Category: Synthesis Letter

Topic: Impact COVID-19 brought on the tourism industry

Research Questions:

1.What impact COVID-19 brought on the tourism industry? What actions or changes do they take to keep their business going during a pandemic? 

2.How traveling, these types of relaxing activities, help our mood during pandemic?

3.Why is it important to keep this industry going?

Synthesis Letter-

 

Dear Professor,

 

As I further discovered and unfold the topic of the importance of the tourism industry, I found the key answers to my questions and the connection between them. I found a total of four entries that are reliable. They provided me with not only basic knowledge of the topic but also new information we needed to further develop and expand our idea . Some of the entries gave both positive and negative sides on the impact COVID-19 brought on the tourism industry. It gave us insight on how COVID affected this industry and how important it is to keep the tourism industry going even during this time period.

 

The article by the world tourism organization is the bridge that connects all sources. It provides us with a general idea about the topic. This source is similar to EconomistMagazine(2020), they both mentioned how COVID-19 impacts the tourism industry. They both focused on the economic point that this pandemic really harmed the economy in most of the countries. World tourism industry focused more on the harm of the decrease in global GDP, job lost and money lost. In opposition, EconomistMagazine(2020) focused on the damages and challenges airline companies are facing during this time period. Besides the negative impact, these two sources also mentioned how decreasing traveling helped rebuild our environment in some way. As stated in the report, the use of fuel has decreased, which has helped improve our air quality and air pollution. The pause of the air travel also brought many concerns. Due to the pandemic and the virus, traveling has more protocols to follow. It is more strict than before. In order not to expose ourselves to danger and those complicated new rules, the amount of people traveling decreased over the past year. This harmed globalization. In Nordås, H. (2020) journal, it showed us how important the tourism industry is. It connects the whole world. Without it, the problem of unemployment, inequality and remittances are going to come up. This is why it’s important to keep the tourism industry moving in pandemic. In the forth source, Virtual travel experiences to enjoy now, they mention how the creation of the virtual reality(VR) can help us stay home while traveling. It gave us a new opportunity to keep our spirit and our mood going but not harm anyone. It is the perfect combination of technology and travel. 

 

By researching this tropic, I believe I learned much new information from these four entries. This information really acknowledges both positive and negative sides of the impact COVID-19 brought on the tourism industry. I learn not only the original and basic idea, I also see many experiments and data collections that help further develop this topic. I believe I learn a lot that I can explain and support my ideas more clearly after this research process by using my original ideas, thoughts and feedback about the sources. 

 

In conclusion, I think the knowledge I gain from this research process can further support my idea and the product from our company. I think it’s important to acknowledge how important the tourism industry is to us. I’m grateful that I have a chance to introduce this topic and let people learn the importance of keeping this industry moving. It’s a pleasure to invent some product that not only helps the economy stabilize and calm our moods during a pandemic but also helps the recovery of our earth. I believe by combining these four entries, I can form a strong conversation about this topic. 

 

Sincerely,

 

Pei-Ting Fang

Topic: Nomophobia: How common is nomophobia in college students? How nomophobia affects people? How to overcome nomophobia?

Synthesis Letter: 

Dear Professor Beacher,

In the entire source of annotated bibliographic entries, I have obtained, I have found many resources that are useful. I pick some sources that are more useful and revialiable  to use as my entries. These sources focus on different research questions I choose and all the entries are connected someway. These give the main idea that nomophobia is common in college students and it has a great effect on college students. All entries are as progressive as the research questions I put forward. Knowing them can help the audiences to know what is nomophobia, how serious it is and let them concern their mental health.

Jilisha, Menon and Olickal (2019) mentioned that nomophobia is common in college students through experiments, which contains a lot of data. For example, more than half of the participants in the experiment spend a lot of time using smartphones every day. Most of them use mobile phones during leisure time and while sleeping. Nearly 40% of the participants said that using smartphones hindered learning. More than half of the participants said that they would check their smartphones immediately after waking up in the morning. Then, Cole, L. (2020, August 28) demonstrated the influence of nomophobia on people. She said that nomophobia can cause many symptoms like anxiety, respiratory alterations, trembling. After that, MacKay, J. (2017, December 07) talked about how to fight nomophobia like deleting unnecessary apps and separating them from mobile phones. Finally, Agbani, K. (2020, October 5) posted his video on YouTube explaining what nomophobia is, how common it is for people, the signs and symptoms of nomophobia and how to treat nomophobia. This is equivalent to putting three research questions They answered together.

I believe that the information I learned will surely help me to deal with the problem of my topic. Now that I have more knowledge in nomophobia about how common nomophobia is in college students, the effect of nomophobia, and how to overcome nomophobia. This will help me explain and show the topic better and more clearly to the audiences, that is, the college students. I believe that the best way to achieve my goals is to make my articles as much as clear, and easy to understand and straightforward. Make the audience understand what I’m saying because there may be some audiences who have never heard of nomophobia and do not know what nomophobia is. I will clearly state my argument, use simple words, and try to avoid situations that the audience cannot understand.

The knowledge I have learned will provide a “question and answer” for the questions I am researching, and it will fill in the knowledge gaps about the question. The research questions will be the questions asking while the sources I found and chose will be the answers of the research questions. These research questions are connection-like steps, and different sources have different focuses. So, I must combine all the information to answer these research questions completely and all sources will be the argument of my article.

Sincerely, 

Zaining Sun

Yuting Chen
March 12, 2021
Professor Beacher
Draft 2 

Topic: How does virtual learning (gamification ) and online traveling experiences benefit people? 

Research Question:

1. How does gamification bonds to behaviors of online traveling users?
2. What are some core values of gamification?
3. How does virtual traveling experiences help people manage through COVID? 
4. How does the internet help and change the way we travel to a place?
5. How does virtual traveling establish a great opportunity for people with disabilities and people with other special circumstances?

Synthesis reflective  letter: 

Dear Professor Beacher, 

During the process of researching how gamification and virtual traveling experience could benefit people. These four entries are the ones that I think are the most helpful resources to explain the connections among gamification, virtual traveling, and people. These four entries reveal the advantages of gamification, developments of human thinking, and discover core values of both gamification and people. The concept of gamification and virtual traveling has illustrated among these four entries. They help us to realize why gamification has such great potentials and gains in growth of both companies and humans.

            Sigala (2015) and Rosenbloom (2013) both suggest how companies use game mechanics to motivate people to gain rewards in the process of exploring the world virtually. Gamification provides great opportunities to let customers challenge themselves and keep moving forward with their accomplishments. The audience of these two resources are people who are interested in game mechanics and eager to learn about the world virtually. These two authors would like to convey how gamification is a foundation to both companies and people in order to improve their understanding of the world. Companies are composed of people. They need to keep developing new techniques in order to fulfill expectations of their customers. Similarly, customers want to experience new and fun products in order to perform better. Sigala (2015) is a professor of tourism and director of International Federation for Information Technologies in Travel and Tourism( IFITT), she is an expert in traveling management. The article she writes is peer- reviewed scholarly paper, promotes the idea of gamification and then applies the idea to traveling virtually. Since the article mostly mentions the benefits of gamification, I might say it is a little biased because gamification might have some downsides as well. Rosenbloom is a columnist for the travel section of the New York Times, she has been a reporter for more than ten years. She reports how people gain knowledge by using gamified apps and establish virtual museum tours with multiple people. The tone aims to be objective and report what she sees. 

              The third entry, which was published in December 2020, mostly discussing how gamification and virtual learning benefit people during the pandemic. People now are stuck at home due to the pandemic and they have to avoid physical contacts. In addition, people with disabilities also have hard times to have chances to connect with other parts of the world. Virtual traveling establishes connections by interacting with different people. In addition, they are able to adventure more easily than physically go out. The goal of this article is to let people discover about themselves during the pandemic. People have actually reduced their concern due to gamification and virtual traveling. They are able to stay connected with the world. The audience of this article is people who are affected by the pandemic, but try to avoid their concerns about the uncertainty. This article is published by PR Newswire, which released news over sixty years. The tone is aimed to be objective and report how Americans think the pandemic would change overall traveling rates and turn it into virtual traveling. In entry four, Yu- Kai Chou (2014) has developed his own octalysis, which explains the definition of gamification and its core values. The purpose of this video is to encourage people to learn while playing. The tone is inspiring and encouraging. They are involved in something big that might change the world. The eight core drives demonstrate that people have potential to turn games into real life examples. They are able to help and improve the world by inventing creative products. Yu- Kai Chou is a gamification pioneer and helps people believe that they have great ideas to make everything more productive. 

         I believe that these four resources can better help me understand the connections among gamification, virtual learning, and people. They all added to the ‘conversation’. The concepts of eight core drives establish a foundation of introducing and explaining what gamification is about and how they drive people to become a better person. The consequence of knowing the potentials of gamification brings people to apply the ideas of gamification in different areas such as virtual traveling. It raises people’s interests and demands about the product because they discover something new about the world. At the same time, people achieve, accomplish, challenge, and reward themselves with concepts of gamification as company owners and regular people. Virtual learning is simple and convenient, especially now. Virtual learning helps reduce anxiety of people while avoiding physical contacts. It also encourages people with disabilities to not give up the beauty of the world. I believe the best way to organize my ideas is to find connections among the resources and combine the ideas of gamification and virtual traveling to show how they benefit people in various ways. 

Sincerely, 

Yuting Chen

 

Topic: Bilingualism: Is bilingualism good? How to best raise bilingual children? What might be any disadvantages of bilingualism? 

Synthesis Letter: 

Dear Professor, 

Throughout the reaching for sources for my reflected annotated bibliography entries. I found many sources that are useful, where I pick the ones that’s more convincing and revialiable to use as my entries. Even though the authors are writing their ideas in their own perspective and some ideas are very one sided, all the entries are connected someway that gives a main idea that it is importance to understand bilingual and bilingual education, it has both advantages and disadvantages for bilinguals. And knowing them will help a person to understand the advantage he has and knowing which parts he should work harder to improve himself. 

Diaz (1983) and Bhattacharjee (2012) both demonstrates the good side for being bilingual by arguing bilinguals are more advantage in cognitive skills. Both authors justify their perspective by demonstrating persuasive evidence such as experiment done by Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. On the other hand, Ouzia & Folke (2018) illustrations the down side for being bilingual and argues that there is a limit for bilinguals and conducts a research himself to maintain hi argument. In addition, Hu (2008) demonstrates the different types of bilingual education that there are strong and weak ones. Where he claims that heritage language bilingual education is a strong form of bilingual education, according to Baker (2006). Hu (2008) also claims that the Chine-English language bilingual education is a weak form of bilingual education and its misleading the education in China. Also, Bialystok (2009) gives a clear examples of the advantages and disadvantages for bilinguals in his research paper. He is the only author in my entry that don’t take a side on whether bilingual i good or bad. Instead, he demonstrated a clear database of information on the pros and cons for bilinguals. 

I believe that the information I learned will surely help me to address the problem of my topic. Now that I have more knowledge in bilingual education about the pros and cons to it from studies and experiments, this will help me to be better and clearer in explaining and showing the topic to my audience. I believe the best way to achieve my purpose for audiences to thank me is to make my entries clear, easy to understand, and straight to the point. By doing so , I tried to avoid using words directly from the article, and use words that’s easier for audiences to understand. 

The knowledge I learned will create a ‘conversation’ about the problem I investigated and will fill gaps in the knowledge about the problem because the knowledge has different perspectives and interpretations about the topic. Thus, I have to combine all the information together and form a new interpretation, which will also be different from any of the author. This is only because everyone thinks things differently and will create ‘conversation’ about the problem on a certain topic. 

Sincerely,

Student