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

What would Socrates Say?

In the article, “What Would Socrates Say?” by Peter W. Cookson, the author states “the inventive curve of new technologies is so steep that the internet culture well undoubtedly becomes more ubiquitous and communicatively dense” (par.6). What cookson is trying to say, is all these new technologies that are coming out very frequently, challenge all the knowledge has been given to us from the early times of the industrial revolution, and puts it in a situation it needs to be used to better our understanding, and to use and apply it to the human daily life. Another idea that the author states, is that in order for this process it require literacy discipline, yet there is failure to do so. As a cause of this, is that now days there is fewer books being read, and the cause is that the people are on the web “surfing for fragments of thought” ( cookson par.6). Instead of choosing the articles that are full of the right information, there are others that are in the web, who are reading the wrong material, and not getting the complete idea.
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2 comments:

  1. MichaelFebruary 2, 2011 at 11:50 AM

    When we compare our learning curve (steep uphill struggle) with the "inventive curve of the internet" it becomes clear to me that I don't have a clue about what Cookson means. So often I try to take a very literal approach as I deceipher stuff it can interfere. The curve that plots how quickly different aspects of the internet were invented???

    You were able to help me understand what Cookson meant with his to me, vague phrase. Mary told me to say "I g2g, bye" here.

    g2g, bye

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  2. DcarlsonFebruary 2, 2011 at 11:54 AM

    Very true, we are only getting fragments of thought from using the web. I think that a solution to this problem could be to not multi-task and bunny trail off of things when using the web but instead read entire articles and try to get deeper trains of thought.

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