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

Stupid or Just Plain Lazy?

Kevin Eaton

When it comes to the topic of Google making us stupid, most of us will readily agree that Google doesn't exactly make us stupid but more lazy than anything. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of is the information we are learning actually information or just data, and does any part of it actually help us or does it just fill our brains with useless data. Whereas some are convinced that Google helps us it allows us to work at a faster and more efficient pace, others maintain that the faster pace it allows us to work at, is just making data in our head nothing we can use as useful information because all we were searching for was the answer. I believe that Google doesn't make us stupid, lazy yes but not stupid, because it's just a more efficient way to find information instead of digging through books for days.

My own view is that Google is allowing people to work at a faster and more efficient pace, which is making us lazy. Though I concede that Google does give us the information we are looking for faster so that we are basically filling our heads with data and not always useful information, I still maintain the belief that it is making us more lazy than anything. For example if I were to need the definition of any work in the dictionary Google would allow me the quick and easy way of just typing it in and hitting enter, whereas with out that technology I would be forced to pick up a dictionary and skim though the pages until I find the desired word. Although some might object that Google can really help our intellectually state of mind, I reply that it helps me every day it makes homework and many other tasks easier to complete and a lot less stressful. This issue is important because I believe Google is a very helpful source of knowledge and it greatly helps the majority of people.
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2 comments:

  1. jabendhoffJanuary 19, 2011 at 12:07 PM

    I believe you have a good point here, we are able to full our heads with the unlimited data that surrounds us. We are able to gain more information than we have been able to in any other time. Today's world is helping us. But with it making things so easy to google something its causing us to become lazy, however, its not lazy in a bad way. I feel we are becoming lazy in needing to travel the world, night and day, just to find one answer to the question we are looking for. We have completely eliminated that need for the search. Which has become a great help in today's technology. We are gaining the knowledge that we want, just skipping the boring details that isn't needed. We are learning how to fill our heads with the main details. And I believe soon we will be able to know every detail going on in the world one of these days. Just in a matter of time.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 19, 2011 at 12:12 PM

    I definitely agree with you. I find going to the internet for looking for answers way more easier than having to open a book and have to scam and search the answers to our questions. But, on the other hand not everything posted on the internet is true. Also, by using the internet so much I think it makes up less responsible to find the answer and takes away the learning about research and reading ect. that we learned in our earlier years/ (If that makes any sense?)

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