Kay Lindell
Blog on WWSS
“What would Socrates say?” is an essay written by Peter Cookson Jr. in 2009. It is a very informative piece with the interesting twist of trying to understand what Socrates would have to think about of growth of technology in today’s world. Cookson says that his greatest fear is similar to that of the infamous philosopher “My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the fact of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance.” With Google and other means of quick resource information we are teetering on the edge of thinking that because we have all this information at our fingertips it’s the same as knowing it. To actually claim the knowledge of something though, we have to be able to really understand it, to the point of being able to teach it to someone else. With the vastly large information super highway easily accessible though we tend to filter information in and out of our brains without retaining much. Why should we? We can always look it up again quickly. Cookson recognizes this need for information came from two key points in our history: the European enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, without these advances we would never have come to the point we are at today. We are standing with our feet on either side of this line of new and old. We mustn’t forget what got us here. The decline of hard tangible newspaper sales is an ominous omen to something that we might not be able to reverse if we go too far.
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!
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