Cathy Davidson Colaborative Learning For The Digital Age Analysis

Rhetoric is language “designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience”. It is important to use rhetoric in order to effectively make an argument. In “Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age”, Cathy Davidson uses Pathos, Logos and Ethos to convince the reader that collaborative learning is a new way that can provide society with a great opportunity to advance in problem solving and learning. The author has established her credibility as a Professor for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, uses logistics from studies done to prove the efficiency of collaborative learning and shares stories to relate to the audiences emotion. Through the rhetorical appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos, the author makes her argument …show more content…
The reasons are that you get valuable information from others that you could have missed, it is more efficient, and it doesn’t discriminate. For example, Duke University assigned each of their incoming freshmen a task to think of new ideas to improve an iPod. This is known as crowdsourcing, meaning, you invite “a group to collaborate on a solution to a problem”. Because so many intelligent people were participating in this, the University was very likely to get a solution to this problem, and get it quickly as well. In the end, the students came up with very innovative learning apps for the ipod that even an employer at apple couldn’t have thought of. This experiment was very beneficial in the way that it not only showed the university that interconnection of students is key to success, but it also showed the students with various expertise that each one of them was crucial to this solution. This backing shows that people were able to find a solution to a problem from learning from another, were able to learn quicker this way, and also respected everyone’s different expertise in the …show more content…
“Participatory learning” meaning learning from one another’s skills, “cognitive surplus” or having more together than individually, and “collaboration by difference” respecting different expertise and perspectives were all used in the classroom to create a better learning environment. Each of these collaborative learning techniques prove the reasons that you get valuable information from others that you could have missed, collaborative learning is more efficient, and it doesn’t discriminate against anyone. The warrant is, however, that the author assumes people want to seek more effective problem/solving techniques. A backing for that is that some people may still like the “regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion”. Overall, the use of logos establishes a logical structure of argument that persuades the reader to participate in collaborative