“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is the name of the article Nicholas Carr wrote where he describes the ways in which technology along with the internet have made people “stupid.” Carr borrows opinions from other people to use as evidence and back up his ideas. One of Carr’s arguments is that even though this new generation is writing more than the past ones; it is not doing us much good because he believes that reading online or texting are not the same as actually reading something that requires more thinking. As evidence to strengthen his idea Carr brings in Maryanne Wolf who is a development psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: Story and science of reading brain. Wolf says that “the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above else, may be weakening our capacity for kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.” So in other words she is saying that all of the reading internet users do online is not the same as reading a book for. When one reads a book it requires a different kind of thinking than when one briefly looks up something on the web. I still believe though that it is better to read something, even if it is cell phone text or online reading material than nothing like the previous generations. The people from the previous generations that didn’t read books never read anything and nowadays those people at least read short pieces of text on cell phones or online.
I do believe though that not everything that we read online has made our writing better. Websites like sparknotes.com have definitely made the lives of some students easier but online services like that are what have made our literature very poor. Instead of reading an entire book because people need to for school purposes; students instead go online to websites like Sparknotes.com and read a brief summary of the book. That is changing the way we think about the reading we do because a summary of anything does not get in depth of what the entire piece of writing is about. It just tells the most important points which are not enough to get our brains working like if we would’ve read the entire book.
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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