Syllabi as Cybergenre

Abstract

Modern communication technologies continue to spawn new and transformed genres, but in the digital realm, distinctions between form, content, and medium are blurred. Confounding this issue is the fact that genres are usually specific to a particular discourse community of users with learned social and cultural expectations. In the domain of higher education, genres such as lesson plans, reading lists, and tests revolve around the creation of a course syllabus, itself a genre. As a preliminary analysis, a case study of selected syllabi from State University of New York at Farmingdale was conducted. Print syllabi for traditional classes, digital syllabi for traditional classes, and digital syllabi for online classes at the State University of New York at Farmingdale were examined using the genre theory of <content, form functionality> and a 5W1H (who, what, when, where, why, and how) communications framework. The research questions posed were: What are the similarities and differences between print syllabi genres for traditional classes, digital syllabi genres for traditional classes, and digital syllabi genres for online classes? What are some of the factors that account for the degree of uniformity in syllabi genre? Study results indicate that syllabi genres do evolve into replicated variant cybergenres with enhanced functionality, but that this does not always happen. There can be barriers to this evolution. One of those barriers is software. Other barriers may include social, cultural, power, and political issues. It also showed that closer knit communities such as full-time faculty produced more consistent, uniform syllabi genres than isolated adjuncts.