Effective communication helps communities to achieve common goals, but is especially hard to achieve in virtual adversarial collaborative communities. In these communities, the matching of widely differing objectives as well as interests is very complex. We study a case of a virtual adversarial collaborative community in which the common goal was to author reports assessing the amount of true c...

Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for...

this study investigated metadiscourse and its subcategories in english research articles (ras) written by nonnative (iranian) and native english writers from the two disciplines of applied linguistics and civil engineering. the study aimed at seeing whether language and discipline influenced the frequency of occurrence of metadiscourse elements in research articles. to this end, a sample of 120...

The impact of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) on communities’ development is a topic still rather unexplored. All the interaction processes mediated by these technological environments are characterised, from both psychosocial and discursive points of view, by absolutely new practices and by the absence of some communication features, typical of face-to face. The “Community of Practic...

The topic of Community-of-Practice (CoP) has been discussed in the management literature in the earlier part of 1990’s, and since attracted a lot of attention from academics and professionals around the globe. Communities of Practice (CoP) have become a strategic approach for fostering learning and transferring knowledge. However, there are a few studies, which explain what makes a community to...

The role of tutors has changed over time, depending on models of learning and on the technology available. This paper discusses the evolution of the tutor role and presents a new model concerning the tutoring of a virtual community. The definition of a virtual community starts from a theory of communities of learning and takes the features of the virtual environment into account. A project in w...

This paper presents a methodology for supporting the moderation phase in DCC (Democratic Citizenship Community), a virtual community for supporting e-democratic processes in e-life systems and applications. Based on the Government-Citizen Interactive Model, the DCC encompasses an innovative debate structure, as well as the moderator’s participation based on Discourse Theory, specially concernin...

Purpose – This question of community has always been a preoccupation for the human sciences and, indeed, is a practical concern for us everyday humans in our variety ways of being. As such a preoccupation with community traverses vast territories of intellectual discourse in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth. Recent developments in continental philosophy, innovations...

Virtual Colonialism (Ameli, 2011) is reflecting a new trend of colonialismin the virtual space parallel to the physical space. According to Ameli(2007), withthe “Dual Spacization” of life,the imperial powers like the United States of Americatake the advantage of the synchronization and translocality of the virtual space toexpand their realm of imperial power through the “attraction” and “persua...

The paper argues for the use of discourse analysis in information systems research by drawing on a discourse analysis study of virtual organizing. It identifies a range of issues and potentials in the use of discourse analysis both as a theoretical and a methodological approach in this field of research. The paper presents a study of a virtual team project and takes a particular focus on the di...