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!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

A Vision of Michael Wesch, by Adam D.

This video “A Vision of Students Today” by Michael Wasch, is about how college students see themselves in their educational careers. It is presented in a shaky point of view that makes the user follow the dialog on notecards that the students hold up. The students view themselves from their own point of view as well as the point of view of other people around the world. They show signs that show themselves in shallow ways, such as “I spend hundreds of dollars on books that I never open,” and “I spend much of my class time on Facebook.” The way that they show humility is signs that say “This laptop cost more than 1 billion people will make in a year,” and “more than a billion people make less than a dollar a day.” But the exact message that they are trying to get across is elusive. I don’t know if they are calling themselves shallow or the schools. The whole thing is covered by eerie music that just adds to the drama. Maybe someone else will have better insight as to what the main idea is, because I am still confused.

-Adam D.

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