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



Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Lest we can actually read the entire thing (Cynthia Selfe essay summary)

In Cynthia Selfe's Essay entitled "Lest We think the Revolution is a Revolution" she talks about how technology is often related to change, which is exactly what it is doing. Those who teach in the English Department have accepted the new change that technology brings, and with that they often buy new equipment and upgrades for the most up-to-date programs. Although with this, it tends to have people fear the effects that the change technology brings. Selfe can't help the fact that even though there can be draw backs to change, she continues to say that "it is easy for us - for Americans, in particular - to believe that technological change leads to productive social change." (p. 293)The essay continues on to say that it is in fact easy to believe that the change technology brings can create a productive social change. Selfe also believes that computers will help make the world a better place and more productive in the worldly affairs. Due to the change from technology, they are able to create advertisements from just still pictures and tell stories from them. What she stated about the ads was that also in the essay that the ads "reveal to us the complications of our feelings toward technology and illustrate how these feelings are played out in the shared landscapes of our lived experience" (p.294)

There was a quote in that essay that said "Americans use technology to become world travelers, to learn about - and acquire knowledge of - other cultures, while remaining comfortably situated within their own living rooms and, thus, comfortably separated from the other inhabitants of the global village.(p.296-297)" What she is saying is that even though we have the power and capabilities to reach the farthest ends of the world and visit them virtually, that's all we are actually doing, visiting them virtually. People today would rather pretend that they were there than actually go to those places. I understand this a little bit, mostly that in this economy I would rather pretend I went somewhere nice and foreign rather than pay for a trip there and back. Understanding that nothing compares to the real thing.
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