The film “A Vision of Students Today” made by the Anthropology professor, Michael Wesch, and his students is stimulating yet disturbing and depressing. Throughout the film, the students are silent as they express themselves with notes on the paper or laptop screens. The silence of the students implies the increasing frustrations and the lack of energy, interaction, and enthusiasm among the young people. The film addresses issues such as the excessive amount of time young people spend on technologies such as computers, televisions or cell-phone. Moreover, the article points out the fact that internet material has become the major source of readings for most students. The role of books in our education system has changed drastically. The messages this article tries to convey pose a series of alarming and valid concerns. With over dependency on the technologies, we should watch out the negative habits we are developing in life. The convenience of technology has affected our education system negatively because there are too many choices for learning yet too little reinforcement on validating what we learn.
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
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