Professional Documents
Culture Documents
communication in online
learning
Noamgalai: 'Socializing'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noamg/218169158/
‘Face work’ in Facebook:
An analysis of an online
discourse community
Tony McNeill
April 2008
1. Introduction and context
My chosen online discourse community relates to my professional practice as a lecturer based in the
Academic Development Centre (ADC) at Kingston University. Within the ADC I am involved in
providing, amongst other things, a range of academic staff development opportunities and guidance
in the area of e‐learning. An emerging area of interest at Kingston University is the use of Web 2.0
tools and platforms as a supplement to, or in some cases, as a replacement of, the Blackboard
Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), currently the institution’s main platform to support learning,
teaching and assessment.
A small but growing number of colleagues have articulated a concern that the university’s
technological infrastructure was too detached from the practice of its students; for example, there is
currently minimal support for outbound text messaging in a youth culture in which texting is the
norm and there is little use of social networking sites (SNS) which are growing in popularity amongst
young people of, or approaching, university age (JISC 2007a; JISC 2007b; JISC 2008; Kennedy, G. et al.
2006; Livingstone & Bober 2005; Salaway, G. & Borreson Carouso, J. 2007). In response to this, some
colleagues have begun to go ‘beyond Blackboard’ and experiment with alternative environments
including SNS such as Facebook.
The use of SNS in Higher Education raises a range of interesting issues about language, discourse,
power and culture that some researchers have begun to address (boyd 2007; boyd & Ellison 2008;
Ellison et al. 2007; Liu 2008; Merchant 2006; Selwyn 2007; Stutzman 2005). Questions that
particularly interest me include:
• What discoursal expectations emerge from the use of an informal 'outside' space to host a
learning community? What are the kinds of politeness strategies deployed?
• Does communication in ‘their’ [i.e. student] space alter the power dynamic between tutors
and students, lessening social distance between participants?
• Does the widespread use of SNS by students for particular forms of identity performances,
often at variance with ‘official’ academic identities (Selwyn 2007), militate against its use as
a virtual learning environment?
• What are the key characteristics of language use in an SNS? Do they change as a result of the
involvement of an academic tutor? Is there a distinctive variation in language use between
an institutional VLE‐based discussion board post or email exchange and those situated
within a third‐party SNS?
This analysis will consider these questions, respectively covering discourse, power, culture and
language, within the context of the use of the Facebook SNS as an environment for course‐specific
student support. I will take as my discourse community the staff and students enrolled on the BA
Film Studies programme (both single and joint honours) in the 2007/8 academic year. The corpus of
linguistic exchanges for analysis is comprised of Facebook interactions between a Lecturer in Film
Studies (henceforth known as David), and his students. I will concentrate primarily on a series of
group email exchanges and discussion board posts between David and his students. These emails are
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included in the Appendix. I have secured permission from the colleague concerned, as well as his
students, to analyse their Facebook exchanges for the purposes of this study. My analysis will draw
on the work of John Swales on discourse communities, Susan Herring‘s research on text‐based
computer‐mediated discourse (CMD) and Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson’s models of
politeness strategies.
2. Discourse communities and Facebook
According to John Swales, discourse communities are defined by broadly agreed common goals,
special mechanisms for communication and participation and some specialised vocabulary (1987
pp.5‐7). Swales’ later writing (1990) adds a further level of complexity, arguing that a discourse
community is not simply a group of people who share a particular common interest and forms of
communication, but one whose participation is delimited by that community’s discoursal
expectations. Participation within the environment of a particular discourse community is deemed
acceptable only insofar as it conforms to the underlying rules of the game (i.e. how things are done,
what constitutes appropriate or socially desirable behaviour) of that community. Susan Herring’s
work on CMD is potentially useful here and employs the term ‘norms’ (2007) to describe behavioural
standards and linguistic behaviour specific to a particular group. By way of example, she argues that
empathy, encouragement and support are expected and approved of in a women’s health
newsgroup (e.g. Stork Talk) but that rudeness, aggressiveness and profanity are expected and
desirable features of the alt.flame newsgroup. Joseph Kayany’s (1998) earlier research on flaming
adopted a similar line, arguing that intemperate language was not an intrinsic part, or inevitable
consequence, of online communication but, rather, the result of particular social and cultural
contexts.
The Facebook SNS provides a convenient environment for the development of discourse
communities with its varied participatory mechanisms. On Facebook users create their personal
profile page allowing them to list interests and activities they share with others. They also belong to
a ‘Network’ defined primarily by the educational institution with which they are, or have been,
affiliated. Communication with others within Facebook takes place via a range of tools including
email, discussion boards, uploaded videos and picture galleries that include a space for comments
and a ‘wall’ in which users can exchange messages with nominated friends. Other popular features
include status updates, ‘poking’ friends (an ambiguous tool but one of the many phatic uses of
Facebook) and gift‐giving (fish, flowers etc.).
Facebook users can also set up their own groups which they make public or else invite others to join,
thereby creating highly fluid and open ’community’ spaces for learning. Of interest to this study, is
the use of Facebook to create and sustain social networking communities (SNCs). I want to argue
that the sorts of SNCs operating within Facebook may be seen as distinct online discourse
communities with some, admittedly a minority, having learning, or the co‐production of knowledge,
as the common goal or interest. Facebook is currently the platform for various discourse
communities; it is not the space for a single monolithic one. To date, thousands of groups exist with
a range of common interests and discoursal expectations or norms. Alongside academic groups such
as Teaching & Learning with Facebook whose discoursal norms are little different to those of an
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academic newsgroup, there exist many others whose norms permit very different, often disturbing
(see Capriccioso 2004), types of online behaviour.
3. Discourse in our Film Studies Facebook community
Being part of a discourse community involves sharing its specific interests but also its ways of acting
discoursally. This is reflected in the way that members of a discourse community share expectations
in terms of appropriateness of topics and ways those topics can be discussed. These expectations,
Swales argue, create the genres that articulate the activities of the discourse community.
Within our Facebook discourse community, David served as the ‘expert’ member, creating groups
and initiating communicative exchanges. Genres deployed included: asking advice, inviting others
out for a drink, soliciting feedback on work produced and so on. The types of interactions observed
were typical of what Gary Burnett has called ‘collaborative interactive behaviours’ (2000) with
either a transactional orientation related to information seeking and providing information to other
community members, or with a more interactional orientation (language games, conversational
humour and expressions of empathy and support) that were more about establishing and reinforcing
group identity. David’s Facebook communications also vary in tone: those on academic matters
adopting a less playful, although relatively informal style (e.g. interaction 1: 38); whilst those on
social events such as organising an end‐of‐module drink adopt a less formal style characterised by
various forms of conversational humour (e.g. teasing, self‐deprecating jokes, mock‐competitiveness)
and in‐group references (e.g interaction 1: 1).
Analysing the exchanges, it appears that discoursal expectations developed as a result of three
factors: David’s initial Facebook communications which set a tone and invited particular types of
responses; participants’ prior expertise in online communication in Facebook and/or other forms of
CMD; and, perhaps most importantly, the rapport David had already established with his students
offline. It’s interesting to note that some of the conversational joking present in David’s exchanges
took the form of self‐deprecating humour in which David parodied his own adaption to the CMD
styles required of him:
that's "sick" (I believe that means "big" and good)
Interaction 1: 13
In part, this example refers to a strand of offline joking between David and Sunil. However, it also
indicates a playful awareness of the tension between David’s preferred style and the emerging
dominant style of the discourse community. It might be argued that this use of self‐deprecating
humour was also a means of downplaying his linguistic authority whilst simultaneously exercising it;
playing along with the language games – in this case, the use of slang terms like sick and big ‐ whilst
indirectly (and therefore maintaining the face needs of participants – more of which later) reminding
community participants that such words are not part of the ‘legitimate’ lexis of academic discourse.
Although I’ve indicated that so‐called ‘non‐expert’ community members played a key role in
establishing the dominant style, one drawn from earlier experiences of CMD, not all characteristics
of the discourse of SNS have been carried over. For example, as some researchers have already
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identified (Selwyn 2007; Thelwall 2007), the use of taboo words and swearing is commonplace in
SNS like Facebook and MySpace as a form of identity performance and/or to strengthen group
identity. However, there were no uses in any of the interactions studied. There were occasionally
uses of substitute adverbial boosters – e.g. “thats so freakin weird” (student Facebook email Jan 28th
2008 – not in Appendix) – and two uses of now weak swear words – e.g. sod and git in two instances
of banter or mock offensiveness (interaction 1: 8 and 52 respectively). This might be explained in a
number of ways: the limited scope of the corpus of interactions studied or the attitudes towards
swearing of the participants. However, my hypothesis is that there was a tacit prohibition of such
language; the discourse community’s implicit expectations led to a self‐policing of its behavioural
and linguistic norms.
4. Politeness strategies, humour and social distance
An integral part of the discoursal practices of this community involved the use of conversational
humour, including banter, teasing and self‐mockery. Sociolinguistic studies (Boxer & Cortes‐Conde
1997; Kotthoff 1996) have tended to confirm that joking behaviour serves an important social
function and that the playful use of language achieves a range of identity and relational effects (e.g.
attenuating power imbalances; licensing challenges to status hierarchies; establishing common
ground; marking in‐group boundaries) .
I’d argue that conversational humour was one of the politeness strategies deployed to maintain
participants' ‘face’ within the discourse community. Brown and Levinson’s model of linguistic
politeness adapts Ervin Goffman’s earlier concept of face ‐ "an image of self delineated in terms of
approved social attributes" (1967, p.5) – and face‐work – “actions taken by a person to make
whatever he is doing consistent with face" (1967, p.12). Brown and Levinson argue that behaviours
that infringe on other peoples' need to maintain face constitute what they call Face Threatening Acts
(FTAs). Politeness strategies are deployed for the main purpose of avoiding or dealing with FTAs.
In a number of Facebook interactions, verbal play and conversational humour is used by David to
present a positive face (i.e. as accessible, approachable and able to take a joke) and by students to
avoid the overly deferential attitude they might be expected to adopt towards their tutor (arguably
an FTA). This is apparent in the numerous exchanges in Interaction 1 in which students tease David.
I’d interpret the teasing about David’s alleged lack of pool skills (emails 5‐8), his typographical error
(emails 15‐19) and age (emails 51‐60) as particular forms of face work expressing solidarity and
friendship rather than distance and antipathy. In two of the three examples, about pool and his age,
David invites the teasing which some of his students respond to accordingly (joking is, after all, a
jointly constructed activity involving initiation as well as uptake). What David is doing is inviting, or
giving licence to, students to enter a more informal relationship with him whilst maintaining their
face needs by allowing them to accept that invitation in a way that avoids the FTA of ‘sucking up to
teacher’.
Moreover, the conversational humour is also linked to in‐group references (e.g. the ‘80s cult teen
film The Breakfast Club), shared experiences (David receiving an age‐related comment from a
barmaid) or mock rivalry with another module cohort (Simon’s group … intellectual inferiors) further
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reinforcing a sense of common group identity. The cultural references that are an integral part of the
humour (The Breakfast Club, Star Wars, superheroes etc.) presuppose a shared culture that
attempts to bridge generational differences as well as the student‐tutor power asymmetry. For
example, the assumption of shared cultural competence in David’s suggestion that “I will be the
beauty, you can all be the jocks and the dorks” (interaction 1:1), which presupposes prior knowledge
of The Breakfast Club and an understanding of the conventional character types of the ‘teen flick’,
may be interpreted as an example of the politeness strategy of finding common ground whose aim is
to support a sense of solidarity and camaraderie.
5. Facebook culture
A growing area of interest amongst some academics is the culture of SNS (boyd 2007; boyd & Ellison
2008; Ellison et al. 2007; Liu 2008; Merchant 2006; Selwyn 2007; Stutzman 2005). According to
Stutzman (2005), undergraduates use Facebook to ‘hang out’, to shoot the breeze, waste time, to
learn about each other or simply as a directory. Students often use Facebook as a means of
managing their social lives; staying in touch, organising nights out and the like. However, Guy
Merchant’s writing on the culture of SNS, influenced by sociologists like Anthony Giddens and
Zygmunt Bauman, has drawn attention to the use of sites such as Facebook to produce and perform
“an ongoing narrative of the self” (2006, p.238). So, Facebook pages and communications are as
much about the construction of a dynamic story of the self as that self interacts with various social
contexts as they are about arranging going out clubbing. Hugh Liu’s work is an interesting addition to
this line of inquiry and highlights the role of SNS profile pages as the location for ‘taste
performances’ (2008) that define and distinguish social identity.
Neil Selwyn’s study of undergraduate uses of Facebook at an unnamed London university deploys its
extensive data to argue that undergraduates use Facebook for particular forms of identity
performances at variance with ‘official’ academic identities:
On Facebook students could rehearse and explore resistance to the academic ‘role set’ of
being an undergraduate (Merton 1957) – i.e. the expected and ‘appropriate’ behaviours
towards their subject disciplines, teachers and university authorities. Students who were
facing conflicting demands in their roles as socialites, minimum‐wage earners and scholars
could use Facebook as an arena for developing a disruptive, challenging, dismissive and/or
unruly academic identities. Thus Facebook was acting as a ready space for resistance and the
contestation of the asymmetrical power relationship built into the established offline
positions of university, student and lecturer (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). This was perhaps
most clearly evident in the playful and often ironic rejection of dominant university
discourses throughout the posts, with the students certainly not conforming to the passive
and silenced undergraduate roles of the seminar room or lecture theatre. (2007)
Although my analysis of Kingston University students’ use of Facebook confirms many of the trends
Selwyn identifies (e.g. exchange of practical and academic information; displays of supplication
and/or disengagement; and exchanges of humour and nonsense), I’d argue that it can also house
more conventional academic identities. Provided care is taken to lessen the social distance between
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students and tutors, Facebook can function as an environment for the articulation of interests and
enthusiasms related to formal academic study and, thereby, for the performance of ‘official’
academic identities.
Let’s consider the following student email from Sunil:
I propa enjoyed it [the module] too, even though it's not over. But it was really BIG!
and uno wat, i knew NOTHING on post‐modern. Hadn't watched Blade Runner, Dark City,
nothing!
Watched em one by one n OMD!!!! lol (Unimaginable)
(interaction 1:26)
Here the student expresses his appreciation for the course and its content (postmodernism, the sci‐fi
film genre) in a way that, if articulated differently, might be interpreted as an indication that he was
overly engaged with his course. Selwyn has identified the widespread practice of student users
categorising others according to their levels of engagement with formal academic study; those
overly keen on their course tending to be assigned negative labels such as spod, geek or keeno (2007
p.15). However, the very informality of the language used (discussed in more detail in the next
section) asserts a separateness from formal academic linguistic norms that allows the participant to
distance himself from an identity performance that might be so labelled. So, Sunil’s email both
expresses excitement about the module – and is, therefore, a kind of identity performance as
‘motivated student’ ‐ whilst maintaining his particular face need to be perceived as ‘having a life’
outside the academic context. Similarly, Sarah’s question “Is any of you thinking of doing the MA
next year @ Kingstonia?” (interaction1: 27) expresses both academic aspirations whilst adopting a
tone of gently‐mocking distance.
6. Language
In an earlier section I touched on the linguistic style of the Facebook community, describing it as
drawn from participants’ earlier experience of CMD, defined by Herring as “predominantly text‐
based human‐human interaction mediated by networked computers or mobile telephony ”(2007).
Although David Crystal’s (2001) notion of a homogenous computer‐mediated language (‘Netspeak’)
has been criticised by more recent scholarship (Herring 2007), certain forms of CMD such as email
correspondence, text‐messaging and synchronous chatroom interaction nonetheless share a number
of characteristics found throughout the selected corpus of Facebook interactions. Let’s consider
interaction 2: 8 in the Appendix in order to identify some key linguistic features:
deletion of subject pronoun was gd, met som new ppl
abbreviations and other typographical gd (good), nxt (next), ya (you), tho (though) ppl
irregularities including improvised phonetic (people), soz (sorry) and plz (please)
renderings
slang catch ya nxt week (see you next week)
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use of single case i.e. no use of the upper case at the start of
sentences – upper case tends to be used as a
substitute for prosodic clues as in: why this
obsession with ... "pool". what's wrong with
going somewhere to DRINK and TALK TO PEOPLE
without these stupid games. (interaction 1:5)
Another feature widely observed in the corpus was the use of specific textual means to substitute
for paralinguistic (e.g. winking, smiling) and prosodic (e.g. stress, tone, loudness) features. The
following table draws on our corpus to exemplify common textual strategies adopted:
asterisk emoting *heartbroken* (interaction 1: 8)
*Waves fist* (interaction 1: 26)
orthographic representation of they have pool tables muhahahah! (interaction 1: 3)
laughter ( including mock ‘evil
mastermind’ laughter – hahaha, i'm guessing it was Serena hahaha; see you all soon
muhahahah – from a range of yahooo (interaction 1: 61)
cultural sources such as cartoons
like Pinky and the Brain or films
like the Austin Powers series)
abbreviations lol meaning laughing out loud (interaction 2: 16)
OMD meaning oh my days (interaction 1:26)
emoticons or smileys :) (interaction 1: 25)
(,”) (interaction 1: 34)
There was one use of what I call a ‘reverse emoticon’ in a
comment on a video posted by David in which a student used
the words angular‐bracket three for the emoticon <3
(generally used to designate love). It indicates a playful
approach to emerging CMD conventions and a desire to find
new forms.
The example confirms the conclusions of some linguists who have characterised CMD as an
emerging oral‐written hybrid (Crystal, 2001; Herring, 2007). Although produced by 'writerly' means
(a computer or mobile phone keyboard), the email is characterised by features of orality defined by
Herring as "rapid message exchange, informality and representations of prosody" (2007).
Another feature observed was the use of intertextual references, that is to say, discourse features
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drawn from the specific texts, genres, styles and practices of popular culture. In part, this may be
explained by the nature of this particular discourse community’s shared interest in film and popular
culture. However, I’d argue that the nature of SNS as spaces for identity performances through the
articulation of specific cultural practices and tastes lends itself to various forms of intertextual
referencing. Many exchanges conformed to one linguist’s early description of IRC language as a
"bricolage of discursive fragments drawn from songs, TV characters and a variety of different social
speech types" (Werry, 1996 p.58). Examples include:
parodic use of formal or Do you want to come to a public house called "The Mill"
antiquated style and lexis (interaction 2:1)
sounds like a swell idea (interaction 2:9)
catch phrases Im there like a bear mon frere (interaction 2:7)
slang terms imported from a I read it. Dude, that was really nice man!
range of sub‐cultures such as Hip I propa enjoyed it too, even though it's not over. But it was
Hop, slacker etc. really BIG!
and uno wat, i knew NOTHING on post‐modern. Hadn't
watched Blade Runner, Dark City, nothing! (interaction 1:26)
yer im down sounds safe (interaction 2:11)
other cultural practices *air guitar solo* wild stallions!! (interaction 1: 29) ‐ although
this alludes to a broader cultural practice it is probably a direct
intertextual reference to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
(1989), a film in which the two main characters play air guitar
as a sign of approval and which features a rock band called
Wyld Stallions.
On some occasions, intertextuality was used as a means of cueing the use of humour (e.g. David
adopting the tone of a parade ground sergeant‐major, a character type in British popular culture
from Carry on Sergeant to It ain’t half hot mum, in “alright you horrible lot”, interaction 1:1).
Moreover, the mimicry or quotation of an authority figure is also a parody of authority used to
undermine or soften his own status. Generally though, much of the intertextuality present is, as I
have argued earlier, part of the use of specific in‐group references and the assumption of shared
cultural literacy that seeks to establish group cohesion.
7. Conclusion
The use of Facebook, in lieu of Blackboard, for the creation of an academic discourse community is,
I’d argue, a partly political act made to facilitate a different kind of student‐tutor relationship based
on reduced social distance. David hoped to develop an environment that recognised and valued
students and that helped foster of community of scholars. This was achieved through a variety of
face‐to‐face interactions including holding optional group sessions in a local pub. The use of
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Facebook followed easily from the perception of a real life community and provided a space for the
extension of real life dialogues. David’s use of Facebook confirms the “offline to online trend”
identified by Ellison et al. (2007) as is it provided an environment for the continuation of already
established, although developing, offline relationships based on a pre‐existing mutually‐respectful
group identity.
In the opinion of both David and his students in their module feedback questionnaires, the
community‐building objective was successful. However, the degree to which interactions inside
Facebook contributed to this success is less clear. There is some emerging research from other
institutions that supports the case that Facebook is appreciated by students and that it can play a
role in facilitating closer student‐tutor relationships (Mazer et al. 2007 and the Teaching & Learning
with Facebook group). However, I’d argue that this Facebook initiative is an example of a successful
use of technology in which the use of the technology is so fully integrated or ‘blended’ with other
forms of activity that it is impossible to extricate it and accurately assess its particular contribution to
the specific objectives set. Because Facebook was embedded in the social practices of
undergraduates (I check facebook 5 times more often than BlackBoard tbh and BB is quite
temperamental, interaction1: 39), I would argue that it provided a more effective participatory
mechanism for learning purposes than centrally supported technologies such as the Blackboard VLE
or the University email system.
A key characteristic of the Facebook interactions observed was the use of language varieties
common to a range of computer‐mediated communication (email, SMS, chat). These forms of
language sit uneasily with the notion of the ‘legitimate’ academic language (Bourdieu 1992)
expected of undergraduates coursework. However, there was no evidence encountered in this study
to support the fear that the CMD literacies of undergraduates undermine their ability to produce
coursework in acceptable academic English when required. Indeed, David has confirmed that both
coursework and email exchanges using the Kingston University email system were produced in
appropriate forms and that the students concerned were more than able to switch styles according
to context. Although the 'complaint tradition' (Milroy and Milroy 1985) of some academic writing on
standards of literacy has articulated a concern at the perceived impoverishment and
oversimplification of undergraduates’ language (Crawford 2006), I observed many instances of an
imaginative adaptation to the medium of e‐communication to articulate expressive speech acts. In
deploying a range of textual strategies, David’s students have succeeded in creating a more
complete discourse within the confines of a primarily text‐based (“lean”) medium.
Like wearing skinny jeans and a porkpie hat, using Facebook to support one’s students is something
not everyone can pull off or will feel comfortable in attempting. Facebook can provide a kind of
liminal space between university and non‐university territories, as well as between social and
academic identities, for interactions based on less fixed hierarchies. If a lecturer seeks to decrease
social distance, and to minimise or mitigate the power they exercise (‘doing power less explicitly’),
then Facebook may be an environment, used in conjunction with other forms of contact and
interaction, that merits further consideration.
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8. Acknowledgements
My thanks to Sahib Singh, Becca Heaton, Alex Birt, John Glover, Simon Donnelly, Iwona Grazyna
Dabrowska, Rachel Matthews, James Hoare, Teresa Orlando, Leah Godard, Sonia Nayyar, Tom
Griffith, Aaron Allmark, Alex Kirk, Ryan Tyler, Joann Randles, Theresa Mopelola Arinke Adebiyi, Paul
Hammond and Samuel Smith for the permission to use their Facebook exchanges for the purposes of
this essay.
My special thanks to Dr Will Brooker for his generosity in opening up his use of Facebook for
external scrutiny and for his time in reading and commenting on a first draft.
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P01547: Language, culture and
communication in online
learning
Laughing Squid: Facebook
http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/986548379/
‘Face work’ in Facebook:
Appendix
Tony McNeill
April 2008
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Interaction 1
Text of group email sent by David to his final‐year Special Subject: Cinema and the Postmodern City
students. The original email was sent to organise a social event to celebrate the end of the module
but subsequent responses covered such topics as academic progress (posts 21‐26 and 29 and 30),
postgraduate study (27 and 28), the use of Facebook (38, 39 and 41) and assessment (42‐45). 63
Facebook email messages, 8 participants and 1,731 words in total.
Original email message title: school’s out
1 David alright you horrible lot
Dec 7th next thursday at 5pm school's out... for ever! or at least, SPECIAL
STUDY is over.
where do you want to go for a drink to celebrate the elite think tank
that mortals called: cinema and the postmodern city.
it will be just like The Breakfast Club. i will be the beauty, you can all be
the jocks and the dorks.
2 Sarah I'm easy, but preferably somewhere cheap...please and thank you!
Dec 7th
3 Patrick Somewhere everyone will know... or somewhere new? Druid's Head
Dec 7th was quite popular... could take over the upstairs of the mill... they have
pool tables muhahahah! I don't mind; but out of what's left; I bagsy
being the basketcase... great fun!
4 Yuliana Perhaps Coconut? It has a good music, a pool table and it's quite
Dec 7th cheap. It's a pretty tiny place though but as we're going early then
shouldn't be a problem with sits! Otherwise The Mill sound good to me
as well! :)
5 David why this obsession with ... "pool". what's wrong with going
Dec 7th somewhere to DRINK and TALK TO PEOPLE without these stupid
games.
6 Sarah Are you bad at pool Will? Is that why you resent it so much?
Dec 7th
And if John's Judd Nelson, can I be Ally Sheedy's character please and
fanks?
7 David i am in a league below bad at pool, ie. I have never played it. i think it is
antisocial. I go to a pub to drink and talk, not play... "games".
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Dec 7th
the basketcase IS Ally Sheedy, that role is taken by John.
8 Sarah Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Dec 7th *heartbroken* fine, then I'M gonna be Judd Nelson, sod the lot of you.
9 David does someone know how to include XXX XXXXXXXXX on this, I forgot to
Dec 7th include him.
and anyone else I left off by accident.
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18 Sarah I'd prefer the intellectual interiors in all fairness...
Dec 7th
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28 David sab gives me beh jokes
Dec 10th lol
i would love to see some of you to do the MA... i think you may get a
discount on the fees if you go from the BA to the postgrad, but I'd have
to check on that.
Andrea is course director of the theory MA ‐ she, Cathy, Simon, Ron
[xxxxxx] and Mark [xxxxxx] teach it, with me doing two guest slots.
so she is *directly* in charge of its running and she would welcome
your interest. but I am *generally* responsible for everything in Film
and TV so you can also ask me about it.
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Dec 12th of luck everyone :)
Dec 12th messaging here, plus sharing videos is also an advantage that
Blackboard don't have :P
btw. if anyone just received a graffiti it was an accident!!;)
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52 Sarah Of course we want you there [David]! It's just not the same without
Jan 15th you and you're old mannish ways! Only this time...turn up later so the
Irish Bird doesn't think you're a sad git :P
p.s...are we actually meeting up tomorrow?
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63 Sunil lool
Jan 18th
Interaction 2
Text of Discussion board forum posts between David and his second‐year Concepts and Perspectives
students. The original post was sent to organise a social event. 19 discussion board posts, 13
participants and 383 words in total.
Discussion board forum title: Concepts Field Trip
1 David Do you want to come to a public house called "The Mill" on Monday 18
Feb 6th Feb after the lecture. You can get to know your fellow students and
lecturer.
2 Phil Certainly;)
Feb 7th
3 Helen Count me in as well..!
Feb 7th Very nice idea to get to know each others :)
4 Trish look forward to it :)
Feb 7th i wanted to get a couple of people to go anyway!
x x
5 Tanya yup yup!
Feb 7th
6 David how sad that everyone replies to this thread and nobody replies to the
Feb 7th ONE ABOUT FILM ANALYSIS. you are not doing a degree in DRINK you
know :mad:
7 Andrew Im there like a bear mon frere
Feb 7th
8 Darrel count me in, im always up for a couple of drinks and a film chat
Feb 9th
9 Al sounds like a swell idea will, u sure the mill tho, essence is actually
Feb 10th quieter early on and only £1 drinks on mondays !!
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10 David I don't know Essence, where is that and what's it like.
Feb 11th
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Comments from David on the first draft of the essay
(additions to Word document attached to email sent 15th April 2008)
David’s familiarity with CMD
I have been part of online communities since 1995 and still spend a fair amount of time on
discussion boards and msn, so I would say I am familiar with what you call CMD... to a
certain extent anyway, as forms of internet discourse, slang and conventions vary according
to age groups and community norms as well as evolving over time. For instance, the “Lolcat”
linguistic conventions are quite recent, or recent within the mainstream anyway.
My jokey, mock‐self‐conscious (complex!) use of “big” and “sick” meaning “good” was
picked up not so much from Sunil using the terms online but from his use of the slang in
person. The facebook interaction was a continuation of our banter in class, where I would
joke that I was “gangsta” because I grew up in South East London. Our student‐teacher
relationship involved my appreciation of his slang, which was unfamiliar to me, and his
pleasure in teaching me it (a similar process to him giving me a disc of his favourite hip‐hop).
There was an occasion in an interaction I haven’t given you (it may be lost) where a student
remarked something along the lines of “you’ll have to explain ‘lol’ to [David]”, sincerely
believing I wouldn’t know the term, and was pleasurably shocked when I did.
So overall I’d suggest that I dropped elements of CMD into my online conversations with
students because I knew they found it amusing... like putting on a voice or accent.
David on his use of slang
This [reassertion of appropriate linguistic norms] wasn’t so much my (conscious) intention –
consciously I would say my intention was as a little tribute to and “official” (because it came
from me) recognition of Sunil’s slang... what he might call a “shout‐out”. Also, there was an
element of playful reversal of the teacher/student relationship, where I put myself in an
uncertain position (making a fool of myself by using/not being sure about slang) – a
temporary reversal, of course, which may well as you say enforce the normal power
structure.
David on the offline to online movement
Again it should be noted that the Facebook group and its discourse did not just spark up in
isolation. It was an online platform that continued and extended the group relationship
already‐established during five weeks of class, and then three optional, full‐group
discussions (about academic work, but held upstairs in a pub). So the relationships exhibited
in the Facebook case study had evolved in real life.
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An interesting question is whether I would have added these students on Facebook, and
initiated online discussion, if I hadn’t felt we were enjoying a positive, relaxed working
relationship as a group, in which discussion of theory and assessments was mixed with some
easy‐going jokes. I think the answer is probably no. I feel Facebook is inherently quite
informal and blurs the boundaries between professional and personal. If the group dynamic
had been different, I don’t believe I would have had those group discussions on Facebook at
all.
Did the students write essays in appropriate (aka ‘proper’) academic English?)
Yes, there was no issue here – they also wrote most of their emails to me on Outlook in
conventional “proper” English, though there was some slippage. It was interesting to me the
way [Sunil] in particular would write a formal email (with Dear.... Yours faithfully etc) and
then sometimes follow it up with an informal postscript (along the lines of “uno... u give me
such jokes man....!!!”)
They could clearly shift between registers very easily (as I suppose I did too) and recognised
when each was appropriate/permitted.
Comments on the conclusion
Firstly, I don’t know if I’d call it “minimal” [social distance]. I would agree “reduced”.
Secondly, the use of Facebook was not entirely a planned‐out decision on my part. I would
say, with hindsight, that it evolved from the way the in‐person (irl) dynamic had evolved...
which had pleasantly surprised me. This was my first Special Study module, which involves a
small, final year group dedicated to a tutor’s specialist topic, and to an extent I was playing it
by ear. The optional group tutorials upstairs in a pub were improvised because the group
discussion in the formal sessions had been so productive, and because the group dynamic
was so clearly positive. The use of Facebook, I’d say, followed naturally from the feeling of
real life community, and the online discourse was an extension of the real life conversations
(or a translation from spoken into written format) that were possible because of the
comfortable, mutually‐respectful group identity.
[…]
So, yes it was a “political” decision to try to foster a small scholarly community based on the
sharing of original ideas, on mutual respect, aspiration towards further study, enthusiasm
for cinema and for theory; I wanted this to become more than just a module towards an
assessment, a means to an end. But that took place before the discourse moved on to
Facebook.
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[…]
The student work and the Module Evaluation Questionnaires provide some evidence that
this experiment was successful, in my opinion.
[…]
I’d like more on the fact that this worked and was successful, from my own selfish and
personal point of view! Otherwise it might come across as a potentially failed and
embarrassing attempt for a tutor to mix online with students... and I don’t think this was the
case. I think the online discourse reflected the aspects of the module which students
explicitly appreciated (in MEQs [module evaluation questionnaires]) – recognition of them as
individuals, group discussions that they felt part of, close tutorial attention and feedback,
tutor’s approachability, their own satisfaction at joining in and feeling part of a community.
To my mind, the Facebook discourse reflects aspects of the group dynamic that were
integral to its success – I think you imply here that we can’t know whether it really worked
out, and I don’t feel myself that this is the case.
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