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



Monday, October 25, 2010

is Google making us stupid

Kyle Musilek

10/25/10

The world is an ever changing ball of technology and evolution. People change and the way they perceive facts and events around them changes with the environment. Nicholas Carr talks about this in his writing call “is Google making us stupid.” He talks about how the internet and search engines are altering our thinking patterns making us more susceptible to a lack of deep reading and a lack of an attention span. With the facts presented to us in such and easy format were the actual information that is being out can, within 3-5 lines of text, be extracted without the use of heavy thinking. The gist of this is that because of the ability to effortlessly pull information out of online texts people are losing the ability to look deeply into certain things and overall losing the ability to read into texts deeply and grab the other meanings behind certain words. “The net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.” Carr states in his essay. One can only agree with this because nowhere else can you find such a vast amount of knowledge open to the public. People lose their sense of free thinking when they browse the many pages of the internet and form ideas and biases based on other people’s thoughts and ideas.

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