“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr puts forth the idea that the web can either be a godsend or a major hindrance. He states that the godsend comes from the immense information that is right there at your fingertips. Information that would normally take days to find in libraries is now only a mouse click away. The hindrance is it comes at a price. We now only skim the surface of a given topic without any real knowledge. After a while of “power browsing” online, we lack the concentration to pick up and read anything of substance. A book of a couple hundred pages on the same subject, or same story, seems like a monumental undertaking. Time that could be better spent looking on-line, looking at any number of other subjects. As he states “remapping the neural circuitry” to take in only tid-bits of information. It is up to each of us how much we want to dive in, or skim the surface.
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!
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