In Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he finds a recently published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London. The scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e-books and other sources of written info. They found that people using the sites revealed "a form of skimming activity" jumping from one place to the other and rarely coming back to anything they'd already visited. Typically reading no more than 1 or 2 pages of an article before skipping to the next site, sometimes saving long articles but there’s no proof if they actually went back to it and read. In their recent work they suggest that it’s obvious users are not reading in a traditional sense, there is a new form of reading and its is called "power browsing" claiming that online users skim "horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts." Only getting what they need and exiting.
Carr implicates technology is changing the way we may think and read when he mentions "thanks to txt on the internet, the popularity of txt messaging on cells" that we may be reading more today than we did back in the day but it's a "different kind of reading, behind it lies a different kind of thinking." The style of reading the internet’s promoting may be weakening our ability for deep reading. What do I think? Keep to the roots of original traditional reading, try not to let technology take over your life. The classic way is always best.
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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