Tech essay - Topics and ideas

  • Due Jun 21, 2020 by 11:59pm
  • Points 2
  • 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!"  

In this assignment, 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, and do some initial searches for scholarly sources about how these different technologies might affect your chosen career community.

 

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.  

To find a newspaper or newsmagazine in our library,

  • go to the UW Libraries home page (https://www.library.wisc.edu/ Links to an external site.)
  • 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 newsmangazine
  • 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.  

2. Construct a search 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"

3. Pick three possible news articles that you might use as the "seed" for your paper.  For each article, write down the outlet where it appeared, the search terms you used to find it, a brief summary of what the article is about, and some ideas about how it might serve as a good paper topic.

4. Do some initial scholarly article searches based on these three articles.  Go to the UW Libraries article search page Links to an external site. (or just go to the main UW Libraries page Links to an external site. and choose "Articles" from the drop down search menu).  For each of the three news articles you found above, now do a second-order search for scholarly articles related to the topic of the news article, to see whether there is recent research on how the technology and career community mentioned in the news article interact.  This involves not just repeating your news searches in the research literature database, but also trying to figure out what kinds of additional terms and concepts from the news article might be effective search terms to get you into the scholarly literature.  For example, you might scour each news article to see if it contains these kinds of clues:

  • Titles of particular research studies recently published on the new technology
  • Names of individual researchers whose work is relevant to the new technology
  • Technical or official terms for the new technological developments 
  • Companies or organizations which are experimenting with the new technology

For each of your three candidate news articles, find at least two likely scholarly sources that might allow you to delve deeper into that topic.  Briefly describe what each of these scholarly sources are about, as well as the search terms that led you to them.  (This means you should find and describe six new scholarly sources in all.)

5. Note some useful ideas from the scholarly articles we've been reading each week.  Finally, for each of your three candidate topics, search our weekly assigned scholarly articles for some analytical tools that can help you make good arguments.  After all, the first eight scholarly articles on our syllabus all deal with different ways in which automated and digital technologies are changing the nature of professional work -- not only the goals that work is meant to accomplish and how it is performed, but also the impacts it has on human communities and natural environments.  These articles were chosen because they introduce key concepts that can be useful to you in formulating your own arguments about technology in your chosen career community.

Browse back through the assigned scholarly articles that we've been reading each week (and look ahead to the assigned scholarly articles coming up in the next few weeks) to see if you can identify any specific ideas, bits of evidence, or useful concepts that might help you make an interesting argument about each topic.   For each idea or concept you find, write down a key quote demonstrating how the article author defines or uses it in their article, and suggest how you might use it in your essay.  You need to find at least two ideas for each of the three news articles you started with, for a total of six useful ideas.   

6. Turn it in.  Upload to Canvas the document describing your three news articles which are candidate topics for your paper, your six new scholarly source descriptions, and your six useful ideas from the scholarly articles already on our syllabus.  

 

 

Examples

Here are some examples of an online New York Times Links to an external site. 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 Links to an external site."
    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. Links to an external site."
    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 Links to an external site."
    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)

 

 

More information on scholarly article searches

Whether writing a research paper for a college class, investigating an organization you may be interested in working for, or composing a summary memo on a new competitive trend for an employer, the ability to quickly and effectively investigate a topic and find reliable, useful, and understandable information on an issue that you’re not already familiar with is a key professional communication skill.

 

You are probably accustomed to doing simple web information searches using tools like Google and Wikipedia. These are good starting points, but use caution:

  • The first few hits that appear in a Google search are not necessarily the most authoritative or effective resources. Even if a site provides factually accurate information, that information may not be complete, relevant, or understandable.

    Tip: Your Google search results may differ from those of others based on your personal search history, your location, or other contextual factors.

  • The Wikipedia page for a particular topic can be a good starting point for learning about a new subject. But an encyclopedia entry is meant to provide the basic consensus outline on a topic, not the open debates or most recent developments.

Tip: Well-written Wikipedia articles include footnotes and source links at the bottom of the page, which can lead you to scholarly sources.

 

A second step is to do a library resource search using the book or article database. This can lead you to more authoritative writing that has been peer-reviewed (other experts have had a chance to review the work, suggest improvements, and ultimately approve the work for publication), copy edited (experts in language usage and clarity have helped the author polish the writing), and professionally published (an organization with a reputation to maintain, a professional audience to serve, and a business model to uphold has agreed to put its name reputation behind the piece). Our library owns research materials that you can’t find for free on the open web.

 

A third way to find scholarly articles is to directly consult professional journalism sources available online. Many prominent, national- and global-scale journalism organizations like The New York Times, the Economist, or Scientific American have decades-long records of comprehensive coverage, accessible writing, and verified accuracy. If you access these sources through UW-Madison libraries as a student, especially through the library search tools above, you can avoid the paywalls that limit content only to subscribers. All university students should regularly read one or two respected, comprehensive journalism sources.

  • Contemporary journalism reporting may cover breaking news (the big story that everyone else is covering, often changing over time as new information is revealed) or they may present their own investigative reporting (longer-term stories that the news outlet covers even if no one else is talking about that issue).

    Tip: Reporting often contains weblinks to research institutes, scholarly articles, or datasets that can help you find outside scholarly sources and evidence.

  • Besides breaking news and investigative reporting, professional journalism organizations employ experts who provide opinion editorials (op-eds) and news analysis. These types of articles should be clearly marked to distinguish them from regular breaking news or investigative reporting.

    Tip: Opinion and analysis pieces can demonstrate how someone from a particular background, using a particular set of assumptions, might explain and make arguments about the topic that you are researching.

 

Finally, the most important tool for finding scholarly articles is to follow the bread crumbs of author names, journal titles, and book titles that connect one useful source to another. For example:

  • Use Google and Wikipedia searches to gather likely search terms and concepts that can help you do more effective searches of library databases.

  • When you use a library search database to find a useful article, note the name of the journal and browse through the last few years of articles from that journal to see if the subject comes up again in a different way.

  • Many library search databases for books and articles now have a Netflix-like feature listing related books and articles for each search result.

  • When you find a useful scholarly book or article, use the library book search and article search to find other pieces written by the same author that might expand on the ideas or restate them in a more understandable way.

  • When you find a useful scholarly book or article, check the footnotes to see what research the authors are building upon, responding to, or criticizing in their own work. Often the footnotes include lists of references to basic background on a subject that can help introduce you to a new research area.

  • Read a professional news source every day and follow up on links, researchers, and ideas from interesting news articles.

 

Bonus: Here are some video tutorials on finding scholarly articles from the UW Libraries.

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