6) Discourse Community

A discourse community that I consider to be a part of is an after-school clubs that I was a part of, I was a part of robotics club, and cyber warriors, fun fact I was the one to come up with that name for our club. Anyways both clubs had similarities and differences, I have done a lot of work in both clubs and was a very important member of both. I have never thought of them as a discourse community until this day, using the six characteristics that Swales described in his text I define the different experiences I have experienced. Both clubs had different goals that we have set, my robotics we have set a goal to make a functioning robot that can go on a course to fight and win a game, while the other we worked on  a technology based project to present at a very big tech conference that happens ones a year.  

There’s a lot of ways we were communicating with each other’s, we ran a chat server for one of the clubs, while the other had an email list, as well at least one meeting each week.  There so much work going on, we were always there for each other’s to help and learn, of course I had some experience with it, but after I finished, I had a lot more knowledge, because of the experience I had. We had our own words and terms we used, like if I said “raspberry pi” you would think of a delicious pie but that’s a name of a small computer that we used to code projects into to be able to run them. People with this experience would be able to understand those terms, which gets me to my next point going from those small groups to be able to be apart of way bigger communities, for example I got the chance to run as a developer for a big company like Apple to help improve their software.

I once tried to be a part of a French club, I thought I could learn something new about a language with absolutely no experience. After going in I didn’t think I will have fun here or enjoy it as it was really if you wanted to join you had to have some experience with speaking French and I didn’t have that.  It made me feel like I was left out on things and didn’t understand anything that was talked about.