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!

Friday, May 6, 2011

Friday Blog

If you try to incorporate everything that comes at you, you will lose your mind and wallet at the same time.

In Peter W. Cookson Jr.’s essay “What Would Socrates Say” he states “Every day we are exposed to huge amounts of information, disinformation, and just plain nonsense. The ability to distinguish fact from factoid, reality from fiction, and truth from lies is not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have’ in a world flooded with so much propaganda and spin.”

Everything in this world is coming at your face at 400 mph. You have to learn how to duck and cover and also take in only the important facts. If you try to incorporate everything that comes at you, you will lose your mind and wallet at the same time.

There seems to be the same thoughts in the short video “A Vision of Students Today” by Michael Wesch, where information put out says “26% of course readings are relevant to life.”

By looking at both of these examples, the fact of right or wrong doesn’t even matter anymore, only what can hold your attention the longest to fill up that one little section in your brain just long enough to buy their product or pass their tests.

-Adam D.

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