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

"A Video of Students Today" Summary and Response

In a recent assignment in English 100L we watched “A Vision of Students Today” by Michael Wesch. In this video we learn a lot of facts on how technology affects education. Is it a good influence, or a bad one? I don’t know. College students go to school to get a better education for their future. In this video we learn that some students take their laptops to class just to Facebook. We will look at 1,281 Facebook profiles, 2,300 web pages, but we can’t even read the 8 books we are assigned. One girl in this video had written she only does 49% of the reading assigned to her, and only 26% is relevant to her life. Maybe we don’t read is because we don’t connect with the book or our teachers. In this survey the student’s figured out that only 18% of their teachers knew their name. That is a very low percentage.

I believe these students conducted a very good survey. If we could connect to what we are being tought, or even the teachers, maybe would be more willing to do the reading. If we are enjoying what we are learning maybe we won’t misuse technology in the classroom. I know if I had a laptop in some of my classes I would not be on topic because I am not connecting to what I am learning. I feel that it isn’t relevant to my life. If school had that connection maybe we would all be more willing to do the homework.

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