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!

Monday, May 9, 2011

Setting up the conversation

Peter W. Cookson Jr. in his article, “What Would Socrates Say?” states “what we must cultivate in the 21st century is the willingness to abandon supernatural explanations for naturally occurring events. Floods, famines, and human misfortune have often been attributed to angry gods, fate, and fantastic cosmologies that externalize our locus focus of control, making us perpetual victims who must please the gods of fate to survive”.
Cookson is implying in order to overcome our own ignorance we have to problem solve and use logic theories. Wishful thinking will not lead us to solve anything unless we reflect, observe, and visualize the data we have and think logically. By not following these theories, we will fall in a ditch were we will make belief of anything. Not making use of the methods science offers us will not allow us to correct this.
Cookson also points out, “a moment’s reflection tells us that all knowledge is social. None of us are educational islands unto ourselves. There is a great deal of talk about teamwork today; the real basis of teamwork is the willingness to think collectively to solve common problems.”
In other words, teamwork intelligence solves problems. It takes knowledge collaborated by groups to over achieve our difficulties.
These two quotes relate because they both indicate what procedures to take when it comes to problem solving. I understand Cookson throughout these two quotes is explaining when we face a problem, or something “unreal” occurs to us, we cannot sit down and depend on something “supernatural” to happen or depend on our “wishful thinking” to solve our troubles. We have to make use of our knowledge and come together as a group to figure and solve these issues. With the many troubles our generation faces today; things will only work better and change when we all learn that we all need to think together and work as a team.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)