Ashry 1 Nedal Ashry Prof. Guzik ENGL 301B 15 February 2020 Education and Technology The benefits of technology cannot be denied in how they help students getting their work done both in and outside of the classroom. Technology also saves students time by helping them submit their work when it’s due. Even with these great benefits, using screen-based-devices can distract students from staying focused. Handwriting notes is more efficient than typing it because the notes will be more specific. In this essay, I will discuss the benefits of screen-based-devices in education and their disadvantages. I will discuss a potential policy which California State University Long Beach should adopt in order to prevent students from multitasking and staying focused on getting one task done at a time. Administrators and instructors should develop ways to help students stay engaged in class by providing them with a productive environment for learning with the use of screen-based-devices. Students who try to multitask can’t get things done in a timely manner since their brain can’t process two different things at the same time. According to Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who is a neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco, the prefrontal cortex faces challenges when the brain tries to process multiple tasks at the same time. Studies show that the brain works in harmony with the prefrontal cortex when one task is being accomplished. However, as soon as students start multitasking, the right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the brain are forced to work independently which stops them from getting things done on time. However, if they focus on doing schoolwork or taking notes individually from start to finish, they won’t be worried or concerned about checking their devices. In order for the prefrontal cortex to process things in harmony with the rest of the brain, students should minimize the use of screen-based-devices while they are in class or doing homework so that they can get tasks done on a timely manner. Another disadvantage about screen-based-devices is the ability to retain information during lectures. Students spend the entire class time taking notes on their electronic devices without paying full attention to the material being taught. I have experienced this issue myself when I would be taking notes during class, and when I went home to study. I had a hard time understanding my notes because I didn’t spend as much time paying attention during class. With some professors drawing diagrams or not having uniform notes, I would not be able to copy down the information on my screen-based-device as quickly or in a manner that would make as much sense as what the professor wrote on the board. I also would get distracted as soon as I received a notification from either Facebook, Twitter or when I receive an important email. I would often find myself switching from one screen to another and oftentimes forget that I am in class. It came to a point where I prefer ...

1. Ashry 1
Nedal Ashry
Prof. Guzik
ENGL 301B
15 February 2020
Education and Technology
The benefits of technology cannot be denied in how they help
students getting their work done both in and outside of the
classroom. Technology also saves students time by helping them
submit their work when it’s due. Even with these great benefits,
using screen-based-devices can distract students from staying
focused. Handwriting notes is more efficient than typing it
because the notes will be more specific. In this essay, I will
discuss the benefits of screen-based-devices in education and
their disadvantages. I will discuss a potential policy which
California State University Long Beach should adopt in order to
prevent students from multitasking and staying focused on
getting one task done at a time. Administrators and instructors
should develop ways to help students stay engaged in class by
providing them with a productive environment for learning with
the use of screen-based-devices.
Students who try to multitask can’t get things done in a
timely manner since their brain can’t process two different
things at the same time. According to Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who
is a neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco, the
prefrontal cortex faces challenges when the brain tries to
process multiple tasks at the same time. Studies show that the
brain works in harmony with the prefrontal cortex when one
task is being accomplished. However, as soon as students start
multitasking, the right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the
brain are forced to work independently which stops them from

2. getting things done on time. However, if they focus on doing
schoolwork or taking notes individually from start to finish,
they won’t be worried or concerned about checking their
devices. In order for the prefrontal cortex to process things in
harmony with the rest of the brain, students should minimize the
use of screen-based-devices while they are in class or doing
homework so that they can get tasks done on a timely manner.
Another disadvantage about screen-based-devices is the
ability to retain information during lectures. Students spend the
entire class time taking notes on their electronic devices without
paying full attention to the material being taught. I have
experienced this issue myself when I would be taking notes
during class, and when I went home to study. I had a hard time
understanding my notes because I didn’t spend as much time
paying attention during class. With some professors drawing
diagrams or not having uniform notes, I would not be able to
copy down the information on my screen-based-device as
quickly or in a manner that would make as much sense as what
the professor wrote on the board. I also would get distracted as
soon as I received a notification from either Facebook, Twitter
or when I receive an important email. I would often find myself
switching from one screen to another and oftentimes forget that
I am in class. It came to a point where I preferred taking notes
in my notebook rather than typing them in. That way I could
stay on track with the lecture and retain information better for
when I study outside class. Taking notes on screen-based-
devices really hurt my productivity in the long run, because I
was so focused on writing everything down which made it more
difficult to listen and absorb the information. Screen-based-
devices also has the influence of allowing boredom to get the
better of me. With the endless distractions just a few clicks
away, I would go online and surf the web in order to deal with
what’s more appealing.
The Bank of England chief economist states, “Skills building
innovation and an entire economy could be at risk because fast
thought could make for slow growth.” We live in a very fast age

3. where information is spread across the world in matter of
minutes if not seconds. Students tend to stay up to date with
everyday information, and for this reason they don’t want to
risk missing anything that happens in, even during class time
and that’s what causes them to multitask in a bad way.
Multitasking has its disadvantages, and procrastination certainly
plays a major role in this. Students tend to procrastinate when
they focus on secondary tasks and deviate from the primary task
which they should focus on in the meantime. One of the most
distracting secondary tasks is social media. The problem with
social media is that we are receiving notifications from our
friends, family, or news organizations constantly. When we
receive a notification from a friend, we leave what we are
working on in order to check what they’ve sent us, and that’s
what makes students lose their train of thought; it is as if our
brains are addicted to these notifications and we are willing and
wanting to respond to them right away. According to Zomorodi
in Bored and Brilliant “There’s no way it can be completely out
of your mind if you still have your phone in sight. Also, have
you ever managed not to look at an object that starts buzzing in
your hand?” (2). It is especially tempting in school, because
classes are not always exciting or interesting during its entirety.
Therefore, it’s not easy to ignore your device if it’s in your
hand or nearby. However, being addicted to the devices can cost
more than just not focusing in a class it can cause accidents.
The news also plays a role in this as well. As current events are
new and stimulating and draw our attention immediately. What
we see day to day regarding politics, the economy, or anything
else that plays an important role in our lives so it just.
Technology adds fuel to the fire of distractions. This dilemma is
related to multitasking which us students suffer from during our
undergraduate career. This can be seen by a participant of the
Bored and Brilliant challenge, who said, “I’d like to sit and read
and not interrupt myself every five minutes to check Clash of
Clans; or watch an hour-long drama and really appreciate all the
nuances which I’ve been missing because I’m only spending 30

4. percent of my attention on it.” If this is affecting people during
their leisure activities, it is going to distract people when they
need to be productive such as in class or at work.
This problem is not only important to take on for when the
students are in school, but also for their futures. If they are
distracted in class, this will undoubtedly spillover into their
careers. An example in Bored and Brilliant is, “I have a whip-
smart colleague who always has the best ideas for shows and
edits- but who also can’t keep from checking Instagram…Even
when we play back the sound edit, she can’t help herself”(34,
Zomorodi). The author goes on to explain how the coworker is
unaware of what is going on and things must be repeated. They
also describe how people cannot focus even during face-to-face
encounters and social situations. By stopping this in schools, it
would benefit students in their future careers and social lives a
whole. Many technical things are learned in school, but by
stopping distracting technology in the classroom it could teach
them a healthy life habit; by not having these distraction it
could set them up with a solid foundation for being more
focused in when they enter the workforce. In other words, each
time a person takes his/her focus from one thing to another,
their brain takes new information, which reduces their primary
focus. Constantly being distracted leads to inefficiency, and at
work a problem like that could end a career and cause trouble
when it comes to getting and retaining a new job.
While technology is great and important for our society going
forward, its disadvantages outweigh the advantages in this
setting. I believe administrators and instructors should limit the
technology access during lecture time, so students can have
their full attention to the lecture. By doing this, students will
have no option but to live up to their true potential and perform
at a higher level overall. When students pay attention in class,
they won’t have to go over their notes repeatedly on their own
time since they can more easily retain the information covered
during lecture. I believe instructors should enforce physical
textbooks rather than online books and PDFs since that will

5. help students stay focused longer and be able to shut off the
“technology overload”. Also, students should be writing their
notes in the class instead of typing it using screen-based-
devices. In fact, the mind learns and processes more information
by writing things out rather than typing it out due to muscle
memory. Moreover, technology has been evolving yet our form
of writing information hasn’t really changed. This is why it is a
natural way for us to remember more when we write things
down. If schools make textbooks cheaper to buy or rent, then it
will offset the potential for this affecting the students’
financials. Stopping the use of screen-based-devices would
benefit everyone; from students, professors, the schools
themselves and society as a whole with people who know how
to work effectively and efficiently.
Citation
Zomorodi, Manoush. Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing out Can
Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. Picador, 2018.
McClurg, Lesley. “Don't Look Now! How Your Devices Hurt

6. Your Productivity.” NPR, NPR, 19 Oct. 2016,
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/19/498450445/dont-
look-now-how-your-devices-hurt-your-productivity.
English 301B Sections 12 & 15
Prof. Guzik Spring 2020
Assignment #1: Doling out the Dopamine
Purpose:
This first assignment asks you to become a researcher by
thinking about your own use of technology and then to draw
conclusions as you synthesize what others have to say with your
own observations and experience.
As with all essays in this class, the prompts here are
purposefully broad. Part of what we’ll focus on is learning how
to narrow the scope of a prompt to allow you to write about
yours interests—in other words to personalize the prompt—
without leaving out any parts of the prompt that must be
addressed in order to create a draft that merits a passing score
on the GWAR Portfolio Rubric.
With those tasks as the foundation for the topic, in terms of
specific writing skills, we’ll focus on really learning techniques
for decoding prompts, drafting more complex thesis statements
than the five paragraph or five-paragraph-style essay
encourages, and developing awareness of your own writing
process. We’ll also cover the basic mechanics of citation—
including both quotation and paraphrasing.
In addition, we will go over some foundational information
about grammar: distinguishing between clauses and phrases
using a reliable technique for finding subjects and verbs. This
particular grammar lesson might not be especially fun or flashy,

7. but it’s the foundation for many common grammar issues;
finding and correcting run-on sentences and fragments,
correctly using semicolons, understanding the rules of comma
placement, and subject-verb agreement all require that writers
have the skill to analyze what kind of group of words is on the
page.
Background:
Manoush Zomorodi, a public radio host in New York City,
created a challenge for listeners who were concerned that their
relationship with screen-based devices (SBD) like smartphones
and tablets was reshaping the ways that they thought. Although
Zomorodi focused on creativity and productivity, academics
have long worried about the ways in which multitasking may
seem like a more efficient way to get work done but may
actually have the opposite effect, especially on students both in
the classroom and while doing homework. Many of today’s
electronic devices, including those we see in CSULB
classrooms, certainly seem to encourage multi-tasking in
general.
Tristan Harris worked in tech at Google before the company
asked him to think about the ethics of design in their products.
Eventually, he began writing and speaking as a critic of the tech
industry overall, analyzing how the applications, software,
websites, and platforms we use are being purposefully designed
to get us to spend as much time as possible on a specific device,
app, or program. His TED Talk “How Better Tech Could
Protect Us from Distraction” not only critiques the way many
current technological developments are poorly designed but also
offers some design alternatives that he argues can restructure
technology to help us be more productive and less distracted.
In this assignment, we’ll think about Zomorodi’s and Harris’s
arguments in depth. Based on what you learn from the readings

8. and from your own observations of the world around you, you’ll
be asked to craft an argument that synthesizes data gleaned
from all those sources with your own research and opinions into
an essay designed to convince others of your point of view in
light of all that evidence.
For both prompts, you should start out by taking a mental
inventory of your own personal experiences and your own
observations about how you see people around you (including
yourself) using technology, particularly screen-based devices
(SBD).
Prompt:
In a 1500 to 1800 word thesis-driven, university-level essay,
take a position on only one of the two following prompts:
argue for a SPECIFIC redesign of one app/program/platform/or
website that you regularly visit and/OR USE. your proposed
redesign should strive to make that technology something that
contributes More than it currently does to meaningful
productivity for users. MAKE SURE TO CLEARLY DEFINE
WHAT YOU MEAN BY PRODUCTIVITY AS YOU USE THE
TERM IN YOUR ESSAY. ALSO, be sure to explain why the
redesign you propose is in line with what research says about
how humans interact with THE technology you’re focusing on.
OR
argue PRECISELY HOW one key characteristic of SBD
technology is potentially detrimental to the “HIGHER-LEVEL
THINKING” REQUIRED IN UPPER-DIVISION CLASSES at
CSULB. Write a persuasive editorial for the daily 49er and the
academic senate in which you propose a specific policy that our
campus should ADOPT for students ON CAMPUS to help
CSULB graduates develop a more productive relationship with

9. screen-based devices. be sure to provide clear reasoning for
why that you think THAT policy IS IMPORTANT AT CSULB
TODAY. ALSO MAKE SURE TO DRAW ON YOUR ACTUAL
EXPERIENCES WITH HIGHER-LEVEL THINKING IN UPPER
DIVISION CLASSES HERE ON CAMPUS.
Requirements:
Final drafts (both the First Final draft and the Revised Final
draft) should be a minimum of 1500 words from the first word
of the introductory paragraph to the last word of the conclusion.
Drafts shouldn’t really be much longer than 2100 words (with
the same counting protocol.) Remember that headers, titles, and
works cited pages do not count toward the word count.
Papers should be in MLA format throughout. Papers must
include a properly formatted works cited page in correct MLA
style.
Remember that the strongest essays do not look backwards,
offering homilies or advice to students who are behind you in
school, younger in age, or lesser in experience with education.
Instead, the strongest essays stake out a position of authority
and imagine their audience as colleagues in the university
community: other undergraduate students, graduate students,
and professors, including faculty outside the department that
offers this class and outside your major as well.
In other words, you have to write with an authority that
suggests you see yourself as a peer of not only your classmates
but also as a peer of your professors. In addition, you have to
do that without seeming cocky or without seeming as if you
haven’t considered all possible perspectives on the issue only
after looking critically at academic-level evidence.

10. If you don’t feel like you really have the confidence to speak
authoritatively to that audience, to be successful in upper
division university-level writing, you’re going to have to learn
to fake it without coming off as pompous.
Essays must make use of Zomorodi and/or Harris in ways that
demonstrate that the author of the essay understands the major
arguments made in the book and/or talk. Passing references to
Bored and Brilliant or Harris’s TED talk are not enough.
Simply sprinkling a quote or two—particularly cherry-picked
quotes that do not line up with the author’s actual thesis—will
result in a reduction in the grade of your essay. Any essays that
do not effectively refer to substanative arguments in Zomorodi
and/or Harris will be marked down by one full letter grade. At
least one of the arguments you use MUST come from Zomorodi.
Final drafts may include personal experience, especially that
based on your own technology use and what you observe about
how other people use technology. Using first person is
acceptable in such instances, but please refrain from
undermining your own credibility with phrasing like “I think,”
“I feel,” “I believe,” “in my opinion,” or other similar means of
unhelpful qualification of your argument.
The drafts of the paper that you turn in should demonstrate that
you have a writing process that allows you, through revision, to
improve both global concerns such as organization and quality
of support and sentence-level issues (like common grammatical
and mechanical mistakes.) The first final draft of this paper
should be polished and the result of multiple, substantial drafts
with both global and sentence-level revision.
Required Readings:
Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (See assignment
schedule for specific dates and chapters)

11. Tristan Harris “How Better Tech Could Protect Us from
Distraction” (The TED Talks website has both a video and a
transcript, so you’re welcome to watch and listen or watch and
read along, or both.)
Leslie McClurg “Don’t Look Now! How Your Devices Hurt
Your Productivity” (not a required reading for this essay, but
you may use it in addition to the Harris and Zomorodi)
Anil Dash “Twelve Things Everyone Should Understand about
Tech.” (an article published at medium.com, link in
BeachBoard.)
James Doubek “Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away”
from NPR.org
Key Terms:
The First Final draft is not a rough draft. The first final draft is
the best polished draft you can produce in a few weeks of work.
At minimum, the First Final draft that you submit electronically
should have been the following revision processes before you
upload it to the Dropbox in BeachBoard:
*Evaluation by you to make sure that the paper’s thesis is
NOT a five-paragraph style thesis, that the thesis responds to
just one of the two prompts here, and that the thesis matches the
full draft that you’ve written.
*Global revision to make sure that each paragraph has a
connection to the paper’s thesis.
*Checking to make sure that your argument is informed by
two central arguments from Harris’s and/or Zomorodi’s work.
*At least two meaningful and careful rounds of sentence-
level editing. One of those rounds of editing must involve
reading a draft out loud from a hard copy—not a screen on your
tablet or laptop.

12. Due Dates and Formats:
See the A1 assignment schedule for day by day assignments,
including homework. The first final draft of A1 needs to be
uploaded to the appropriate Dropbox in BeachBoard no later
than Friday 14 February by 1 pm Pacific time.
Please name the file as follows:
sp20e301bsecXyourlastnameA1FF
Replace yourlastname with your actual last name. (I will
announce to each class whether or not there are multiple
students with the same last name; if there are, please use your
last name and first initial.) You are always welcome to put
additional information onto the end of that file name (like draft
1, draft 2, v3,v6, and so on.) Make sure that the file is in an
acceptable format even if you’ve written the document in a
different word processing program.
Graded copies of the essay will be returned no later than two
weeks from the time you submit the essay, except in cases of
instructor illness or personal emergency.
You will get a separate assignment sheet and daily schedule for
the Revised Final Draft portion of A1.
Remember that when I calculate your final grade in the class,
the First Final Draft counts for 1/3 of the overall A1 essay
grade. The revised final counts for 2/3. (As an example: a
paper that earns a D- on the first final draft and a C/C- on the
revised final draft, would be recorded as a 69.705 when
calculating your final class grade: 62 * 1/3 + 73.5 * 2/3=
69.705).
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