Coaches can Read, Too

In "Coaches Can Read, Too" Sean Branick uses the CARS model to write an ethnography on the coaching community.  The three main moves he uses in his paper are as follows:

Establishing the Territory:

Branick establishes what a coach is and talks about their background by stating "The main responsibility of the coach is to enable their athletes to attain levels of performance not otherwise achievable" (558).  Coaches set goals, develop plans to reach said goals, then helps the team carry out the goals by monitoring and assisting.  Branick shows that coaches are crucial to a successful football team by mentioning coaches have to be literate in many different ways; reading defense, reading his own players and creating a game plan are just a few literacies any good coach needs.

Establishing a Niche:

When Branick introduces the paragraph on "Characteristics of an Effective Coach" he starts out with a while statement similar to the three while examples on pages 7-8 of WAW for establishing a niche. "While successful coaches have been exposed to the spotlight throughout history, certain personal qualities of these coaches have emerged as essential to success in the coaching business."  What he is talking about is that effective, successful coaches tend to have nearly identical qualities and characteristics:  being a good teacher, organized, competitiveness, learning abilities, and the ability to be a friend and mentor.

Explaining how he will fill the niche:

Branick asks the reader "How do football coaches, as members of a specific discourse community, go about their players and the game in order to get optimal performance and a positive end result?" (561).  This question will lead into his methods of using the characteristics of an effective coach to evaluate real coaches and how they read the game and their players.  He then applies his 5 established qualities of a successful coach to already successful coaches (UD and UC head football coaches) to see if the qualities match up with his earlier claim.

Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food and Service Workers

 In "Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food and Service Workers" I believe Mirabelli's research question asks what a menu is for a restaurant, and how it fits in as a part of the discourse community.  I believe this because Mirabelli states, "..what is a menu and what does it mean to have a literate understanding of one?”(544).  Mirabelli was able to easily collect and analyze the dinner discourse community because he used to be a part of a restaurant discourse community and was experienced and fluent in language of the restaurant business.  Because of this, he could instantly spot out ways Harvey could have done things different, or things that Harvey was doing wrong.  For example, the situation Harvey was in with the mother of the child who wanted a side of carrots, Harvey's inexperience made the situation a lot harder than Mirabelli thought it should have been.  Harvey could have avoided the whole thing by just saying "oh yeah for sure you can get carrots" then went to the freezer and got some carrots himself, not asking the already busy cooks to pick out carrots of the mixed veggie bags.  Mirabelli finds out that the menu is a primary connection between the paying customer and working employee and if this crucial interaction between the waiter and customer has any bumps the whole interaction can go south in no time.  Waiters are supposed to be the translators of the restaurant lexis and answer any questions a non member of the community wishes to know, and if the translator can't perform their job correctly the customer can choose to not be a member of that restaurant community anymore.

Project 4 proposal

Project 4 Proposal

Bobby Baldino

I am proposing for project four that I examine the discourse community of the highly popular and competitive computer game Starcraft II and its rapidly growing player community.   Nationwide, the game Starcraft II is starting to finally become well known among Americans or “foreigners” as the community calls anyone who is not from Korea.  My friends and I have been a member of this community ever since we heard about the $10 Million dollar game release two summers ago.  For a game developer, Blizzard Entertainment, to put the amount of time and money into the making of this game, we had to check it out. 

The release of Starcraft II was highly anticipated due to the huge success of Starcraft Brood war.  The first Starcraft game was released in March of 1998 and changed the way real time strategy (RTS) games were made and played.  It was the first game of its kind to be so balanced and competitive that it instantly got a lot of attention.  The most popular expansion set of Starcraft was Starcraft Brood war, which was released November of 1998.  From 1998 until 2009, countless hours of unique competitive game play has occurred recreationally and in professional tournaments.  With the rate of change in technology, for a game to remain extremely popular for more than 2 years is extremely difficult and Starcraft did it for over 10.

The Starcraft community has always been relatively large for a computer game, but has been exponentially increasing since the release of Starcraft II in 2009.  Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the community through online play, online forums, game casts, and even live tournaments.  Live tournaments used to be primarily hosted in South Korea and televised on one of their two 24hr gaming channels, but are becoming increasingly popular in America.  IGN, a popular site for videogame reviews, hosts IGN Professional League (IPL) competitions with a prize pool of $100,000 and first place prize of $30,000.  The tournament play is streamed live on the internet with popular game casters from the community calling the games.  An already established videogame tournament hosting organization, Major League Gaming (MLG) only adopted professional Starcraft to their competitive ESports tournaments a few years ago.  Now as the main event of all MLG tournaments, Starcraft II has proved its popularity and entertainment.  The tournaments are attracting big sponsors like Mountain Dew, Samsung, Visine, Sony, Dr Pepper, Stride, Bic, Hot Pockets, and Alienware just to name a few.  Every month MLG hosts a professional tournament in a different location and attracts thousands of people.  For this month, November, MLG Providence is from the 18^th to the 20^th and held in Providence, Rhode Island.  The tournament games are Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, and Starcraft II.  Starcraft has four separate live streams covering the matches of the World’s best players and is advertised as the main event on the MLG website.

A lot of my friends and I are members of the Starcraft II community, however compared to console games like Halo and Call of Duty our community is relatively small on a college campus like this.  I want to analyze the community to help raise awareness of Starcraft and ESports and how competitive and cool they really are.

In my paper I plan to use Gee’s 6 characteristics to define the shape and details of the community.  I also plan to use Wardle’s way of illustrating “mode of belonging” to how players and fans are accepted into the Starcraft community.  I am defiantly planning on using the specific lexis section from Swale’s article, because speaking in Starcraft terms sounds basically like speaking Latin to someone who is not an experienced member of the community.

                                              Refrences

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty/news.html?sid=6269369 

http://www.teamliquid.net/

WAW articles by Swales, Wardle, and Gee 

Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces

      In "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces" Elizabeth Wardle states (from Wenger) three ways newcomers use to try and belong to a specific community.  The three ways are Engagement, Imagination, and Alignment. 
       Engagement for a newcomer would be trying to get to know everyone, developing "interpersonal relationships".  For my project 4 discourse community, the world of professional Starcraft 2, engagement would be going to a tournament and trying to learn all the players, learn their styles and actually watch their matches live. 
        Imagination would describe the importance of being creative and using your imagination to contribute to the community, and not being ineffective or detaching oneself from the community.  A big part of Starcraft 2 gameplay is imagination, developing new unique strategies to win the game.  This can be rewarding or a complete failure, that is why it's important to not get too carried away with a longshot strategy and end up losing. 
         Alignment describes finding a common ground, or "adoption of broader discourses", and in this case, one of the best things you can do in Starcraft 2 is adopt a build order from a professional player.  Sponsored gamers will spend up to 10 hours each day practicing builds and imagining new ones, testing them, then deciding whether to use them or not.  By watching a professional game, and mimicking at least their opening build new members of the community can gain an edge on the rest.

Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice

Swales seems to have more of a checklist that tells you where you fit in with your discourse, while gee is basically saying that one is born into a discourse community, and they may have learned literacy in their own way and formed a secondary literacy.  This of course would be corrected by the sponsors of the primary discourse community, in this case most likely parents or a teacher.  Johns on the other hand adds to the conversation by saying that maybe "discourse community" isn't the right way to describe the community, perhaps "communities of practice" is a better way to describe the community.  Johns says this because she believes that in the classroom, students should learn from each others wide variety of communities of practice to broaden their discourse through experience with many different communities and their unique discourses.

Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

I can remember a long time ago when my younger sister was learning the many words and phrases and rules associated with the english language, and I specifically remember that she had a tough time with the past tense.  I was only three years older than she was, but would notice it every now and then and would immediately want to correct it because it was not the right discourse to me.  I still had a battle between the primary discourse of the community and my secondary discourse, but was closer to making my primary discourse the accepted one than my younger sister, so my parents were usually the ones that brought the hammer down.  They would do constant tests everywhere we would go, in the car out to dinner, at grandma and grandpas... just testing her past tense skills until she showed that she was starting to leave the previously dominant secondary discourse behind.  Of course this "help" was not at first welcomed by my sister, but as time went on and she improved she became more tolerant of the practice. This situation from my child hood is what I believe Gee is describing when he talks about dominant discourses and how the users always want to correct anyone who doesn't speak the same way.

The Concept of Discourse Community

Discourse community common  public goals:
     This can be any group or organization that shares common objectives that can be listened in on by anyone.  I am in the Ohio Snowcats, a ski and snowboard club full of members who love winter activities and anyone can join.

Mechanisms of Intercommunication:
     The methods of intercommunication for any discourse community are the multiple ways members can talk to each other and share information.  In the Snowcats, we have a facebook page and email system that tells members when meetings are.  The meetings as well are another form of communication.

Information and feedback in the community:
      In order to improve the performance and success of the discourse community feedback is always important.  Exchanging this vital information can help improve the whole organization. In meetings the commanding officers are always asking what the weekends' party should be themed, or which white water rafting trip we would want to go on in the spring.

Multiple genres of communication:
      I think this category refers to the importance of having multiple ways of communicating with the members in a community.  For the snowcats, in case a member does not have facebook, or their email listed they have another option for communication.

Specific Lexis:
      The specific lexis of a discourse community is the lingo, phrases, abbreviations and methods unique to that group or organization.  In the snowcats, phrases like Snowglow (snowcats house rave party) or backside 180 (a trick when snowboarding) are specific lexi. (past tense of lexis?)

Members with expertise in the discourse:
      In order to have a successful discourse community, there needs to be leaders and organizers that have been members for a long time, or that just have a very good understanding for the discourse.  The leaders of the Snowcats are twins that have been skiing their whole lives, and joined the club as freshman then worked their way up to senior officers for their senior year.