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

Michael Wesch response

Michael Wesch’s video “A Vision Of Students Today” brings up some depressing facts about the college students at KSU and their thoughts of technology and schooling. Throughout the video it’s show the students thought on held up cars or on their laptops in class. One kid wrote on his laptop, I bring my laptop to class, but I don’t use it for school work. Others had their thoughts on schooling saying that “they have an average of 115 students in their classes” so “only about 20 percent of their teachers know their names”. I believe that if a teacher knows you on a more personal basis that he/she can better teach you, so if you have smaller classes thats better. The kids also have to pay for books that are rarely used and say that, “by the time I graduate I will be $20,000 in debt. That is crazy. Many of the students are stating that they spend about as much time using one piece of technology than they do studying or doing homework or that they end up reading and writing way more on Facebook than they do for a class. One student said, “I will read 8 books this year, 2,300 web pages, and 1281 Facebook profiles. This just proves that the internet encourages people to read because it is for an entertaining basis and keeping up to date with friends. I believe that the technologies we have are helping us with the education system we have. Instead of using up a lot of paper we can do it all online to submit an assignment. As long as students are willing to learn and are mature enough to use computers in class properly and not get distracted I believe that it can be a huge benefit for students.
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