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

Saturday, February 5, 2011

"A Vision of Students Today"

In the video "A vision of students today", created by Michael Wesch and 200 students of Kansas State University, students do a survey on themselves and post their responses through out the video to give us some insight on what it is like for them. The survey for this particular school suggests:

* Average class size is 115 students per class

* Students are spending large amounts of money on text books per year that they have no use for

* Only 18% of the teachers know the names of their students

* Two out of three hours of class time are spent eating by students

* Some leave or graduate from college with a debt of $20,000

Theses are just a few things that really stood out in my mind while watching this video. I realize that Universities such as Kansas State have more students per class room compared to that of WCC, what doesn't make sense to me is why spend an estimated $20,000 on school if you are going to waste your time on facebook, your cell phone, or eating 75% of class. This may be a good reason the teachers don't know more of their students names, perhaps their time is being wasted as well. I don't know, I may be missing the whole point of this video, this is just my outlook on it.

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