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

Summary of Michael Wesch's video text.

Michael Wesch created a video titled “A vision of students today.” This video text informs us of the educational situation of students today, and their hardships. The statements made in this video reflect on the redundancy that some students must go through such as buying $100 text books that will never be open or used, reading that is barely relevant to life or even the work assigned. This video holds much truth in it that I can relate to. I am taking another English class that I find almost useless. This video really shows the frustration of some students, and even though this is only my first year at WCC I can understand somewhat. Studying to retain facts that sometimes are unnecessary, books that would take up more than half of my check, even if I bought them for cheap online. All just to pass a class that makes up only a fraction of what I must do to accomplish what I want. The educational system is not adapting well to the influx of students and advancing technology. It’s easy to relate to a statement that a student made when she held up a sign that said “My neighbor paid for class…but never comes.” In my other English class I have only seen a certain student twice in that class, and I go every time. The classroom needs to change as well as how things are done.
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