Lesson for Week 5: Day 2
5:2
Read chapters 8 and 9 in Dinner at the New Gene Cafe, HTW's discussion of APA documentation, pages 144-149, and to write a one to three paragraph summary of the theory about discourse communities, forums, and genres to be used later as the lit review part of your report.
Remember that you are reading this book to get background knowledge for a persuasive paper that will be the next project after the one you are presently working on. Instead of giving you quizzes over the reading, I think it is more beneficial to ask you to write summaries because these summaries may be useful when you write the paper later. Therefore, when you read interview transcripts of people like Tim Seifert (starting on page 96) and Earl Sime (starting on page 141), you should think of these as people you can quote by referencing Lambrecht's book. Thinking ahead to your final paper, you could write a summary of their views now. A good summary will also pull a quotation or two from the material to give "voice" to the person speaking.
Today, I want you to devote an hour or so to collecting background information. You tend to spend a bunch of time online taking this class, so you might as well start thinking of the web as a good resource for research. Although you can't rely on web for all of your information, it is often a good place to get started, taking the role that encyclopedias used to play in research.
Because you are focusing on the discourse in your field paper at this time, try to find out more about your field's discourse practices. I rely on Google when I search the web, but you may have another preferred search engine. Look for professional organizations, like the American Accounting Association or the American Horticulture Society. You might also look for companies in your field. You might find a site that describes the field; you might find one that archives a bunch of documents. If you find one of those, you will have already begun to collect documents you can use in your analysis.
If you get done with that, begin looking for things on GMOs. Go to Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture and look at some of their documents. You'll find an interesting one about contamination of foundational seed stocks. This group is vehemently opposed to GMOs. I found an interesting site about the green revolution in India. We'll get to that later in the book. I also found a website aimed at highschool kids which might give some good background. Here's another site on contamination of gene stock. And finally, here's one on scientists defending GMOs. You'll be able to find a lot more by using a good search engine like Google and punching in key words.