Rules on CR20? Mores?

Hi. I am writing an ethnography about CR20 for a graduate class and I have a question for everyone. Here it is: Are there any kinds of implicit rules or mores
that one learns as he or she becomes fully immersed in the Classrom 2.0 community? Any information, help, or discussion that you could provide on this topic will be greatly appreciated by me.

Tags: CR20, ethnography

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Permalink Reply by Mike on May 18, 2008 at 7:13pm

Your question is intriguing. (I saw it a while ago and I'm finally getting around to responding).

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'll offer my own experience with CR 2.0. When I got on this network it only had around 2000 members. I am a classroom teacher and when I first started most of the people I came across were technology teachers or those in higher ed. As it's continued to grow, I see a lot more general education teachers and many more from other parts of the world - which makes it a lot more interesting. Even though it has become rather global in scope, English is definitely the primary language in almost every post I've seen.

Early on, I saw some random (computer) geekiness in a few posts, but most of the conversation I see now comes from those searching for advice and reviews for different applications or tools. For a long time I never started a discussion of my own - I didn't want to post something that no one would reply to. From time to time I'll see a post that seems pointless, but the vast majority are quite productive. I didn't want to be one of the pointless ones, so I posted some comments here and there until I felt comfortable posting a discussion question. To my surprise, the post generated quite a bit of discussion and I've learned a lot from it. This also opened me up to several new people whom I might not have encountered otherwise.

I don't know when I'll post another discussion question, but I will certainly make sure that it has relevance to the community. That seems to be an understood 'rule' of sorts in CR 2.0. Besides that, I haven't run across inappropriate conversations and everyone is always helpful and gracious in their comments or replies to conversations.

That is based on my experience only, though I would be interested to hear others' stories.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on May 18, 2008 at 7:45pm

This fall in the implicit rules department-- Don't try to sell anything. People here at CR2.0 don't seem to like it when people start their post with "have I got just the thing to solve all your problems...." There is a subgroup for people who have something to sell.