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 Vidieo summary

A lot of people are talking about how technology is holding us back and how it is a big distraction. A large mount of people are concerned with today’s educational system and how it just isn’t keeping up with students today. Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist, he researches about what effects media and technology has on society today. In his video “a vision of students today” it appeared to me how frustrated students are with the education system. One of the quotes from a student in the video that really stood out to me was “when I graduate I will probably have a job that doesn’t exist today.” This quote really makes you realize how fast the world is changing. I think it is true, technology is advancing very rapidly and there will probably be many jobs a few years in the future that don’t exist today. I think the new jobs will have to do with technology. To me it was shocking when I saw this quote because It really makes you stop and think. It makes you realize just how much we are advancing each year. Another quote that stood out to me was “filling this out wont help me get there, or deal with it.” This was written on a scantron test paper, on the front it said “filling this out wont help me get there.” I think that what the student meant by this was that sitting in a class doing something as pointless as filling out answers to a test isn’t helping her get to ware she needs to be in her life. I think the student thinks that it is completely unproductive to just sit around and wait to take action, she wants to go and be the change not study for it. The second part of the quote “or deal with it” was written on the back of the scantron and it had arrows pointing in all directions to papers around her that had world problems on them such as war, ethnic conflict, etc. She is saying that taking a test of her knowledge isn’t helping the world deal with their problems. Being passive aggressive isn’t going to fix anything. You don’t solve problems by sitting back and hoping they get better and you don’t advance in life by just talking about what you are going to do. I think the full quote is expressing how frustrated she is with just having to sit back and wait for someone to decide to fix things, she wants it done now and she is sick of waiting. I believe this video shows a lot of issues and it complains a lot however it also shows some solutions. If we just would use technology to help us then as the video says, it could save us.
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