PRINCIPLES OF SCHOLARLY DISCUSSION IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT
Today’s society seems like everyone is in online social networks and it is rare to find someone who does not have a Facebook or an email address account. Social networking has had a huge influence on how we get in touch, but, unfortunately, it has become plagued with poor grammar, common misspellings, and frustrating acronyms that can be puzzling, to say the least (AACN Essentials of Master's Education in Nursing, 2011)). The social network platform differs significantly from the scholarly platform that takes place in the online academic setting.
For example, social networking is flooded with individual opinions and partial information while scholarly discussion involves professional experiences and scholarly ideas supported by reliable sources (Al-Shalchi, 2009).Scholarly discussion incorporates the use of formal language contrary to the social network. There is a tendency of people using the social network to treat the electronic communications the way they want. They abbreviate the texts and use the slang language rather than using grammatically correct language. Contrary to scholarly discussions, there is the use of the formal academic language in that it is imperative to use full sentences and checking the spelling errors.
This portrays respect for other scholars (Akin & Neal, 2007). In the scholarly discussion, it is critical to stay on the topic and avoid wandering off tangents to the point that the original topic is lost (Al-Shalchi, 2009). This will help an individual to get clearly the main agendas being discussed. In social network discussions, there is a lot of controversy on topics being discussed. Each and every moment, someone comes with the topic of his/her interest without considering the topic under discussion at that precise moment.Scholarly discussions employ respect and diversity. Online discussions involve a lot of people from diverse, multicultural world hence; there is no use of the offensive words which can spark racism, sexism and heterosexism. However, there is no use of jokes or any sarcastic comments. In social network discussions, a lot of offensive words are used. Individuals use comments which are derogatory directed to any persons of different status. Racism and tribalism have been spread in the social networks, and this has sparked a lot of concerns. Social network discussions spawn a lot of body linguistics such as the use of smiley’s which are not allowed in scholarly discussions because they do not carry any academic meaning (Akin & Neal, 2007).
When conducting scholarly discussions online, individuals are very concerned about the sources of information they have provided. There is no use of someone’s information without providing the links or credit to the author. This helps to prove that one has used information of another person with permission (Akin & Neal, 2007). In social network discussions, there is no provision of the links or the sources of information one might have used. Someone can just copy paste certain information from an article and consider it to be his/her original work. Scholarly online discussions employ a …
