What distractions in your life pull your focus away from your new student responsibilities?
Discussion: Managing Distractions

Discussion

Post a response at least 200–300 words to one of the following prompts: EITHER Prompt A or Prompt B. Use the writing resources, writing samples, and the Discussion Rubric to develop your post.

Prompt A

What distractions in your life pull your focus away from your new student responsibilities? What concerns do you have about managing these distractions? After completing the Support Network Exercise, what did you learn about your support network?

Develop and share your plan to either obtain the support you need or to grow your current support network to help alleviate some of your distractions. In addition, explore the Walden Support Community and share something you learned to help yourself transition to the role of Walden student.

Assignment: Analysis of Imagery: Evaluating an Artifact

Humans are art making creatures. From the evocative hunting depictions of our ancient ancestors to modern dance, humans have reacted to their environment by painting, singing, dancing, writing, and recording the things they encounter. In this week’s assignment, you will be asked to select an artifact to analyze. Make sure that you choose something that really resonates with you, but also make sure that you would not mind sharing it with the members of the class. Understand that this is an academic workspace, and select an image, poem, or song that you would be comfortable sending to the entire class. You are free to select any object that is shareable electronically with your classmates.

Photo credit: Microsoft Corporation. (Producer). MP900309017 [photo of brushes and art supplies]. Retrieved February 6, 2014 from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=art&ex=1%20-%20ai:MP900309017|#ai:MP900309017

Discussion: Managing Distractions

Discussion: Managing Distractions

Evaluating a work of art requires some distance from the piece. You will be asked to analyze the artifact that you select and to describe why the piece was selected. Please choose something that you would not mind others critiquing. For example, if you select a painting that your sister painted, you might not want to have someone write that they didn’t like the subject or style. Make sure that you are comfortable with the piece being viewed and analyzed by other members of the class.

In this Assignment you will identify and analyze an artifact of your choice. The resources used in the Week 2 Notes and Readings are just a few of the options for types of media you might select as meaningful to you.

To prepare for the Assignment:

· Read the Reading Images and Texts document in this week’s Learning Resources.

· Select an artifact, something that is important to you or resonates with you in some way. Make certain you have a way to share the artifact electronically. You can save the website/link to the artifact if you found it online or take a photo or scan the artifact.

· Use the Artifact Analysis Worksheet to evaluate your artifact.

· Use the Academic Writing Expectations (AWE) Checklist to guide your writing for each question on the worksheet. Even when you are filling in a worksheet, you should be considering the AWE guidelines.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.