Discourse Communities
     (Note:  There are 15 pages in this set.  Navigate through them with the slide numbers at the bottom of each page)

Information Development and Dissemination

An Exercise in Community

Academic disciplines are just one example of discourse communities. Attorneys, physicians, carpenters, and any other profession you can identify make up their own discourse communities.

Sharing common language, norms, and assumptions helps communication and facilitates the building of knowledge. As a college student who must do academic research, you will want to tap into this scholarly communication and begin to participate in it yourself.

Discourse communities share common understandings, norms, and conventions for communicating their discipline, particularly in writing.

You can assume that all members of your major, for example, agree on certain facts and use specific terminology to describe those facts. This notion of discourse communities will help you to manage your own research, writing, and discussion.

Scholars and researchers share some distinctive habits and practices, especially in their methods of communicating with one another. Many rely heavily on their colleagues for information about new developments in their fields.

They may confer by phone, communicate by e-mail, pass drafts of research articles back and forth by regular mail or e-mail, and attend conferences in their specialties where they learn by work-of-mouth about the latest research, teaching practices, or other trends in their disciplines.

Your Course Community: Chat Rooms and Blogs.

All this may seem onerous, tedious work to you, and it really isn't. Think about a hobby or other interest you are passionate about. You know quite a bit about it and. If you start to go on about it at a party, people who don't share your interest will just wander off with glazed eyes. If you go to a place where people who share your passion gather, however, you'll find that you can talk for hours. You have discovered a discourse community.

If you come to enjoy this class, the chat room can serve that purpose You are finding out as many different things about the subject as I can pack into a course whose primary audience is nonprofessionals. I have created such a wide variety of materials--many more than students can assimilate in a semester. Don't let that worry you. It lets you follow up on your interests, which you then can bring to your blog and the chat room to be shared with others.

Information that remains inside your head and is not shared with a community of your peers never really develops. Most people say that they learn as much as they share when they get together with others who share their passionate interests. One weakness of most physically based classrooms is that there is little time for the members to share their work. Usually, students write a paper, the professor (briefly) responds to it, and the student glances at the grade and tosses it somewhere. If you think that this process is a waste of the often significant amount of time that you spend on papers, you aren't alone. And yet, you don't know enough about the subjects you take to be ready to publish in the field. Discourse communities that develop by way of chat rooms and blogs can help to solve that problem. You can try out ideas and develop a voice in the field without having the world jump down your throat if your ideas prove to be 'half-baked', which of course they are at this stage.

University is a Public Forum: Blog and discussion board entries should contain content that you would feel comfortable seeing on the side of the Goodyear Blimp. Things you mount on the spaces of an MU-Online course are just much public discourse as a speech on the floor of the senate or chat on a talk show would be. As you know, freedom of speech carries both rights and responsibilities. As an adult student in this class, you have the right to speak your mind, to develop and share your considered opinions. With freedom, however, comes responsibility. You are responsible for

1. stating your ideas as clearly as possible,
2. taking time to provide details to back up your points,
3. crediting those from whom you have gained knowledge and insight, whether that person is the author of a published work or a student who peer reviewed your paper.,
4. protecting the ideas of other members of the community, even if you disagree with them and say so, which means that you never damage or slander individuals or their work;
5. avoiding flaming or clogging other students' blogs or chat entries,
6. focusing primarily on ideas rather than emotion.

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2002; Last edited February 12, 2009
© Dr. Bonnie Duncan
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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