - Thesis and outline assignment, your TA may ask each student to share what they chose for a topic and thesis, and take questions on how to turn an outline into an effective first draft.  Remember to work through your Booth textbook and check out the UW-Madison Writing Center Writer's Handbook for good tips.  

Special note: As part of discussion this week, your TA will set up procedures for next week's assignments dealing with the first drafts that you will complete this week:

  • Writing conference.  Your TA will send you a link to a shared Google document where you can sign up for an individual writing conference next week.  These writing conferences are 15 minutes long and will be conducted in the same BBCollaborate Ultra room where you meet for discussion section.   

    These writing conferences are brief, so you need to think beforehand about what you would like to focus on with your TA.  Your TA will likely give you some feedback on the one or two areas of your paper that are most in need of revision.  However, you should also come to the conference prepared with one or two specific questions about how to best turn your first draft into a final draft.  (It is not appropriate to simply ask your TA, "So, can you tell me everything I need to do to make this paper an 'A'?")
      
  • Peer review.  Your TA will group you with one or two fellow students to trade papers in order to perform your Tech essay - Peer review assignment.  This is an important opportunity to learn how to  provide constructive feedback to a colleague, and to learn from the ways that another student approached the same assignment with different techniques. 

    To prepare for peer reviews, in section your TA may ask students to talk about their first draft technology essays, if you haven't yet had a chance to go around the room and each explain what topic and thesis you settled on for this assignment.