This paper examines the importance of ‘discourse architecture’ and ‘community’ to the maintenance and growth of virtual publics. ‘Virtual publics’ are computer mediated discourse spaces created by using various technologies including email, the USENET, web based bulletin boards, IRC, MUDS, etc. It is argued that the over-emphasis to date on ‘community’ has discouraged systemic analysis of colla...

The growth of distance education warrants a closer look at how virtual communities of practice form in asynchronous online classrooms. Prior studies have sought to identify a process to virtual community formation, which may vary depending upon the media used for collaboration. This microstudy examines how one student group in a distance writing course used the popular social media site Faceboo...

in recent years, virtual communities have been significantly popular and almost all of them are targeted for business profitability. in our study, the profitability of these communities for businesses has been analyzed from a commercial perspective. the study considers virtual community as a business model which can have a great impact on consumer purchase decision process. with respect to refe...

As the Internet has become widely accessible mailing list servers are being used increasingly to support collaborative discourse in scholarly communities. The majority of these communities are open and new users may join who have met few, if any, of the other list members, and come to know them primarily through email discourse. However, new members joining the discourse of an established group...

As the Internet has become widely accessible mailing list servers are being used increasingly to support collaborative discourse in scholarly communities. The majority of these communities are open and new users may join who have met few, if any, of the other list members, and come to know them primarily through email discourse. However, new members joining the discourse of an established group...

This manuscript is to provide an action research report on the issues behind the prototyping of a student-centered creative knowledge environment (CKE), which focuses on developing student responsibility, making learning meaningful, promoting overt knowledge construction, performing learner assessment, and showcasing learner achievements. The primary idea is to create an electronic knowledge sp...

the absolute hegemony of international code of (academic) communication has resulted in the development and spread of the discoursal voice of the culture form which historical english has emerged, and, as a consequence, any violation from the generic conventions and thinking patterns born out of such a discourse has resulted in the deprivation of non-native thinkers form active participation in...

in order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

This paper assesses some of the strong claims made about the significance of virtual communities to electronic commerce. It focuses on the notion of community building as a means to constructing virtual metropolises, where tens of thousands of individuals are engaged in public computer-mediated discourse. It is argued that the community approach discourages systemic analysis of collaborative me...

The aim of the current paper is to formulate a conception of pragmatic patterns characterizing the construction of individual and collective identities in virtual communities (in our case: the Twitter community). We have explored several theoretical approaches and frameworks and relevant empirical data to show that the agents building virtual communities are 'extended selves' grounded in a high...