The genres and activity structures in electronic communities seem very
variable and sometimes incoherent, seemingly integrating activity
structures from different areas of users' personal experience. This
includes both writing and speaking in working, learning, or informal
settings.
Our experience is that that students are very insecure when they first
start participating in an electronic learning community, because they are
not familiar with activity structures and discourse genres which are
appropriate in this medium. We first have to spend a number of weeks
dealing with these issues before we can begin learning about other things.