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 13, 2010

A Vision of Students Today

We recently watched a short video by Michael Wesch entitled “A Vision of Students Today”. This video shows us an auditorium at Kansas State University full of college students and as a unit tells us their college lifestyle and how they learn. Students throughout the video raise up signs and tell us small facts about their classrooms, things they do during and after class. “My average class size is 115. 18% of my teachers know my name.” “I complete 49% of the reading assigned to me. Only 26% is relevant to my life.” “I buy hundred dollar text books that I will never open.” “I will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages and 1281 Facebook profiles.” With many more interesting and surprising facts being held up during this video, we learn how students in college are not actually learning properly in class. Students are not having enough one on one time with their teacher. With this happening, students are left to attempt to do class work by themselves and learn the concepts that they do not understand but if they can’t understand it and ask questions students will become inpatient and frustrated and not even complete the work. Another point to bring up is that students are not actually learning things that are relevant to them. If things are not relevant to a student’s life and goals, then actual thinking and trying to grasp the concept will not happen. Students in America are also paying too much for education; students that already don’t have that much money and are just trying to achieve their goals can’t because of high costs. Knowledge is being put at a very high price. Though knowledge is priceless, knowledge isn’t knowledge if it is not even relevant to you and your goals. The main thing that I took from this video is that students are learning in a proper manner, instead of being in classrooms learning things that don’t relate to them, they should be interacting with one another and asking questions.
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