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

Quote Sandwich

Before when information had to be studied students might find themselves buried in the stacks carefully pouring over large and unwieldy volumes.  As technology advanced, along with the way people took in information, society has become more dependent on easy, simple, quick answers.  With constantly wandering attention and distractions beating you from all sides the idea of becoming engrossed in something seems almost laughable.  Supporting Michael Agger's idea in his essay titled Lazy Eyes; that it’s not the reader who must change, but the author, WCC student Adam D. suggests that, “If they cannot find the answers within four or five mouse clicks, they will give up and say, “I guess I’ll never know.”  Today with the advances made, we find ourselves skimming and skipping from one bit of information to the next.  Moving with his theory that the author must change to suit the changing way people concentrate Agger claims, "The environment works against you.  Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again."  With our skipping natures we sabotage any potential learning we might gain otherwise.  With this mentality it's not toward a more informed society we advance, but toward a degeneration in societal reading and development standards.
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