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

"A Vision of Students Today"

In the short video “A Vision of Students Today” made by the Anthropology professor, Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University) and his students, they don’t necessarily talk but show their opinions and statistics through paper. By presenting it this way (in silence) it gives the short film a creepy almost depressing vibe not only because the students are mute but because of what’s written on the paper and claimed to be true. Such as “completing 49% of the readings assigned but only 26% is relevant” or “reading 8 books a year but reading 2,300 web pages and 1,281 Facebook profiles. Pretty much proving that we associate technology with class too much, and this is affecting the way we learn dramatically. I think they’re bored with how they’re being taught and want an upgrade but will this upgrade really help, or be another distraction?
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1 comment:

  1. Adam D.May 6, 2011 at 11:46 AM

    to think that any new kind of technology will help is a matter of opinion. No mater what anyone thinks, they are going to force computers into every aspect of our lives, including school. There is arguements on each side of the equation, but there is no way to tell which side is correct.

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