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



Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Response to Michael Wesch

In subject to technology, there are many different views to if it’s good or bad. Michael Wesch seems to think that technology can be distracting but if we use it correctly it could be a big help. He took students from an average class size of 115 and had a blog setup about who they are and describing about their lives at school. It ranged from being 20,000$ dollars in debt to not knowing or being comfortable with their teachers. I think this video was very inspirational and informal to people that don’t go to college or that have never been. When the girl shows the sign that says “ I didn’t create these problems,” then in the next scene she says “but they are MY problems.” In my opinion this is a major problem concerning our government and economy because those kinds of things should be taken care of by people with high paying jobs. Not college students going to school and working at something to achieve. The music also adds a huge theme. The music is very depressing in my opinion. It sets the musical theme that something needs change and that something is wrong. I agree with some of that because yes the world needs to make some changes and not rely so much on technology but then again there are few college students that will be able to change those things.
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