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 19, 2010

Growing Up Online

In the video “Growing up online” it talked about how kids today spend the majority of their time surfing the web. This video was produced/ directed by Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio.  During the film they show how students’ internet use is affecting their lives. One of the first lines on the video shows a guy named Greg who states, “You need to have the internet on to talk to your friends because everybody has it”. This shows just how much this generation’s students rely on the internet for their everyday lives. It gets to the point where kids don’t even pay attention in school unless the teacher is entertaining enough and in some cases involving new age technology into their class. For the majority of the time kids are in school all they can think about is getting out and either getting on their phones or computers to get online and socialize. Besides taking you away from your school work, for most kids the internet is an awesome thing. But for others it can be a nightmare. In the video there is a child who gets bullied so much at school and online that he commits suicide.  You would think that after leaving school you child would be safe from that sort of stuff once they got home but now a days that’s not the case. I think in this generation the internet has way to much of an impact on the lives of kids and teens.
            When I was in high school the internet was a huge part of my life. After school the first thing I would do is go onto the internet and wouldn’t get off until my mom kicked me off. I would be doing anything from using MySpace and instant messaging to just surfing the web for interesting information. During this time I would rarely do my school work and that was a major problem. It definitely affected my grades because I would be messing around on the internet instead of finishing my homework. When I graduated high school however I started to view socializing online as being kind of a waste of time so I decided to delete my MySpace and stop wasting my days glued to the computer screen. Now don’t get me wrong it was fun. I just shouldn’t have gotten as involved into it as I had been. Now that I don’t waste many hours of the day online like I used to, I really enjoy my life more. Since I’m not on the computer so much anymore I have a lot more free time to do fun activities. I do get online to socialize every so often now that I have a Facebook account but why waste hours talking to my friends online when I can just go hang out with them in person. Now a days the majority of my time online is spend working on homework or school related activities. Besides that with the exception of checking my Facebook every so often, I would rather spend my time interacting with people in person rather than talking to them through a screen.
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