For today’s class, you read Carlson, “Nicholas Carr on the ‘Superficial’ Webby Mind,” http://goo.gl/VqyHVm and Carr, “A writer of books, essays, and ephemera,” http://www.nicholascarr.com. During your summary writing during the first ten minutes of class, write what you learned about the book that we are about to begin to read and its author, Nicolas Carr.

Remember to type up your beginning of class writing from Monday and today, and post that writing as comments to their respective blog posts. Since Project Two is due before class on Monday, you might have to scroll down to find the correct place to post your comments.

Today, we are concluding our reading of John Medina’s Brain Rules by taking a look at the “Exploration” chapter that you read before today’s class. Besides simply summarizing today’s reading, I would like you to discuss why this chapter is so important to the work that you are doing on Project Two now, and the work that you will be doing in all of your classes at City Tech as you work your way towards a career. We will discuss this during the first part of class.

For today’s class, you read the Gender chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. This is one of the more challenging chapters to read in this book, because the reader has to carefully follow what Medina says about the similarities and differences observed between the brains of women and men. During the first ten minutes of class, write your summary of the chapter, and discuss the relationship between what Medina tells us and your own direct experience.

For today’s class, you read two chapters from John Medina’s Brain Rules: “Vision” and “Music.” Post your summary of these two chapters as a single comment to this blog post before Monday, November 2.

On Wednesday, we will meet outside the entrance to the library on the 4th floor of the Atrium. One of our expert librarians will introduce the library and its useful research resources to you.

During the orientation to the library, we will have some time set aside to use the research tools that the librarian demonstrates to you. Your task during this part of class will be to use the Academic Search Complete database accessible from http://library.citytech.cuny.edu to look at articles relating to your field of study and your future career. Find at least one article that you would like to return to and read in detail as part of your research. In your notebook, write down information that will help you find the article again: it’s title, an author’s name, the journal’s title, the issue number, the date, and the page numbers. If you have time, you can download the article and attach it to an email to yourself for safekeeping, or use the database’s built-in features to email a link or copy to your email address. Before our next meeting, write a 100 word summary of the article (or perhaps another that you find through further research in the database) in your own words followed by an MLA-formatted bibliographic entry using the guide available on the Purdue OWL website (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/07/). Post this assignment as a comment to this blog post.

During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading from John Medina’s Brain Rules: “Sensory Integration.” Also, discuss how you think sensory integration relates to creating and reading multimodal compositions (combining words, sounds, moving images, graphics, body language, etc).

During lab, we will peer review the writing that you brought into class for Project Two. Your task, however, is to peer review with fellow students who you have not peer reviewed with before.

Remember: On Wednesday, we are meeting just outside the library in the Atrium on the 4th floor. Your reading assignment to prepare for our library tour and in-library assignment is to skim the sections linked from the Purdue OWL’s Conducting Research site (i.e., read that page and skim the pages linked from there beginning with “Research Overview” and ending with “Internet References.”

For today’s class, you read the “Memory” chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of the chapter and discuss your own memory (e.g., What is your earliest memory? What is your happiest memory? What things do you remember the easiest? What things are more challenging for you to remember?). Type and post your in-class writing as a comment to this blog post before class on Monday.

During today’s class, we have these goals:

• Beginning of Class Writing on the “Attention” chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. Spend the first ten minutes writing a summary of your reading in your notebook. Also, write about your own experiences with maintaining attention, losing someone’s attention, and dealing with distraction.
• Presentation on “Attention” and subsequent discussion.
• Peer Review Team exercise with the brainstorming writing that you began in our last class and brought print outs of your typed up results.
• End of class reminders for next week.
  • Post your beginning of class writing to OpenLab before our next class on Wednesday, 10/14. Keep up with the reading: “Memory” chapter is next.
  • Begin writing Project Two introduction.
  • Print out the pages from your department’s section of the College Catalog.

Resources for today’s discussion:

During the first ten minutes of class, write your summary of the “Wiring” chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. What are some of the most important things that you remember from the chapter? What is special about the wiring of our brains? How does our wiring reflect who we are individually? How does our wiring reveal how we are similar, too? What is the Jennifer Aniston neuron?

For today’s class, you read the “Stress” chapter from John Medina’s Brain Rules. Spend the first ten minutes of class summarizing what you remember from the reading in your notebooks. Before our class on Monday, you will want to type and save copies of your summaries for today’s reading and the previous one on the “Sleep” chapter. Then, copy-and-paste your summary on “Stress” as a comment to this blog post, and copy-and-paste your summary of “Sleep” to the previous blog post that is specifically about that chapter. You will not receive credit for putting your work in the wrong place. Read the blog posts carefully and post your work accordingly. This is building your digital literacy and professional attention to detail. Your summaries for both chapters are due before we come into class on Monday.