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

Michael Wesch’s video brings up some pretty shocking facts and ideas about the average college student and their interaction with technology, money, and schooling. Throughout the video, students are raising up pieces of paper that have different messages on them that admits something like, “I bring my laptop to class, but I don’t use it for school work.” Or, “By the time I graduate I will be $20,000 in debt.” Things like that obviously show that there are issues with the education system today. Such as, having classes of 115 kids! That’s crazy, I don’t see how people can learn with a professor blabbing away to a crowd of kids and you somehow try to pay attention and take notes of everything. That’s not the way people should learn in my opinion. In the video one student writes, “I will read 8 books this year, 2,300 web pages, and 1281 facebook profiles.” Does that ratio seem right to you? I think that the education system these days is designed to get as many kids through in the shortest amount of time possible. There are classes at some universities of over 200 people! How is that learning? Education I think can be helped by greatly by education, but not if the internet is abused. It can do great things for a student, but also can be distracting and to time consuming.

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