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



Monday, November 1, 2010

Ugghhh this outragous They Say/Claim thing of the Article we've been reading

In “Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution”, Cynthia L. Selfe tries explaining that technology is bringing us out of past times. In narrative one, the “Global Village” and the “Electronic Colony” describe that global technology will bring peace to us. Apparently since Americans can’t bring peace among ourselves, technology will do it for us. This is supported when in narrative one Selfe states that “the computer network that spans the globe will serve to erase meaningless geopolitical borders, eliminate racial and ethnic differences, re-establish historical familial relationship which binds together the peoples of the world regardless of race, ethnicity, or location” (Selfe 294). This powerful claim basically states that technology will bring peace to us. That is how the “Global Village” has things said, but the “Electronic Colony” seems more realistic. In one of their visual aids, we see a Yanomami man in his natural setting, he is not connected to technology and that is how they show him. Selfe seems to say that he is connected to Americans as a “member”, but is “a world away from us” since he is not up to date with the technology world. In narrative two, “Land of Equal Opportunity” and “Land of Difference” has a different idea of things. It is the opposite of narrative one, saying that there is openness to it, and that any American no matter what race, gender or social status is included in the principles of fairness and determination. I think narrative two is saying that no matter what gender, race or social status, technology will always be equal and fair to any American. Narrative three is the “Un-Gendered Utopia” and the “Same Old Gendered Stuff” is based on genders and how technology can change passed stereotypes. It’s mostly about how men are stereotyped as being in suits going to work and coming home while woman take care of kinds, are motherly and beautiful. Technology tries to help women become more equal with men, that would be the utopia, but in reality, I don’t think women will ever really be equal with men. They can get really close to that, but they won’t be equal.
Claims:
1.) One claim I found interesting was when Selfe says “They do indicate, however, that it will be exceedingly difficult for Americans to imagine an electronic landscape in which individuals enjoy new kinds of opportunities to relate to each other and new kinds of opportunities to make positive changes in their lives” (Selfe 316). I think Selfe is saying that in order to move forward in having women as equal as men, we must make positive changes in our life that include technology, if we can not do this then we can not welcome the change.
2.) Another claim I found interesting was when Selfe says “Our work as teachers, the curricula we fashion, the corporate and public environments our students enter as professionals, the schools that make up the educational systems---these social formations are also shaped by the same sets of culturally determined values, the same complexities, the same ambiguities, the same contexts for our imaginations” (Selfe 321). Selfe is saying that if we limit to teaching our students one part of a complex picture then there will be no change, we need to teach our students the social progress we’ve made over the years and encourage them, let them understand the fact that they should be proud of what contributions they have made to society.

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