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



Monday, November 1, 2010

Cynthia Selfe

In Cynthia Selfes essay "Lest we think the revolution is a revolution" she describes how Americans are using technology today. Americans do use technology far more often when compared to that of some other society's and it is starting to change us. One thing that stuck out to me was a small passage only a couple pages into the writing which she states "...The computer network that spans the globe will serve to erase meaningless geopolitical borders, eliminate racial and ethnic differences, re-establish a historical familial relationship which binds together the peoples of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, or location." While that is only a narrative that is appealing it will, unfortunately, not likely happen. Even if it does, would everyone be entitled to the same basic human rights? This "Global Village" or "Electronic Colony" would not be very fun in my mind, because anyone who is controlling the technology in that kind of world would become a dictator over filled with power. Another narrative that struck a chord with me was "The Un-gendered Utopia" and "The Same Old Gendered Stuff". In an Ungendered Utopia any constraints put on someone because of their gender would be removed, women would not be only labeled the wife, mother, seductress, or lover. Men would not only be labeled the nerd, the crazy biker, the sex maniac. Our expectations of gender roles are so ingrained into historic culture and popular culture that they are coded into human brains, says Selfe with the help of Pierre Bourdieu. I don't think any of these narratives will happen soon, but technology is pushing boundaries and creating borders at the same time all the time.
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