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

The importance of video texts today, is the expression of facts to an audience through a form, the American public will,"watch," because it isn't in essay format.
Michael Wesch created a video text with students in the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Class. Michael's video claims, what are we do with the problems of the world, when it is OUR problems? Is school helping this issue? Is watching television, playing on the internet, or texting for hours helping this country or others around it? These are the points Michael is trying to convey to teachers and students across America using the source of You Tube. He is making us think about the importance of technology compared to sitting in a classroom, learning what? Will the effects of school work be important to our lives years from now? He comes up with statistics that will blow your mind. In most countries, people live on less than a dollar a day. Then a student shows a laptop and conveys that the computer cost more than people make in a year.
My point of view is we need to solve the problems of this world quickly but efficently. The problem is we make school a big priority but do we do anything with the schooling we get to make a difference in the world. Just fixing a television will not solve the problems of this world. We need to be on our toes and move on world issues. Michael Wesch is important in putting this video out there for eyes of American's to watch. I hope he is helping world crisis as well, like feeding the hungry.
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