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 Michael Wesch’s recent video of the vision of students today he set up a lecture hall full of students that take turns holding up signs that relate to the average student. The hours and percent that some of the students use in their signs are from a survey that two-hundred students contributed to. They vary from how big classes are, how impersonal they are, the money spent and wasted, and how many hours are spent doing various tasks like eating, sleeping, watching TV, going online, studying, etc… One sign that stood out was the total amount of hours students spend each day accomplishing different things. It added up to 26.5 hours per day. The next sign is held up by a girl saying that she is a multi-tasker because she has to be. Each person in the class represents a little bit of every student.
      I thoroughly enjoyed the message of the video; that students pay a ridiculous of money for classes and either don’t do their work, don’t go to class at all or nothing relevant and useful comes out of what they’re supposed to be learning. Even though some might say that because the survey used was taking by one single class in one university that it does indeed represent the average college student as whole. Maybe not every aspect relates to every student but I feel like every student should be able to understand where this class is coming from. It is one hundred percent true that all students need to be able to multi-task in order to survive. Also it is true that the amount we learn that is remotely relevant to our lives for the price we pay is outrageous. Thus being said the video by Wesch is very accurate in my opinion.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)