Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Prompt 4: What is community and why does it matter?


I created this video about Community and Genre for my Eng 200 class last semester and I think this is an useful place to begin our discussion. At around the same time I wrote this blog post – Community: Jumping to become a full-patch member which further extends my argument.

Links from the video (if you want to learn more):
Genre
Memo
Discourse Community
Gangland
Wolfpack

Reflect on this idea of joining a community. What communities have you joined and how has this process been similar or different from the one I describe?

I also want you to begin thinking about the ways that the web has made the process of learning about a community – and joining it – much easier (or perhaps more complicated?). This can help you with your proposal as well as your project.

Look for the web site of a business or organization that relates to your project topic. For example, Teach For America has come up in our goals discussion. Read up about the organization’s mission, goals, and history. How easy will it be to join this organization? What are the steps to becoming a full-patch member?

I also want you to investigate some hashtags (read this post to learn more about hash tags: The Twitter Hash Tags if you still aren’t clear about them) that relate to your topic (and intended community). Here are a few that I suspect will be helpful for you:


As the post above describes, hash tags develop organically rather than systematically so you have to play and experiment a bit to find the most appropriate and relevant hash tags. Once you have found a few that will work for your project then investigate the Twitter stream for that hash tag and check out the links that people Tweet. You will often find great resources, blogs, and interesting folks this way. Tell us about them!

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