WELCOME

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation 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! I 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, January 19, 2011

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

I'm just going to try writing this like "Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online" by Michael Agger.

When people talk about how computers is evolving more and more, we find ourselves turning away from our ability to read long passages.

In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr, they say that we are not just walking away from literature but rather a full sprint away from it. However, I say that since we are not taking our time having to read a 10 page paper to get the main point, rather than nowadays we just read a couple paragraphs and we get the main point in a matter of minutes.

THEY SAY:

  • Can't consume the depth of the knowledge that was once needed
  • TV, Radio, and computers are consuming us all
  • Skim long passages and skip boring details.
  • We have shorten our attention span
  • Starting to live and depend on technology

We are starting to have the ability to learn more and more knowledge. Everyone doesn’t truly want the whole details; they just want to know what happened, what caused it etc. And then they are satisfied. We aren’t shorting our knowledge but we are actually gaining knowledge, with the consequence of only to lose the boring details out of it. Even news anchors only spend, what, 30 seconds to maybe a minute tops, on a story that’s interesting.

I SAY:

  • Its helping us gain more knowledge
  • Just making life a little bit easier
  • Expanding the human knowledge, in our heads and around us
  • Brain is malleable, its always changing and learning new things

There is so much going on out there that we need to shorten stories and news articles. I feel at some point that everyone can know everything that is happening in the world right now, if every single story just had a few main details about it. Shortening the depth of knowledge will give us the opportunity to expand our length of knowledge that we can take in.
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1 comment:

  1. Nichole LeeJanuary 19, 2011 at 12:08 PM

    I really like the way you demonstrated "I say, They say" in Carr's article. I found it to be very helpful in understanding this writing concept. Thank you!

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