Thanksgiving Break Blog Prompts

Here are the options for 11/24-12/1:

Option 1:

TED talks by Ellen Saks and Eleanor Longden share many commonalities but also significant differences. Both speakers were diagnosed with schizophrenia as undergraduates and ended up being hospitalized. Each discusses her path to getting a handle on their mental health. Discuss the similarities and differences between the talks and the treatment each speaker received on her path to health. You also need to explore how we could identify students with mental health issues sooner and how we could get students to accept help.

Option 2:

Another set of TED talks conducted by Temple Grandin and Rosie King show two perspectives on living with autism. Both make a call for celebration of diversity, specifically neurological diversity and share their thoughts on how the world can benefit from being inclusive. Some people with disorders on the autism spectrum take offense to the idea they need to be “cured.” How do these two talks fit into the idea of trying to “cure” autism and how should we think about treatment with this population?

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Week 13 Blog Prompts

Here are the options for 11/17-11/24:

Option 1:

As mentioned in class, the Implicit Association Test (which can be accessed through this link) is a tool to identify biases which may be outside your conscious awareness. The results of this test cannot determine whether or not you are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., but they are useful to help you understand yourself and how you interact with others. For this post, you must take two separate IAT tests from the link above. You do not need to share your results if you don’t want to, but you need to talk about the experience of taking the test and getting the results, comment on whether or not the results were surprising, and discuss how this test can be useful for college students or your future career.

Option 2:

Now that we have learned about the power of persuasion, it’s time to examine these effects in our own lives. In advertising, both the central route and the peripheral route are used to persuade an individual. Many commercials use these routes to persuade an individual to buy their product or to buy into their idea. Select a product (e.g., cars, cereal, video games) and find a commercial that displays the central route and another that displays the peripheral route of persuasion. Discuss how each route is used, argue which route of persuasion you believe worked best, point out any other persuasion techniques that you noticed, and explain how the commercials could have better displayed the route of persuasion it used. Please put the link to the commercials in your discussion.

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Week 12 Blog Prompts

Here are the blog options for Week 12 (11/10-11/17):

Option 1:

Stress is something all too common in college students’ lives, but what if you could change your relationship with stress. Kelly McGonigal discusses doing just that in her TED talk “Making Stress Your Friend.” Watch the video, share your reactions, discuss how reasonable you find its message to be, and discuss how you could implement some of the ideas into your life.

Option 2:

We all have different methods for coping with stress. For this prompt, please discuss your typical strategies for dealing with stress and evaluate how well they have worked for you this semester. Next, list 3 new strategies for coping with stress you could try and discuss how effective you think they would be. Finally, find a website that provides tips for handling stress and discuss how credible you find the site and its recommendations.

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Week 11 Blog Prompts

Here are the options for 11/3-11/10:

Option 1:

We all want to enjoy life and seek ways to make ourselves happy. Indeed, we spend much of lives chasing the goal of happiness. But how good are we at actually finding it? Dan Gilbert discusses the ways in which we sabotage our own happiness in his TED talk. Watch the video, share your reactions, and discuss ways in which you can incorporate more synthetic happiness into your life.

Option 2:

Motivation is not a stable force, but often waxes and wanes. Throughout your time at Austin College, your motivation for school will undoubtedly be higher at some times and lower at others. How can we use the principals of motivation we discussed in class and read about in the text to help ourselves push through times of low motivation? Specifically, I want you to discuss why you chose to come to Austin College and use 2 different theories of motivation to explain your decision. I also want you to plan an intervention for yourself for how you can maintain motivation to succeed until graduation.

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