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

Summary of Michael Wesh "A vision of students today"

Angel Tellez
English 100
october 12, 2010

When it comes to the topic of education and students today, Michael Wesh and 200 Kansas state university students made a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today and how they learn. It begins with a quote from Marshall Mcluhan 1967 stating that " Todays child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented classified patterns subjects and schedules". The music by "tyrad" is sad yet almost empowering for a change. As the students sit around in a bland university classroom with a look of boredom or depression on their faces they hold up homemade signs that state their perspective on school and technology. One states "my average class size is 115 students" "I buy hundreds dollar textbooks and never use them" "18% of my teachers dont know my name" "I will read 8 books this year,2300 web pages and 1281 facebook profiles" one girl states that she will "write 42 pages for class in a semester and over 500 pages of emails" the students are successfully getting their point across that technology is an everyday factor for todays youth. they will be in debt by the time they graduate college and the learning process in the basic education system is not keeping up with them, the chalkboard is not doing the job it use to. from what I understanding of this video text is that yes things are very different in the classroom even from when I was in school last. technology is so important for todays learning we just need to know our limit on when, where and how we are using it. If we are letting it get in the way of things, maybe like when our teacher is talking and your texting or facebooking, then yes you are not using it to your academic advantage. Wesh and his students are making the point that the standard education system isnt working for the students "of today", that its somewhat of a waste of time and money because even as they sit in the classroom they are focused on other thing such as a laptop or cellphone. They seem disinterested in whats going on because they are learning a different way and at a faster pace. Whats being written on the chalkboard is not relevant to their life. we are lucky to be such an advanced nation but are we using all this technology to our greatest advantage? or are we letting it hold us back?
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