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

In a YouTube short "A Vision of Students Today", created by KSU students and Anthropology proff Michael Welsh they dive into the life of the average college student. The short addresses issues such as; the fact that most students will be 20k in debt by the time they graduate; world issues such as poverty, war, famine, energy, and the water crisis and how we are not being prepared for these things at all; the amount of time we have in a day compared to the amount of time students need. It's all very quite, it's a silent film minus the soundtrack. What I take from the video is that they are saying the education system is flawed and not preparing them for life in the real world. "I read 49% of readings assigned to me, 26% are relevant to my life" (KSU student), "I'm a multi-tasker, I have to be" (KSU student) "My average class size is 110" (KSU student).... What they mean by all of this is that students are not thrilled with the education system.
School has become less about learning life skills and more about shuffling as many students through as possible. Very little of what we learn in college is applicable to what we choose to do in life.
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2 comments:

  1. EctesMay 6, 2011 at 11:43 AM

    I really appreciated the fact that you focused on education failing to prepare us for 'real life'. With some classes at 115 people it does seem as though some schools want to just throw information at people and then throw them out.

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  2. Luis C.May 6, 2011 at 11:53 AM

    The last thing you said I thought was very interesting, "very little of what we learn in college is applicable to what we choose to do in life." It's something to really think about, some believe education is not preparing us thoroughly for the issues that our going on or that will continue to go on with our lives.

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