I chose to observe the class during the most recent class meeting on Thursday, January 29th. I decided to observe the average amount of responses for students with and without laptops, and to tabulate the amount of times the word “technology” (just technology, without any other modifiers) was brought up in each discussion of the two class readings. I thought these two studies would be interesting first because I notice in other classes that many students who regularly bring their laptops tend to pay less attention to their instructor. I also wanted to see how heavily the term technology was used in discussing the two articles, which both were concerned with some aspect of technology and its role in society.

For the first study, I assigned each student a letter, and the recorded a Yes or No next to the letter to show whether or not they had a laptop that appeared to be in use (Students with closed laptops or other electronic devices were recorded as “No’s”). I then tallied the amount of times each student replied, and divided the total count of responses for the students with and without laptops by the respective amounts of students there were in each category. In the end, I determined that students with laptops replied 1.3 times on average, whereas those without laptops replied almost 2.4 times on average.

The second data set was collected using a simple tally-mark method. Each time someone said the word “technology”, I recorded it in the appropriate column for the article. For the first article, the word technology was spoken a staggering 74 times (Not surprising given the title of the article). In our discussion of the second article, it was mentioned only 7 times. I think these two findings are interesting, and I’d like to see what other factors influence the average responses per student.