In our discussion on Thursday, there were various comments about having students study an online community first before they participated within it. While I think this is sound pedagogy on our parts, I wonder if we're having enough discussion with them up front about what exactly a community is. While I realize that time/space limits during the semester may not allow for extensive discussion of community and how they are rhetorical, it does seem to be something that students should begin thinking more about, i.e. communities generally and not just specifically on the few they observe/analyze before writing within one of them. More importantly, and this is the main point I want to raise is that when we do discuss community with our students, are we making sure that we are not just focusing our discussion on online communities but rather are talking about offline and online communities together. The reason I raise this point is it seems like our community discussions focus mostly, if not entirely, on the online community. While this is not surprising based on the course we are currently in, I think we miss out on a lot by not talking about the online and offline communities together. Specifically, students do not solely write or use language in online communities, they also do it in their daily activities offline. What can they learn from their offline engagement with communities and what can those activities reveal to them about their engagement in online communities. Put another way, should we be generating dialogue about the meshing/mixing of their online/offline communication activities to help them become better rhetors when they do go communicate in an online community?