Welcome to Our Blog Conversations Beyond the Classroom!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation 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! I 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!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Is Google Making Us Stupid Summary

In his essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid" Nicholas Carr suggests that even though the web has been a godsend to him as a writer, new age media is changing our way of reading and learning. As we reach out to the most innovative ways to collect information, books and older media are being phased out. Carr suggests that when reading online we skim the text for key bits of information instead of reading texts completely, which is called "Power Browsing." Rather than reading books fully and understanding topics, we are merely power browsing by clicking from one site to the next staying connected to the text just long enough to find what it is we're looking for. Carr uses the analogy, " Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." Carr's observations are very eye opening because as we live our lives we never really stop and think about how things are changing around us. We all go with the flow and take in new things as they are presented to us, not considering any negative consequence that might go along with them. There will always be new technology and new ways of learning new material which will make our lives easier and faster. Are new technologies right or wrong? This is a question each of us should ask ourselves. But I know that as innovative ways to learn present themselves, I will continue to evolve and adapt just like the rest of our society, but I will not forget what got us here in the first place.
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