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

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Complex Claim (Cookson & Wesch)

· I believe from the article, “What Would Socrates Say?” by Peter Cookson that the internet which is just an easier way of find information is a thing that many people are use too and some would be lost without which scares most writers because of the way we have adapted to technology. We are beginning to lose certain perspectives and some believe it is okay since we are reading and learning daily. But what data or information that we are collecting helps us really learn how to live. The internet cannot show us how to live thus cannot help us with our daily lives. The internet is just useless data that is collected in randomness. Just as it is useless, from the video, “A Vision of Students Today” by Michael Wesch, for students to go out and spend money they do not have for books they will not use.

· The article, “What Would Socrates Say?” by Peter Cookson is about his views on the world of education and technology today. In one part of this article Cookson says, “They assume that disorganized, radically democratized data lead to useful information and thus to real knowledge through some process of collective randomized, constant connectivity.” In other words, Cookson believes the internet which is combined with useful information is not shown as something of actual knowledge but just a bunch of random things that are put together to answer simple questions you gather throughout your day. This quote is his idea of the internet which says that they just add some random data through this process of random and constant connectivity and this is thrown together and shown as real knowledge, that knowing this data is making you smarter when really it is shortcutting you into finding the truth. This reminded me of a video we had watched a few days earlier, “A Vision of Students Today” created by Michael Wesch which is about the average college student and the challenges they are facing today. The video sends many messages; however, one reminded me of what Cookson was trying to say about uselessness. This message was about how students have to spend hundreds of dollars that they do not have on books they do not need.

Morgan England

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