e20211amwhitney

A topic dealing with online predators covers a lot of ground, but much of the things being written about this topic only skim the surface. I wanted to write about specific stories that could give concrete examples as to why someone would want to talk to a stranger online. I refined my research to cover two reasons I felt were important as to why teens might talk to strangers: meeting people with common interests and meeting people who will accept them for who they are and who are like them. I expanded upon my draft by tying in the story of Justin with the reasons why other teens talk to online strangers. I think this helped bring the whole paper full circle. I refined my paper by adding more facts and statistics to back up what I had said in my draft. This is shown in paragraph one of page two. The Polly Klass Foundation’s website provided concrete evidence to back up my claim that kids are talking to strange adults online everyday. I also moved certain things in my paper around so that it would make more sense. For example, I took some statistics from a block citation by Anastasia Goodstein and weaved them into earlier paragraphs concerning how often teens talk to new people through chatrooms and instant messengers. My essay shows my best ability as a writer by being able to incorporate the sources into my own thoughts. I was able to tie Justin’s story together with why other teens are talking to strangers by showing that he wanted to meet other people with similar interests and he wanted to feel loved and accepted because his family was doing a poor job of showing it. I feel that I was able to bring people a sense of not only why adolescents are talking to strangers online and how they are doing it, but also, let them know that a case like Justin’s is extreme. And though cases like this do happen, it is more common for kids to realize when they are in a situation they should stay away from. I feel that I was able to successfully incorporate different sources by paraphrasing, quoting, summarizing, and skillfully create a works cited page using these sources. I would rate my final paper an 8 on terms of content, a 9 on terms of organization, a 10 on terms of mechanics, and a 9 on terms of revision.

Through this class, I learned how to add things to wikies, post blogs on lyceum, and navigate a little bit better on the University’s library website. I think all in all, using these tools and posting our progress of our research on them helped out a great deal. At any one moment, you could go back and look at an earlier draft or at an earlier idea of what you wanted to fix or build upon. The blogs also made it a lot easier for students to interact with one another, by being able to read other’s posts and give them feedback on what they had typed. The wikies made it especially easy to look up information that we had discussed in class and get to links that we had been shown in lecture. The professor’s website also helped me out a great deal. It was so simple to use and I was connected to everyone in my class and could easily contact anyone if I needed to. Also, Dr. Sherwood’s website had a link to everything we could possibly have needed to use to be successful in this class. I think overall, that using these tools helped my drafting process, making it easier to navigate throughout my journey on this research topic.

I think that i would probably use these tools again if I was doing a similar project and had to be able to contact people in my class. I will definitely be able to use the editing skills learned (for the wiki) in the future. I would recommend this kind of digital dimension to people who are interested in learning more about communicating with others online through blogs and those who are interested in learning more about putting information on the web so other out there can read what they have to say.

I thought some of the individual blogs that didn’t relate to the final research paper were kind of pointless, but it made it easier for the professor to check the students’ progress throughout the semester. Because of this, this kind of work is much better than having to write papers and turn them into the professor on computer paper. It is so much easier to just look online at a student’s work.

My drafting process wasn’t as terrible as I was imagining it to be. Throughout the semester, we started working on building up a draft little by little; first coming up with an introduction, then adding on about 1000 more words to it, making it substantial. Then, as we talked more about specific things in class, such as transitions, I incorporated new sentences into my draft to make it flow better. Once the first draft of about 2000 words was turned in, we got feedback telling up what we might want to improve on. So a revision plan was posted onto my blog (Revision Plan). Some of the drafting was difficult because most sources out there, dealing with teens and tweens online, only talk about the dangers of sexual predators. Not many discuss exactly why people go online to meet others in the first place and the motivations behind doing so. But once I started looking deeper into my research, things became easier to find.

Once I had a plan, I quickly started making changes on my paper. First on my list was to change common mistakes such as spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. Once I went through my paper doing that, I fixed some of the sentences that didn’t quite make sense because of the way they had been worded. I continued to make my transitions stronger, so the reader would be able to jump from one kind of thought to another easily and follow my thought process. Also in this revision plan, I compressed my introduction and I took the advice from my peer reviewers and searched different websites to back up some of my statements in which they felt people might need more evidence to back them up. One specific part of my paper that I had changed was that I tied Justin’s story together with both reasons as to why teens would talk to strangers online, while knowing about online sexual predators.

In choosing a research question about using technology in some way, I looked to a previous blog post for inspiration (Minni Essay (final copy): Is Virtual Rape Even Possible). This post got me thinking about how people feel when they have been sexually harassed on their computer. Also, a lot of our class discussions covered the topic about how some kind of trauma like rape can affect our lives and how this could affect an adolescent. One discussion, in particular, dealt with the issue of underage teens being virtually raped on Second Life, this triggered me to come up with a topic for research dealing with teens talking to strangers, not just in Second Life, but on other virtual mediums as well: MySpace, Facebook, AIM, chatrooms, etc. I wanted to know exactly what programs and websites teens were using to talk to people, friends and strangers alike. Also, I wanted to know how often teens talked to people they have not already previously known and how many of these people were older men or women pretending to be someone much younger. Upon digging for information about how often teens talk to strangers online, more and more sites came up with information about how to protect kids from online predators. I thought that adding something in about how kids could get sucked into talking with online predators would be something exciting to talk about. All of these different questions combined led to my research question “What makes teens and adolescents, who know about the dangers of online sexual predators, decide to talk to and confide in strangers online and how are teens using the Internet to talk to these people?”