Author: Katie Nelson

Open Access Teaching Resources December 5, 2016 Katie Nelson, PhD   During the American Anthropological Association’s 2016 annual meeting in Minneapolis, I helped facilitate a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges. The discussion spurred a robust conversation on the merits and challenges of open access teaching opportunities in anthropology. Addressing the new landscape of open access educational resources including journals, textbooks, data repositories, and multimedia collections, we discussed opportunities to connect students with instructional materials in ways that reduce the price and access barriers that have existed in the past. We also addressed questions about how to curate open access content for students and how to avoid a rush toward “open everything” that devalues the expertise involved in traditional academic publishing. The presenters offered a range of resources that can be incorporated into anthropology courses to enhance collaboration, experimentation, and the exchange of knowledge including the following:   Open Access Resources Sapiens website: http://www.sapiens.org/ Palomar College anthropology tutorials http://anthro.palomar.edu/tutorials/ Smithsonian AnthroNotes: http://anthropology.si.edu/outreach/anthnote/anthronotes.html AAA Understanding Race website: http://www.understandingrace.org/ American Ethnography Quasimonthly website: http://www.americanethnography.com/ Bradshaw Foundation website: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/ Pop Anth: Hot Buttered Humanity website: https://popanth.com/ The AnthroGeek website: https://theanthrogeek.com/ Savage Minds website: http://savageminds.org/   UTP Anthropology Website The University of Toronto Press Higher Education’s Anthropology website contains information on new books, shared syllabi, teaching strategies, and new developments in Anthropology, including their forthcoming ethnoGRAPHIC Series –...

Matthew Trevett-Smith Boston University January 7, 2016 During this 30 minute video, Matthew demonstrates how he and his students develop best practices for co-learning in a blended environment powered by active experimentation, collaboration, and shared responsibility. How our students communicate using such digital tools as Google Docs, email, blogs, Twitter, wikis, websites, instant messaging, news outlet discussion forums, and online virtual worlds such as Fantasy Westward Journey and World of Warcraft has broad implications for our classrooms. As part of an anthropology seminar course, co-learners explore the literature about these new literacies and directly experiment with the tools necessary for critical consumption of information. Together, students develop best practices for individual digital participation and collective participatory culture, the use of collaborative media and methodologies, and the application of network know-how to life and learning online. Students in this class actively collaborate and cooperate in their learning during and between classes through small group discussions, collaboration teams, face-to-face exercise, forums, blogs, mindmaps, and wikis. . To view Matthew’s presentation please jump to 1:27:41. http://livestream.com/UVAASCIT/UVATWTFAIR/videos/101252350  . Matthew Trevett-Smith joined Boston University in January 2016 as the Director of BU’s Center for Excellence & Innovation in Teaching (CEIT). He can be contacted for comments or questions at...

Heidi Bludau December, 22, 2015 Ah, yes, the end of the semester…the time when we rush to catch up on grading, students repeatedly ask what they can do to make up their poor performance the previous 13 weeks of the semester and grandmothers start dropping like flies. This time of semester, I can’t help but be reminded of the classic M*A*S*H* skit where Klinger “receives a letter from home” informing him that his mother is dying and he needs an emergency leave. We next learn of all the previous like letters he has received over time, ending with “an oldie but a goodie – half the family pregnant, the other half dying.” While we joke about the depths to which students will stoop, hopefully just short of murder, to get out of final exams or to wrangle last minute extensions, we still have to consider the broader context. Life does happen to our students. Life happens to us. I was intimately reminded of this about two weeks before the end of the 2013 fall semester. On a Friday night, I was in a car accident. While I walked away with only a few bruises, aches and a mild concussion, it still threw me for a loop. Not feeling capable of teaching on Monday, I cancelled my classes and suggested to my students that they use the time to prepare...

Lauren Miller Griffith May 25, 2015 The University of Toronto Press have blog that might be of interest to our readers: http://www.utpteachingculture.com/blog/ They also have three different series that are specifically related teaching anthropology. The ethnographies in their series are very accessible and would be great for undergraduate students. They’re also actively acquiring new manuscripts, so our members might want to consider submitting a...