Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations 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! We 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!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Can technology save us? (Michael Wesch Video Summary)

There are classes that are as big as 115 students and yet 26% of the assignments in that class might only be relevant to what that person would want to do later in life. In the video, Michael Wesch started post that was collaborated by his students saying in a way that it might as well be a waste of time to be student sitting in class. They would rather (and most likely are at that point) be on Facebook or texting. in a school year, a student will write about 42 papers of academic writing. That number skyrockets to 500 when they are writing emails. This video shows that there might be a better way to teach students than having a teacher stand in front of a chalkboard. Michael also explains in his video (or the students did at least...) that even after they graduate, it will still be hard to find a job. There is a moment in the video where a few students hold up signs showing how many hours they sleep, work, study, use their cell phones, are in class, etc. It turns out to be more than 24 hours a day total and thus forcing people to be multi-taskers. Not only that but, by the time they graduate, they will have to pay about $20,000 in college credits, tuition, etc.



The way I see it is that I agree with those who distaste sitting in front of chalkboard along with 115 other people. If I were them I probably would also be on Facebook or some other socializing site. Granted, I've heard of classes being as huge as 400 +, but people also have to understand that they are going to that class to do something they want to do when they graduate. When the one women held her sign about only 26% of the work she did for her class was relevant to what she wanted to do with her life, that really doesn't make me look forward to taking the classes I want to take in college. I do not approve of the one sign where the man said he bought books he will never open, that would increase my college debt for no reason and furthers the reason why I shouldn't go to college, which is a bummer cause I need to go to college. But with these facts confirmed by students, it makes me wonder how people still go to college and live with the fact that after they graduate, they will be $20,000 in debt.

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