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. 

From Pencils to Pixels

In "From Pencils to Pixels" by Dennis Baron I feel like he does seem to shrug at technology sometimes, but he shrugs at a lot of things in his writing.  I feel like Baron shows us good and bad sides to technology and its impact on our literacy today, however it seems like he is hesitant to use new technology.  He states that "technology has a trailing edge as well as a down side, and studying how computers are put to use raises serious issues in the politics of work and mechanisms of social control." (439) yet he goes on to say "Although the rate of change of computer development is significantly faster, it is still too early to do significant speculating." Baron is talking about how the altering of literacy practices by computers and technology remains to be seen, saying it is too early to tell if computers have altered our literacy.  Now I know this article was written in 1999, but even then a serious number of people, authors, and teachers used and embraced the use of technology in their writing.  I disagree with Baron's view point in this article; every day new technologies exist, and to say these awesome discoveries are not changing the shape of how writing is written in my opinion is crazy talk.

The Future of Literacy

In "The Future of Literacy" the authors present four case studies and talk about how they became literate and improved their skills through computers and technology.  Of all four, I feel like I make a connection with the Danielle DeVoss case study the most.  I feel like I was the brother in the story and she was my sister.  I can not remember how young I was when I was first introduced into computers but it had to be around the same time I learned to read and write.  I know my sister and I definitely would fight for computer time though, even though all we were fighting for was to play solitare or with microsoft windows 95 Paint.  But through using the computer all the time to play games and even using learning programs that teach reading and writing skills, technology has impacted my literacy skills, and basically built them.  As computer technology increased over the years, I was right there with it learning it all.  Photoshop, dreamweaver, excel, word, several different engineering 3-D design programs, and powerful function input programs like Matlab along with more than a bakers dozen videogames have given me the technological literacy I have today, which is similar to how Danielle developed her web literacies.

Malcolm X and Superman

In both articles, the authors start out with little or no literacy and basically end up teaching themselves to be literate.  The two authors had some very different angles though.  Their approaches were definitely influenced by their socioeconomic statuses.  Malcolm wanted to learn to be literate so he could speak as powerful as he could on the streets with a pen and paper in letters while Sherman was raised in a house full of his fathers books wanted to learn literacy to be like his father.  A "smart indian" was a dangerous person though according to Sherman.  Indians were supposed to fail in school, but Sherman didn't want that so he taught himself to read and understand paragraphs.  Malcolm on the other hand started learning in a jail cell by copying pages of a dictionary, so he did not have much material to work with, but motivation to be literate and the amazing feeling of accomplishment kept him going and copying more and more pages until he could eventually read for himself. 

Sponsors of Literacy

In "Sponsors of Literacy" Brandt suggests that our literacies are shaped and crafted throughout our lives through various "socioeconomic" situations.  She also states that our literacies are shaped by our sponsors in our lives, or the "figures who turned up most typically in people's memories of literacy learning: older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors..." basically anyone you look up to that influences what you do.  My parents are definitely my largest sponsors; they taught me more than anyone else has to date, and shaped me to be who I am toady.  They however are not my only influential sponsors.  My public school experience with not only 12 years of teachers and learning facts, but 12 years of learning social skills and extending my shape to be what it is today.  These sponsors have been and are still a big part of my life and have been more than adequate.  I have always wanted to learn the language of 3-D graphics, like creating and programming flash movies or creating a virtual environment for video games.  Would not mind being literate in video game designing and creating at all.

Reflection Essay

Bobby Baldino

English 308J

Matt Vetter

10 October 2011

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

When I first heard our first assignment was to create a Wikipedia article, instantly a plethora of thoughts were racing through my head.  What should it be? What do I know about that no one else knows? Will it work? Well the topic I decided on was Lake Snowden because first of all it wasn’t on Wikipedia, and second, because I love nature and the outdoors I knew I would definitely not mind researching a local lake and publishing an article on it.  The topic selection process however was not at all easy.  The first idea I had was to write about Strouds Run, a State Park just outside of Athens that my friends and I have been to many times.  Unfortunately an article had already been created on the park, which turned out wasn’t so unfortunate after all.  The Strouds Run State Park article on Wikipedia was basically my template for Lake Snowden.  Both were popular local lakes in the Athens region with very similar wildlife and activities.  The Strouds Run page helped me form my frame, how to make headings and section titles with the “===History===” equal signs and the wiki code to make an information box on the right side of the article with a picture.  I was hoping to get a few good source ideas from the Strouds Run page; however I was very surprised to find the article only had one source, and it was the website they got the picture of the park map from.  I used to be worried about my sources, but now that I am done with the project and feel like a truly have an objective, well written article with a few decent sources and three solid sources, it will not be deleted for some time to come because the Strouds Run article’s last modified date was early June of 2011.  My point is for an article to last from at least June to October with zero sources I feel like my article should last as long as I didn’t make any overlooked errors.  I liked how unique and original this assignment idea was, never before have I been “bragging” to my friends that I get to make a Wikipedia article for an English class assignment.  This is the first class I have done anything like that before and I hope Mr. Vetter continues to use Wikipedia and online writing in his future classes.  Writing articles and posts that you know will be online that people may or may not even see, makes the way I structure my writing different than before because of that chance that someone could see it in the future. 

                The Wikipedia writing assignment really reminded me how rusty I was and how long it had been since I went through the writing process.  When I was first attempting to tackle the assignment I was lost with no idea where to jump in at.  After reading a few articles and assuring myself this assignment wouldn’t be like the classic dreaded English 151 research paper the traditional writing skills started flowing out, but not perfectly.  After reading “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, I was relieved to hear that even the great and lucrative writers have terrible first drafts and try again and again until they have something they like.  Lamott went on to inform me that, “the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down.  The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up… And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth” (303).  This really spoke to me and I feel like I will have less trouble getting the ball rolling on future writing assignments.  Through reading other articles I learned what types of sources Wikipedia likes, and what types they say are not good enough through the article submission for review process, and went back and found more legitimate sources.  I also became very fond with the evaluation and summary writing styles, for that was basically my entire article.  The article deadline is past, but I know I need more in line citations and direct quotes.  The article I was basing mine off used no inline quotations and only had one source, and I should have just dropped Strouds Run and chose another article to structure mine from even though it was so similar to Lake Snowden.  For me, the Wikipedia assignment was the first time I really posted an article to the World Wide Web that comes up in Google when you search it.  This aspect totally changed the game when it came to the writing process for me because like I said earlier, there’s a small chance someone outside the classroom will actually read your article.  In writing this social article I was making sure I edited and worded my paper better than I ever had any paper before.  With an objective paper of course the process was not as difficult as say a persuasive writing but still was time consuming.  Writing a paper as a multifaceted process became very apparent to me after reading “Tuning, Typing, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision” by Barbara Tomlinson.  Most of the metaphors she described related to the writing process I had and didn’t even know it.  The metaphor that I felt was most like my writing process was the mechanic, or “fixing things”.  Tomlinson illustrates the mechanic metaphor in the writing process as, “gradually redying an old car for the road”, (Writing About Writing 262) or “Tightening up all the bolts.” (259). The drawing board on Wikipedia helped because it was a place for me to talk about my article topic and have other Wikians discuss ideas they had about the potential article.  This gave me some very helpful outside opinions that I could use to construct a legitimate objective well crafted article worthy of staying on Wikipedia for some time to come. 

                Online forums like Wikipedia are setting the standard for knowledge distribution in the 21^st century because this century is a technological century, full of tech savvy individuals who would rather find what they are looking for online as opposed to an encyclopedic collection of books.  As far as the forums go, Wikipedia is unique such that they offer the whole World Wide Web hundreds of millions of free encyclopedic articles.  When I think of a metaphor for Wikipedia in the writing process, I think of a liquid, “fluid, molten” (Tomlinson 255) material that can be edited and molded at anytime never quite reaching the casting status.  The web gets this valuable information for free because any of its users can be authors, writers and editors of the encyclopedia.  With this responsibility of writing a free encyclopedia comes with pros and cons.  The cons however can be taken as pros from some points of view; the possibility that anyone can get on and make an edit to any page draws attention by the original authors and Wikipedia administrators.  This confirms that the articles are being constantly watched, checked, protected, and updated all the time while other encyclopedias have to publish entire new editions to fix any errors or add any pages. The online forum approach for an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is, in my opinion and from my experience with the website, absolutely an advantage over traditional encyclopedias written by a room full of scholars and professors writing Britannica’s 14^th edition then casting that with a publisher, just to have another edition in a few years.  

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Writing About Writing A College Reader Ed. Elizabeth Wardle, Doug    Downs. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 301-304. Print.

Tomlinson, Barbara. “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts.” Writing About Writing A College Reader Ed. Elizabeth Wardle, Doug Downs. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 251-269. Print.

Shitty First Drafts

Lamont is saying that when people think of how writers write they think they just sit down and hammer out solid usable work however that is not the case at all.  Even the best authors, most respected authors, and English professors struggle writing first drafts.  Lamont believes that all you need to do to get started is just write a first article loaded with bullll shit (just get stuff on the paper) then write a second, better draft, then a usable final draft.  She said the first draft is a "down draft", just get the ideas written down on paper even if it looks like a child wrote it.  The second draft is an "up draft", you fix up the first and crop out the bad and keep the good.  Then she said the third draft is the "dental draft", the draft where you "check every tooth, to see if its loose or cramped or decayed" and really do a close inspection then end up with a good flowing final paper.  Wikipedia gives us access to the drawing board, which is essentially a place where all the shitty first drafts come to hang out and gain helpful criticism to hopefully one day cut the shit and become a legitimate article.

Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision

I feel like I can relate to most of the metaphors that Tomlinson describes in my writing.  In my article I sculpted the writing by first writing the whole text then going back and sculpting, or morphing the text on a finer level.  I also can relate to the painting metaphor because the author talks about different layers, and numerous stages of writing and editing, which I feel like is how I looked at different sections and  "painted over" a few things.  I feel like you don't have to worry about tying things off in an objective piece.. there isn't much to keep track of and tie off.  I also felt like a mechanic jumping around and tightening up a sentence here and there... fixing a broken phrase or misspelled word... trying to end up with a well-oiled running machine.  In wikipedia, I feel like the View History tab is a good example of Casting and Recasting, showing all the previous states how they were cast before, then what was reformed.  The revisions also take advantage of the shape of earlier casts and build on them making a better article.  The discussion tab is a good place for several different metaphors to come out and be talked about.  An article might have some loose ends, or might need a patch sewed in, or something cut out.  Basically a mechanics "to do list" for the article to get it up and running again.