Link for project

https://www.autismspeaks.org

This is a website that talks a little bit about the disease and how it affects the children. It also tells how it develops and some warning signs and some statistical information about the disease.

Blog Post 6

For the second project, the "othered" community I would like to examine is children with autism. I have chosen this group not because I have a sibling with autism or really know a lot about the disease. I chose this group, because I would like to learn more about this disease and I also love children! Another reason is because it is near and dear to mother who helps at Bertha Barber Elementary School in the special needs department. She tells me stories about the little kids, some are cute and some are harsh, and hearing these stories makes me want to learn more about this community and how even little kids are "othered" by their peers and maybe even teachers. I think that I will be looking at texts from both ways. I would like at least one or two texts about the group in order to learn more about autism and how it effects the children. I would also look at texts of the group and how they compare to the social "norm." 

I really want to vary the texts that I will look at use for the project. I will look at articles about the disease to learn about it because I don't really have a good grasp about it. I also might wanna do an interview with my mother about her kids, but not using their names of course. I think a video or a podcast also might be interesting to use as one of my text. I think using a collection of different text will give my paper a better representation of autistic children and how they are an "othered" community. These are kinda my thoughts about this paper so far. I just think that this will be an interesting project and i'm excited to learn more about this community! 

Blog Post 5

Social construction was never something I really understood or talked about in any other of my classes. It is really interesting to me, hearing several different versions of it and making up my own from all these different sources. This really funny because my roommate is taking a multicultural education class and she just had to right a paper over this and we were discussing it a couple weeks ago. I really have enjoyed the activities we did in class the past week. I think they helped a lot to get everybody in the zone for the new project. 

I saw social construction play apart in every text that I have read or listened to in the past week. Some of them are in similar was and others are in different ways. Hanfler's article, as my base, I can see examples in the different texts that explain what Hanfler was talking about in his article. In one instance Hanfler said "We learn meanings. Parents, teachers, friends, coaches, the media and so forth teach us our initial interpretation of the world. the process begins at birth…" (24). This quote from Hanfler's article really relates to what Lorber was talking about in her article. She is saying that since day one we categorize people as either female or male and they don't get a choice to grow up and found out which one they want to be. Hanfler and Lorber also talk about how influences of the outside world guide you into female or male. What I mean is when a child is little you, as the parent, give them toys to play with. If they are girls, they normally get dolls and boys get cars. This shows that form a young age you already know, based on influences, what gender you are. There is a great example of this in the radio cast I listened to about football. There was a mom and her son being interviewed about football. The mom really pushed her son to play football, because that's what all her brothers, dad, uncles did. Come to find out after a season or two the son didn't want to play football anymore. In the interview he said he really enjoyed swimming and wanted to try synchronize swimming. His mom and the interviewer just laughed at him thinking it was a joke, but the kid was serious. This is an example of saying that since that young boy was male he should play a tough sport like football not synchronize swimming, because that is more a girl's activity. 

We could take the same quote from Hanfler's article and relate it something else completely different. In Young's article he is talking about language. There was one quote in particular that really caught my attention. "If he meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldnt everybody be learnin everybody’s dialect?" (111). In this paragraph, Young was dissecting a quote from Fish's New York Times article. Fish is saying that everybody should be excited to learn a new language. Young's argument back is that if they have to adopt standard english when they write, shouldn't other dialects be adopted too. This goes into what Hanfler was saying about learning meaning from outside influences such as teachers. In school we learn that in order to write a good paper, we must write in standard english. Young is arguing that why we don't adopt other dialects, but expect people to drop their own and learn ours. These are both examples of social construction coming from many different texts and there are tons more.

Blog Post 4

Introduction:

"Our continued disciplinary emphasis on static text, and our reliance on theories derived from print texts, as Brooke and Prior and Hengst (2010) note, not only puts us out of step with students and the larger culture, but also blinds us to many of the rhetorical affordances of new media." (p. 11)

• Here in the introduction and mostly throughout the whole introduction, Buck uses outside sources  and theories that she is basing her research on. That is a good idea to show the reader other points of view about the topic, before she goes on through the paper with her views and the data she collected. This also could be away to tie the conclusion back to the introduction with the same outside sources.

"In focusing on social network sites, I use boyd and Ellison’s (2007) definition: “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system”" (p. 11)

• Also in the introduction Buck told us some guidelines that she used for this experiment. I think that she did this in the last paragraph to kind of transition into her methods section of her paper. 

Methods:

"Ronnie’s case study is part of a larger study of undergraduate and graduate stu- dents’ literacy practices on social network sites. The undergraduate students in this study, attending a large, Midwestern research university, were recruited during the Spring 2010 semester by class visits to an advanced composition course focused on composition through a variety of media, including image, audio, and video." (p.12)

• Buck breaks up her method section for each different way she collected data and how she got started in Ronnie's case study. The specific quote tells the reader how she chose a person to do the research one and it also tells us that this is not her own study and it's actually part of a bigger study on the campus. 

"The research interviews, for example, allowed me to gauge my own interpretations of comments Ronnie posted online, as well as to gain background information unavailable in the textual activity I recorded." (p. 13)

• This quote tells us a little bit on how the different resources she had available helped her in understanding his social media better than just looking at his profiles. I think its important to show the different ways you got information of course, but also how they helped in furthering your understanding of the case. 

Results:

"For him, this number indexed his identity as a producer rather than a consumer on Twitter:
I try to keep my followers greater than the number of people I’m following because, you know, it’s just like my, I guess, weird habit. All the big people who tweet have—tend to have—more followers than people they’re following, so I feel like in a way that I am a publisher and not just someone who’s following people. " (p. 14)

• I like that throughout her results section Buck uses quotes from Ronnie to explain points that she is writing about his social media. That way the reader can see his view on things and might clear up some confusion that the reader might have.

"At the top of his Facebook page, Ronnie had his name written in Chinese characters next to the Roman script. Aside from a large photo album devoted to his music group’s trip to China and Korea, however, Ronnie did not represent his ethnic heritage (either Chinese or Irish) in his social network site use." (p.18)

• This is really interesting to me. She knows a little more about Ronnie than we know about our partners, but in her results instead of just putting things she noticed he did do on his social media, she also put in her results section stuff that she notice he didn't do on his social media. 

Discussion: 

"Because Ronnie used social network sites to organize different aspects of his life, he was particularly attuned to the different ways in which his information was dispersed and used, and this was a process that he wanted to have control over." (p. 31)

• I really like this quote because it shows that from her data she collected for two semesters and how she summarizes her results section, yet expands on the meaning behind the results she came to find. 

"Ronnie also adjusted templates on social network sites for his own purposes." (p. 33)

• I think this quote from Buck really fits well in her discussion section. She states that Ronnie is taking the way he presents himself online into his own hands. Also this is showing that he wants to create his own way of showing who he is and taking charge. 

Conclusion: 

"Ronnie represents a rather extreme case of social network site use, both through the number of sites he used and the amount of activity he engaged in on each site." (p. 34)

• This quote from Buck explains Ronnie is not a normal case and how comparing him to the norm or generalized idea, he is very different that the "average user." 

"Rather than focusing only on the ways that social network sites might be used in the classroom, considering the ways students inte- grate the use of such sites into their daily lives can help researchers and teachers better understand students’ writing activities and digital literacy practices within digital environments." (p. 36)

• This is Buck's last sentence in her conclusion. She wraps up her whole paper and her thesis in one sentence at the end. This is were I struggle and need to work on is wrapping up my thoughts and not leaving anything hanging or loose. 

Blog Post 3

Here are some questions I would ask my partner in the interview and/or screencast for this project:

1. How much time to you spend looking at twitter than actually posting to twitter?

2. Is there a reason that you do not tweet that much?

3. Is there a reason that your follower to following ratio is the way it is?

4. What role to you see twitter serving in your life?

5. Is there a certain way you want to be  perceived on twitter?

6. How long have been using twitter?

7. Do you think that what you favorite more accurately describes yourself that what you tweet or vice versa?

8. What aspects of your life do you enjoy posting about most?

9. How do you use videos and pictures that you favorite as a way to represent yourself?

10. What communities on twitter do you associate with?

11. How often do you use the affordances that twitter offers, which ones do you use most often and why?

12. How do the communities your apart of contribute to your identity on twitter?

Some of these questions are questions that I feel Buck asked Ronnie to get the information she did about his social media. For example she says that his follower to following ratio matters to him and makes him seem like a celebrity because thats how their twitters look. For my partner, he has more followers than he is following and I wonder if that is important to him. Some of these questions come from looking at his profile. On his profile it says how many tweets you have and favorites. My partner doesn't tweet a lot (only 45 tweets), but he has a lot of favorites. So knowing why he uses the favorite affordance instead of tweeting original things. Also some of these questions came from our class discussion. Taking from all these different resources I came up with these twelve questions as a start to brainstorm about what I am going to ask my partner.  

Blog Post 2

These three articles that we read, were really interesting to me. I never really thought about social media as a way to write and find different audiences or posting the good could be considered lying. I only viewed social media as a place to catch up with people that live long distance or to talk about an experience you had that day. I have various forms of social media: twitter, Facebook, instagram, etc. I rarely post things on these sites, I normally just look at them to see what other people are up to. Through these articles I saw people develop communities through like experiences and finding similar audiences. I really enjoyed reading the third article about the conversation between Bev Gooden and Audie Cornish. Something so small as a hashtag on Twitter could change people lives and bring a community into the light that is normally in the dark and not talked about. That is one way I saw through these articles is that experience can connect a lot of people. 

I believe that Harris would say that, in the first article, the poet that started the online twitter poem was creating a discourse community. These people never met before and are probably never going to, but they all have similar interest in poetry that tie them together. "In the place of physical nearness we are given like-mindedness (Harris)." This quote from Harris' article is very prominent in the first article about the color poets. They all have the like-mindedness of their love of poetry and background history. Another quote from Harris' article is prevalent in the third article we read.  "...Swales also stipulates that there must be some common "goal" towards which the group is working (Harris)." When Gooden made that hashtag #WhyIStayed, she was helping other women reach a common goal of voicing their abusive relationships and helping them eventually make changes. 

As I stated before, I am apart of multiple social media sites. Through these sites I have many different communities that I am a part of. Some of these are friends from Georgia that I still keep in touch with, youth group from my church back home, the floor that I lived on last year, and even some of my classes. Some discourses that mark these communities are academic, personal, or professional. The discourses help shape the different kinds of communities I'm apart of by what kind of language to use when I'm talking to different people in the various communities. For example, if I would be more proper when talking to my youth leader or old softball coach, than when I catch up with my friends over messaging. Most of these communities I'm apart of came from meeting the people and making a group on Facebook and using that to communicate, while others came because we have something in common. Communities come to us in many different ways and reading these articles really shed some light on how we can use social media to find even more communities to be a part of. 

Blog Post 1

            Blog Post 1

               Hello, I’m Nicole Carver. I don’t write a lot, but when I do… I write to remember. I write to tell loved ones how I feel. I write to celebrate. I write to say thank you. I write to fill the blank spaces. I write to learn and to study. I write to bring joy. I write because writing is a challenge for me. I write to improve. I write to tell people about what I love. I am the kind of writer who struggles with writing. My brain likes math problems and science equations. It is not very fond of rhetorical analysis and punctuation. Even though I’m not fond of writing, I am the kind of person that will try hard to improve my writing as the semester goes along.

                As for the community portion of the class, the Harris essay really hit it on the head. He was saying that a community has numerous meanings and types. He focused a lot on the academic community with the universities. Harris was saying that the point of having so many different communities is so that students can be a part of the different communities even if they contradict each other. Communities are not meant to be apart for a little bit of time and then move on to another one. They are meant to be taken through life with you. I am apart of multiple communities. From when I was little until now I have developed a lot of the communities that I am still apart of today. I moved to Nebraska in eighth grade, so I still identify myself with the community that I grew up with. I also identify with the community of friends that I built in college. These girls that I have found here are going to be a community that will be with me forever. To be in a community is to be a part of a group of people that you grow up with, have something in common with, identify with, and you enjoy being around. The communities come from multiple parts of my life. Classes, friends, neighborhoods, family and church are where I have found most of the communities that I identify with now. They feel like communities because I feel comfortable and safe in them. Language and writing are a big part and different for the communities. As you talk to different groups of people, the way you talk changes. When Harris talks about Sylvia and Richard, it’s exactly what I’m talking about. He says Sylvia has three languages, even though they were not actual languages, she still talked about how she needs to learn the public language.

                These are my views about both aspects of this class; the writing part, the community part, and them together. I am glad to expand on these subjects as the year goes on. I’m also excited to improve my writing skills on my own and with the class as a community.