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



Monday, October 25, 2010

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

When it comes to Carr’s essay, “Is google making us stupid?” it seems to be that everyone thinks that the internet is bad. The summary of this essay is that Carr explains to his readers that people don’t read as much anymore as they used to and that they are turning to the net and the web to find what they want. I compare this to growing up online when the boy talks about doing spark notes and hardly ever reads anymore. Carr states that he used to be a big reader and now all he does is surf the internet for information he needs cause he and many other people just don’t have the time to read anymore. Like he said previously in his essay, “ I used to dive deep in the sea of words like a scuba diver, now I’m like a jet skier riding across the water looking for information!” meaning that he doesn’t get lost in books like he used to he just skims the surface for info he needs. I think that google isn’t necessarily making us stupid. In the new age of today we just found a quicker more efficient way of finding what we want instead of having to read for three hours. I also don’t think its making us stupid because we find information that is true, it would be different if what we are looking for was false but it rarely ever is. So to wrap this up I think google is not making us stupid it’s just a different way of finding information and not everybody is used to it.
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