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

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Quotation Sandwiches: Meagan

1. Nicholas Carr complicates matters further when he explains Google’s perspective on technology saying, “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” (Carr par. 24) In making this comment, Carr urges us to see both sides of the spectrum by taking a look at the culprit’s perspective. He shows us that Google sees nothing wrong with their company and feels that it only benefits the society – and naturally they would say that. My argument conflicts with Carr’s statement because all of the accessible information is causing our generation to limit our thinking ability. Mostly every question we have can be answered within seconds using Google’s search engine. As a result, deep and analytical thinking goes right out the window.

2. Michael Agger states, “In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig.” (Agger pg. 1) In other words, as web sites became easier and easier to operate, society has trained their minds to switch from site to site hoping that the next one will have more information and possibly be in a more simple format. This world keeps spinning faster and it seems as if people have no time to spare anymore. Everything seems to be rushed and quick - losing depth and quality. Nobody “digs” anymore for a deep understanding.

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