Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Wednesday, October 13, 2010

A Good Point or Misguided Students?

Michael Wesch, a Professor at Kansas State University and his 200 students conducted a study regarding the most important characteristics of students today: how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. They then created a video text to show their results.

The video showed the 200 students sitting in a lecture hall. Each student would raise a piece of paper which has a fact from their results handwritten on it. A few examples of what was written are: “I buy hundred dollar text books that I never open,” “18% of my teachers know my name,” and “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me and only 26% are relevant to my life.” Others mentioned the use of their time throughout the day and not having enough which meant they needed to be multitaskers and one student held a sign up that said he brings his laptop to school but doesn’t use it for class work.

I can see how, yes, technology is a big thing today and more students are reading websites, blogs and Facebook pages rather than their homework, but who is responsible for this? Is this really something that the education system needs to look at, or do these students need to take responsibility for their learning? If these students were to schedule their time better, find out what their priorities are, they could probably be really successful in college. The thought that a lot of these students have their schooling paid for and choose to do other things rather than study is really sad. If they were participating in class, maybe their instructors would know their names and maybe opening up that text book to do the readings assigned to them, they wouldn’t have felt as though that was money wasted. I just really feel that these students made themselves look a bit on the spoiled and lazy side in this video.

There are options of taking classes online, there are many different ways to break up a class schedule and there are so many interesting classes to take. They can leave their laptops at home, turn off their cell phone for an hour or so and focus on what they are in school for. Set a goal and work towards it, instead of feeling as though time is wasted in studying.

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