In 2007 Michael Wesch’s Intro to Cultural Anthropology class created a video called “A Vision of Students Today”. His class researched different statistics that were all affecting the education that they were receiving. The purpose of the video was to use video text (no spoken words) to explain some of the problems that students are dealing with. Everything from how much time is spent eating and sleeping to how much debt they will be in after paying for four years of college. At the end of the video a question scrolled across the screen asking whether or not technology (with some other help or technology alone) could solve our problems.
Half way through the video there are several students that hold up signs relating to money. One is about how his laptop cost more than some people in the world make a year. Another student held up a sign explaining how she will be 20,000 dollars in debt after paying for school. What if all we needed to go to college was a computer and to pay for the classes? No books, no dorm rooms, no expensive fees. Would the amount of debt Americans are in reduce if we relied on technology to provide our education? I feel like we waste so much money buying books we only use two or three times then after that year they will never be of any use to us again. In other countries college, just like health care is provided for free to benefit and enrich people’s lives not to make them go into debt. Let us use the technology that we have to simplify things and reduce the amount of money we have to spend for school.
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
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
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment