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

In the video, “A vision of students today”, by Michael Wesch, many strong points and problems are shown about the current education we have in our college and universities. Wesch points out that classes can be an average of 115 students, and these large classes can really affect a student’s ability to learn, most teachers don’t even know the name of their students. But not only this, class tuition is so much, that it can make students have a bad attitude, because by the time they graduate they could be up to 20,000 dollars in debt. Also, students are necessarily learning what they should be, in fact most of what they learn, they won’t even use in the future. On top of all this, the homework load is too much to keep up on for the students, and is extremely stressful. What they are trying to get at, is that we do not have enough technology in our classes, this is necessary to get more technology, because as students in this decade we run our whole lives around technology. I as a student myself agree with all of these ideas, and I say that we would learn much more with technology, and have a much better attitude. Plus, technology is something we need to get more and more familiar with, because it is the future, and so are we.

John Critchlow

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