- Mike Fang
- Nour el-Refaey
Author: Jacquelyn Blain
Post-its
Here are the Post-Its. I’m not a good photographer, and I cut off the top of the sheet that says Science-Technology so climate change isn’t on there and it should be! Here’s a pdf of the pics:images
The Discovery Project and Beyond!
I’ve re-vamped the class a bit, created a real schedule, and written an Assignment Sheet for the Discovery Project… and beyond.
Inquiry Project Assignmentyour prompt
Based on what we did in class, write and post about an experience you had where you tried to join a new discourse community. What happened? Were you able to? Why or why not?
This is category U2 blog post 1 – Discourse Communities
Your prompt
In a post of at least 200 words, tell me whether the ideas of Discourse Communities, Genres, and Rhetoric make sense to you. Do you think they’re useful concepts? Why or why not? Have you ever thought about them before? When? How?
This is category U2 Writers Statement.
Your Prompt
There are two parts to this:
Part 1. Post your research log here. It can be as messy as you want — just think of this as a place to store what you didd.
Part 2. Read McClure’s article, “Googlepedia: Turning Research Behaviors into Research Skills.”
Then respond to this prompt: The activity we did in class is built on this article. What did you learn about doing research — how you do it, how it’s like Susan and/or Edward’s approach, how it feels to be allowed to use Google and Wikipedia this way?
This is category U2 blog post 1 – GOOGLEPEDIA
Unit 1 Essay Assignment
Here’s a Word doc for Portrait of a Writer.
Here is the pdf: Portrait of a Writer
Bad Ideas mini-report
With a partner, or by yourself, pick one of the chapters from Bad Ideas (first 4 sections only). Then read it and create a mini-report:
- What is the bad idea?
- Why does the author(s) say it’s a bad idea?
- What’s a better idea?
Then create a post. Be sure to put both of your names on it.
The category is Bad Ideas.
Due Wednesday, Feb. 13
Discourse Communities
A discourse community is a “group that has goals or purposes, and uses communication to achieve these goals” (John Swales). What does that mean? Like a sports team or a non-profit group or even the skateboarding community, a discourse community:
- has a broadly agreed set of common goals.
- shares specific values.
- has a specialized vocabulary.
- uses specific genres to communicate with its members.
- has a threshold of knowledge/skill that someone must meet in order to join the discourse community.
In other words, a DC is a group with shared goals, values, skills, language, and ways of communicating.
Of course, that raises a question about exclusion: how does somebody join one? How do its members regulate membership?
Here’s an example of how you might map a discourse community: DC example_1
And here’s how one high school student mapped a web of her own discourse communities: DC web
Literacy Sponsors
Deborah Brandt, in her work on literacy and the workplace, defined the idea of literacy sponsors this way:
“any agent local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy- and gain advantage by it in some way.”
This means our literacy sponsors can be either positive influences on us, or negative ones, or even both. Parents, teachers, classmates, a grandparent, a school environment — anything can have an impact on how we become literate, how we learn to read and write, whether we are comfortable with both, and how we see literacy as part of our everyday and work lives.
