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 24, 2011

Quotations


Richard Wurman in The Business of Understanding reports “It wasn’t- and still isn’t- popular to ask questions rather than answer questions.” Saying that asking questions makes you look stupid, answering questions makes you look intelligent and successful. In order to gain popularity and respect society wants you to know facts and information on every subject, even if you don’t fully understand it. Google is supporting this idea, not requiring the you to start from the basics.

In his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr says, “The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Referring in Google’s eyes our brain is the same as computers and if we could just connect a computer to our brain we would be smarter people. We are human, our brains are capable of much more than repeating data. Google is limited to operating and thinking like a computer, we are limitless and capable too much more greater learning. 

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