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 Think the Revolution is a Revolution

In Cynthia L Selfe's essay, Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution: Images of Technology and the Nature of Change, pages 292-294 describes how technology and the way it is used equals change. English departments have come to accept technology and have adjusted to buying supplies and upgrades for programs. We have adapted to technology but still have fears about it. Selfe says that technological change leads to productive social change. For example in her essay she says, “we hope that computers can make us, and the students with whom we work with, more productive in the classroom and other instructional settings.” She thinks that the technological change will make us more efficient and quicker with our work. Today computer technology has been embraced by English studies teachers. They hope that the computers can make them more effective as communicators and more responsibly involved literate citizens in world affairs. Selfe says that technology makes us more connected with our government and groups all over. Selfe also says how technology kills rich and powerful stories that are full of cultural information that are significant to us. Overall she says that technology gives us mixed feelings.

My specific quote is, “We hope computers can help us make the world a better place in which to live(Page 293).” What Selfe is saying is that we want technology to solve all of the worlds problems so that everything is safe. She hopes that technology will create peace between everyone so that the world will be a perfect place to live. I dont see how computers will be able to make the world a better place. I dont think that if we gave terrorists a new computer they would stop attacking people. I think that the only way technology will create peace is if we connect the world leaders in a online chat page or video chat to solve the problems.

Michael Sperry

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