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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

Friday, February 4, 2011

A Vision of Students Today.

The philospher, Mashall McLuhan stated in the beginning of the video A Vision of Students Today, "Today chil is bewildered when he eneters the 19th century enviroment that still characterizes the educational establishment when information is scarce, but ordered & structured by fragment, classified patteren subjects & schedules." (Marshall McLuhan 1967)

By watching the video, and what I got from it is that the classrooms are to large and the students loose attention quickly. There was a student that had said that she spends 3.5 hours on the internet, and one saying she spends a few hours on the telephone. I think that the technology in our generation is making it a lot easier to not pay attention to school while we are in school. Specially when we are in a large classroom of 115+ students, it can be easily to get right on the internet.

Two hundred students made 367 edits to the video and surveyed themselves to bring the following information.
  • Large classroom, many students, one teacher. Where's the individual attention? Help?
  • Average class room is 115 students
  • 18% of teachers know your name
  • "I didn't create the problems, they are my problems"
  • Not working on class work while in the class room, generally on the internet surfing the web.
  • It can be easy to be destracted by the internet and technology these days during class especially while in a large class room which one teacher, you get less attention and you find class boring and you don't want to pay attention.
  • Spent hundreds of dollars on text books that they most likely wont open

So why not get on the internet? Lets get on Facebook :) Ha! I find it easy in class while I am bored to surf the web or text away just to kill time until class is over. I know how it is to spend most of your class period on Facebook.

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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2011 at 10:50 AM

    Oops I left out who the video is by. Michael Wesch filled the video of students at KSU

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bart BoeckholtFebruary 4, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    Good job with the bullet points describing the jist of what they were talking about.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DcarlsonFebruary 4, 2011 at 11:53 AM

    Great blog post, you did a good job representing what the video meant. I think that lecture style teaching is definitely very boring and its really hard to be focused on class the whole time and not be doing something else. Textbooks are surely a burden and are way to expensive but I guess if you think about college tuition then they're dirt cheap. It's very shocking that only 18% of teachers know your name and there is little or no interaction in the classroom. Classrooms are way too big. You forgot to mention the point in the video that states most of the content learned in a University is irrelevant to the student's lives.

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