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 Rachel Dretzin’s and John Maggio’s film ”Growing up Online”, they really show how bad the internet can be for kids these days, and how it can easily be abused. The give several different stories of kids who are addicted to their computers and activities such as MySpace, Facebook, and even other activities far more worse. For example, Jessica Hunter, as a 14 year old girl she was being bullied nonstop, and was very unhappy with her life, until one day when she created her online life, and became Autumn Edows. As Autumn she took pictures of herself in near to nothing clothing and posted it on a website she had made for herself. Eventually her parents found out and made her delete everything, but then they finally came around to being okay with what she was doing. Although, I would still stay that isn’t right, and is kind of just messed up, but she is happy with herself now. The gist of this is that kids can be someone completely different online that they wouldn’t be in person, because nobody can hurt them or judge them, when they are in the sanctuary of their own home. They also brought up the seriousness of cyber bullying (online bullying); they actually gave the story of a young boy who ended up committing suicide because of it. They gave a lot of extreme rare cases, but failed to point out the fact that most kids aren’t like this, and don’t do radical actions like these over the internet or because of the internet. My life has been greatly affected by the internet, because I use it all of the time, whether it is blogging in school, or using Facebook. I use Facebook a lot to, I probably spend at least a couple hours on it each day, I might not be fully engaged in it though, it might just be up while I’m doing homework. I have never heard of any of my friends having these bad things happen to them or doing these bad things that were explained in the video “Growing up Online.” I think they were way to extreme with it, and are not realizing that you know if something is bad, if you become a part of it, it’s not because you got fooled, but because you wanted to; something they fail to acknowledge.

John Critchlow

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