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

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Meagan K: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Carr discusses the powerful impact of technology in our lives and how we are shaped by the resources that we use. He explores the ideas of distraction, process of thinking, mental habits, and productivity of the times. In Carr's essay, he uses several resources from different opinion to strengthen his overall perspective. He shares one with us from Richard Foreman. Richard claims that as technology has developed, we are not longer a "personally constructed and unique version", we are walking information hoarders who choose not to make anything of it.
He shows that as a society, we are pressured and somewhat forced to succumb to the technology. For example, it is impossible to make it through a college course without using a computer to research. They are now a requirement in order to pass. And many of us choose to succumb because of the "intellectual laziness" that overcomes us and eliminates deep thinking and deep research.
My own view is that everyone is given the same data through Google. Yet, we have not developed this data into knowledge whatsoever. If we had deep reading and deep research, then knowledge would be formed and eventually wisdom. But having access to such information gives society no reason to think deeply. It's all right at the tip of our fingers!
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. illya2011January 19, 2011 at 12:09 PM

    I can appreciate the style in which this blog was written. I like how you summarize the information read in the article and then close with your view. I definitely agree with your idea that we have not developed data into knowlege, and knowlege into wisdom. This is well written and brings up some interesting points.

    ReplyDelete
  2. DcarlsonJanuary 19, 2011 at 12:10 PM

    Great input! I definitely agree with you in that the web is making us lazy. It makes it easier for us to receive information resulting in a lack of intellectual exercise. Some people believe that we are getting smarter because of the amount of information we can get from the web but I believe it is making us dumber because we get to the main point of a topic without thoroughly reading everything about a topic.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)