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, February 2, 2011

The Future is here-Almost

In today’s rapidly changing world with our ability to access information with the click of a mouse many believe that the entire structure of how we think, teach, and learn is changing.  As stated in his new article “What would Socrates say”? (7)  By Holder of the Katsuso Scholarship at Yale, Author of “Trust: an education bill of rights”, and board member of the partnership for 21st century skills, ( Peter W Cookson) “Some of what constitutes this new approach to learning Is already underway” he feels that we are already sharing lessons via internet in schools and across the globe, and many people are converting to more of a collective way of thinking and learning reaching not only thousands but millions around the globe with their message.
   In this new learning environment like the LearningSphere Cookson feels that we will add another dimension stating that “Teachers would learn alongside of their students creatively adapting curriculum to their students” This is more of a Socratic approach to teaching and learning promoting critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition. There are already thousands of web sites where big decisions are made by putting a trust in the collective and many believe this will be the new answer to a democratic government.
   It’s up to the new generation to organize this new way of education which is web based and the onset of the new pathway may even be rejected at first but as said by Cook in his article “What would Socrates Say” “When Einstein shocked the world by suggesting that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, he gave us a new way to think about our world”(7). A new way to think about our world, scary, exciting, good, bad is not the issue because as the old adage goes, That cat is out of the bag, what are we going to do with it?

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