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



Thursday, October 28, 2010

Summary: Cynthia L. Selfe (Pages 303-309)

In my group, we were given pages 303-309. In our group we split into 2 sub-groups of 3 people. My other two group members and I did our last 6 paragraphs. We stated on the second to last paragraph of page 307, and we ended on the second to last paragraph of page 309. In our section we went over the Un-gendered Utopia narrative. “A good portion of our collective imagination,” of this Utopia, “has been constructed by history and sedimented in past experiences and habit.” (307, par 3) After World War II women were no longer needed in the work place, and because of the advanced technology for housekeeping they were expected to become better housekeepers. It has been said that “men use technology to accomplish things; women benefit from technology to enhance the ease of their lives or to benefit their family.” (308, par 1) Selfe then brings in the 90’s women against the 50’s women. She doesn’t contrast these 2 women, I believe that she is comparing them and showing how much they have in common. As a 50’s women you were expected to be the house keeper. Selfe brings a commercial into her paper about a 90’s woman. She is able to be the housekeeper, and because of technology she is able to go to college and get an education. The woman, Celeste Craig, said she is achieving her dreams of “going to college by staying home.” (308,par 3) These 2 women she is comparing have a lot in common, but the 90’s women have a lot more opportunities to achieve their dreams.

In Cynthia Selfe’s essay, Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution: Images of Technology and the Nature of Change, we learn about our misconceptions of our cultural narratives. According to Selfe, “A good portion of our collective imagination is constructed by history and sedimented in past experience and habit.” In other works, Selfe believes, as do I, that because of our past experiences that is what affects our views of our culture and world.

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