Some reflections on community

Draft in progress….

Looking over what some students have written about their communities, I see that we tend to see different groupings as communities:

Ivan writes about his work as a community. He works with many different kinds of people, but all focused on one goal–publishing a magazine. As he puts it: this community “gives me an opportunity to talk and communicate with these different people. Each of them has their own opinion that I have to consider. It’s like move back and force and talk to people in order to create a one single magazine page.“

Kairzhan has discussed several levels of community, best friends, neighbors, study mates, and so on. He even mentions online community. Even within a group of friends, he sees “sub-communities”:

“(I)n communitie of my Best friends I have a lot of Sub-communities. I have a Sub-communitie of friends who I do know from school, they are the Best ))) I have a Sub-communitie of friends from KIMEP, they are the minority. Also I have a communitie of friends from KBTU, a lot of friends. And I have a small Sub-communitie of friends from my yard. Sometimes I do connect two or more Sub-communities, but they are still prefer to be independent. I connect them only on football match, or some anniversary.”
Alua writes about family, friends, and KIMEP community. Gulnara (like me) is part of the KIMEP Times community. It makes me curious about how we might see each as similar or different.

Hi everyone! HAve a good time=)

In-Class Writing

We will start our discussion today with a question. Take a few minutes at the beginning of class and write an answer to this question on your weblog:

What is journalism?

Be sure to take a couple of paragraphs to actually think through this question in your entry. (In general, treat your weblog writing as an opportunity for you to “think out loud.” Don’t worry too much about creating perfect writing–produce a rough draft that demonstrates your thinking.)

Don’t just give a simple answer to the question, “What is journalism?” but make your discussion more complex by considering related questions such as: Why is (or isn’t) journalism important? What does it do for us? How do you (or other people) use the news? Who is a journalist? Or come up with other related questions of your own.

Once you have had a few minutes to begin writing, we will discuss this question as a group. If you don’t have a chance to finish your entry today, be sure it is completed and posted on your weblog before class on Wednesday.

Welcome to New Information Technologies!

Welcome to the course weblog, New Information Technologies for fall 2007. This weblog is part of the course by the same title offered at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research (KIMEP) in Almaty Kazakhstan.