A central belief of the learning sciences is that learning is situated within communities of practice. This paper demonstrates a method for modeling learning within an online discourse community as two intersecting phenomena: members’ trajectories of participation and change in the community’s language norms. Using the word2vec algorithm, a language model is trained on 12 million comments over ...

Recent works in the NLP community show an increasing interest for the analysis of discourse structure, leading to a variety of models and applications. We claim that a constraint-based approach allows a high level, abstract, description of various discourse structures, together with the design of an operative framework for generic analysis methods. The CDML formalism (Constraint-based Discourse...

In striving to learn about an information technology innovation, organizations draw on knowledge resources available in the community of diverse interests that convenes around that innovation. But even as such organizations learn about the innovation, so too does the larger community. Community learning takes place as its members reflect upon their learning and contribute their experiences, obs...

john Swales is a professor of linguistics and codirector of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and has spent most of his career in linguistics working with nonnative speakers of English on strategies to help them succeed as readers and writers in the university. His publications include English in Today's...

L2 language socialization asks how learners come to gain the ability to write appropriately and sufficiently in an institutional academic community of practice. In the same line, this study focuses on the process of socialization of an Iranian English L2 essay writing class in the context of higher education. The theoretical backgrounds rely on the socialization and Vygotsky's sociocult...

Discourse plays an important role in innovation and the diffusion of technology. Various types of actors act as knowledge entrepreneurs to collectively build this discourse. This paper examines the emergence of a new type of actor, tech bloggers, within technology discourse communities. Tech bloggers are authors of web logs focused on developments with new technologies. We examine tech bloggers...