In the video "A Vision of Students Today" by Michael Wesch, shows a classroom full of students who contributed to a document on Google asking what it’s like to be a student today. One at a time, students raise up a sheet of paper explaining their problem in school. As the video progresses, you see the relationship between learning in college and technology. One student puts up a paper saying she will write 42 pages of writing for that semester, but will send about 500 pages of email. Later in the video, many students have the similar problem with spending the same or more amount of time on their technologies like Facebook, emails, or their cell phones. A student held up a paper stating that she would read 8 books this year, but read 2300 web pages and 1281 Facebook profiles. Wesch tries to portray the fact that a lot of this learning isn’t going to be relevant for our future. We spend hundreds of dollars buying books and burying ourselves in debt for classes that are outdated or too impersonal. And technology is being misused when it deters us from our learning environment, but it’s also not being used enough in a beneficial manner. Teachers continue writing on chalkboards to force them, no; “encourage” them, to move when they could be using pictures, videos, animations, or photos to best get their point across. Technology is rapidly increasing and needs to be used in a valuable and efficient approach.
My response to this video is that we definitely are spending way too much time on technology and we aren’t using it to the best of its ability. If the students are constantly checking their Facebook profiles during class or playing games on their laptops then they are wasting valuable class time. Although, classes today in college are extremely impersonal, I can see why it’s difficult to stay focused, especially for students sitting all the way in the back. I always thought that if you have a smaller class size of about 30 kids, then you can learn more one-on-one and you become familiar with the teacher, but in college, the average class size is about 115 students. This makes me wonder is the students in the back can read what is being written or hear what is being said, Students today in college are going through many obstacles, but we need to use technology to better our learning, not to help us stray away from it. In the end though, I still believe a lot of the things we are going to learn, unfortunately, will be irrelevant for the aspects of life: war, ethnicity conflicts, poverty, or inequality.Therefore, we need to make a new approach; a vision for students today.
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
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
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