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Posts from the ‘Academic LIfe’ Category

Oct 20

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Why Michael Wesch’s “Blogging” Should Count

In his essay “Blogging for Promotion: An Immodest Proposal” anthropologist Greg Downey outlines a clear set of actionable proposals for reform at the intersection of scholarly communications practices and academic tenure and promotion practices. I commend his essay, which was published today (10/20/11) on Neuroanthropology, a compelling and influential PLoS (Public Library of Science) weblog that he runs with Daniel Linde. Rather than discussing this important contribution here in depth, I am going to try enacting one of its proposals. (For reference, see especially the discussion that follows Downey’s section heading “An immodest proposal (not an indecent proposition)”.)

First the set up. I am working extensively right now preparing a new course for spring 2011. This course was devised as part of my participation in a two year think-tank funded by the Teagle Foundation (a funder supporting projects designed to foster innovation in undergraduate teaching and learning) and organized by the American Folklore Society. The AFS project was built around the theme “What is the relationship between lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?” Colleagues teaching in a range of institutions, from community colleges and private liberal arts colleges to large research institutions gathered to explore the frontiers of research-based teaching, changing curriculum practices, and the wider contexts of our work in a small border discipline bridging the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the academy and the public sphere. As part of our work, we developed plans for new courses and teaching resources. Part of my work focused on working out plans for the course that I will initially teach next spring (it opens for enrollment today).

I have mentioned the course here previously. In a nutshell it uses the toolkit of folkloristics (and by extension my other field–cultural anthropology) to consider human responses–including aesthetic, expressive, customary, and communal responses–to a range of recently emergent and highly contested human social problems. Called “The New Social Problems: Communal and Expressive Responses” the new problem domains to be considered include such things as the digital divide, genetic engineering, intellectual property contests, and nanotechnologies. I am sure that I will be discussing the course further as it moves forward. The important point in this context is noting the influence that one colleague–whom I do not know and whom I have not yet met–has had on the shaping of my plans for this experimental course.

Michael Wesch, on his website/weblog Digital Ethnography (which is a key node in the digital infrastructure of his undergraduate-based research group), has regularly and effectively documented the pedagogical experiments and research work that he has been pursuing (over many years) with many successive groups of Kansas State University students. Wesch has been appropriately recognized and celebrated for the innovative work that he and his students have been doing. What I want to highlight here is that the manner in which he has documented and explained this work has made it richly available for the wider scholarly community. Because he has used http://mediatedcultures.net as a venue for reporting on his work, his strategies and experiences are openly and immediately accessible to me (and to my students) as well as to everyone else able to surmount the digital divide. Essays like “Our Class on How We Run Our Class” in which Wesch and his students describe (and enact) the technical and intellectual strategies through which a standard U.S. undergraduate course is turned into a deeply meaningful research collaboratory for social scientific investigation are just not available in the conventional published literature in our field. It is on the basis of the inspiration provided and the information conveyed by Wesch and his students that I am able to imagine a very different kind of course to pursue with my own students in January.

Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography efforts represent the kinds of “blogging” work that deserves to count as a substantive scholarly contribution (bridging teaching, research, and service) in such areas as annual review and tenure and promotion considerations.

Oct 5

Tinker Toy Story II – Inside Higher Ed

Tinker Toy Story II – Inside Higher Ed.

Sep 30

Honor Your Campus Library – Inside Higher Ed

Honor Your Campus Library – Inside Higher Ed.

Sep 25

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Information R/evolution

While the fall semester is just beginning, this season’s call to submit book orders is a haunting reminder that the spring semester will be here very shortly. As I have noted previously, I will be teaching a new and experimental course on Folklore and the New Social Problems. Alongside ethical and topical matters, a meta-concern of this course is information literacy and the cultivation of durable research skills for a changing world. The call to submit textbook orders is especially ironic in these contexts in ways that I do not have time to explore in this post. Thinking about them today though, I wanted to catchup with an inspirational colleague (and an inspiration for my upcoming course) so I checked in online with Michael Wesch. I was happy to see that he has been named “Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars” at Kansas State University (well deserved!). I also watched, for the first time, his video Information R/evolution. It is a great companion to The Machine is Us/ing Us and it focuses on the changed information ecology in which those of us with access to digital resources work. Like many of Wesch’s other projects, it speaks well to the concerns so many of us are trying to negotiate. It is a valuable resource for my course. Check it out.

To be clear, I love books and nobody is working harder than my library colleagues to address the changes Wesch introduces. A key value of Wesch’s video work is his ability to explain these changes to general audiences (including those undergraduates with whom he has had such success).

Sep 9

‘Abelard to Apple’ – Inside Higher Ed

‘Abelard to Apple’ – Inside Higher Ed.

Sep 8

On Hacking the Academy #hackacad

I am very pleased to note that the edited book version of Hacking the Academy appeared online today. The online version lives on a site built by the volume’s publisher Digital Culture Books, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press. The volume has been edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, both of the Center for History and New Media. It is based on contributions submitted during one week–May 21-28, 2010.

I am very pleased to have been included in this volume and I want to thank the editors, the publisher, and all those who supported the project, including the many readers and cheerleaders who offered encouragement to the effort.

My chapter in the volume is based on an essay that originally appeared on this site (where the longer, older version can still be found). In the book, it is the first chapter of the “Hacking Scholarship” section. As with the earlier version, it is titled “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps” and it offers an argument for withdrawing, where possible, from entanglements with commercial academic publishing in favor of lending energy, support, and resources to the strengthening of the existing public-sector scholarly communications system and to the building of a more democratic, ethical, sustainable, and open one for the future. It thus relates directly to my more recent post on the enclosure of scholarly journals in anthropology (and to other things that I do, including working on the Open Folklore project and editing Museum Anthropology Review.

I am so thankful to everyone who has engaged not only with the essay but with me in the larger work of understanding and reshaping the ways scholars share their work with the world. The biggest shout out of all, in this regards, goes to my colleagues at the Indiana University Libraries and the IUScholarWorks program. They have been my teachers and tremendous partners in the work. They are awesome!

The old-fashioned version of Hacking the Academy will be published next year. Find the online version here: http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/

Dan Cohen’s reflections on the project can be found online here: http://www.dancohen.org/2011/09/08/some-thoughts-on-the-hacking-the-academy-process-and-model/

Aug 26

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The Hasan El-Shamy Shout-Out

This is a shout-out. I have boundless respect and admiration for my senior colleague Hasan El-Shamy. Dr. El-Shamy is continuing to make crucial contributions to the social sciences and humanities, especially in his beloved field of folklore studies. He is a leader in considering the mutual implications of psychology and folklore studies. He is a world renowned scholar of Middle Eastern expressive culture and belief systems. He has advanced comparative methods and theories in folklore studies, adapting them for the current century. He has argued persuasively for the importance of recognizing vernacular theorizing on the human condition and he has an uncanny ability to recognize the lay social theories expressed in the most humble of expressive genres and folk beliefs and to connect these to the longterm concerns of psychological, social and cultural theory in the academic mode. At another end of the continuum, he is in dialogue with literary scholars as a consequence of his detailed studies of a key canonical text in world literature—The Thousand and One Nights. The glowing reviews that his works receive and the global community of admirers in dialogue with his studies speak to his centrality and influence to our field.

In the past several years, Dr. El-Shamy has published numerous important books, including Tales Arab Women Tell (IU Press, 1999), Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2002), Types of the Folktale in the Arab World (IU Press, 2004), Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature (Sharpe, 2005), A Motif Index of The Thousand and One Nights (IU Press, 2006), and Religion Among the Folk in Egypt (Praeger, 2008). In one of countless high profile recognitions that he has received, this year he was recognized with the honor of being the “Great China Lecturer” at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He was the 94th internationally recognized scholar to be accorded this distinction.

Dr. El-Shamy is on a well-deserved research leave this semester and I wish him well in his continuing research endeavors.

Aug 24

Where are the essays on annual faculty retreats?

Where is the CHE/IHE-style higher education literature on annual faculty retreats? I would have thought that they would have been treated in ProfHacker or one of the IHE blogs. I thought there would at least be snarky blog posts. I wonder if the higher ed. research community has actually studied them via-a-vis manifest and latent functions, aspirations and outcomes? (No time to dig deeply on this, of course.)

Today is my department’s day-long faculty retreat staged at a secret location just outside of town.

Aug 18

Fighting the Big Deal [Fighting Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier]

Reminder. Commercial scholarly publishing is an adversarial rather than collaborative undertaking. As an author, editor, peer-reviewer, and/or scholarly society decision maker, you get to choose which party to the contest you will serve and support.

British Libraries Push Back [Against Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell] from Inside Higher Education

Whose healthy corporate balance sheet / straining public budget have you impacted this week?

Aug 5

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Thanks @ColoradoCollege

In a few moments the students in my Introduction to Folklife course will arrive and take their final exam. I will then head home to Indiana, eager to see my family and enjoy the little bit of summer that is left before the fall semester at Indiana begins. I am very thankful for the opportunity that Colorado College provided to me. Teaching folklore/anthropology in a very different campus and classroom context was very valuable to me and I already know some of the ways that the new undergraduate courses that I will teach this coming year will benefit from my experiences here. It was also wonderful to spend time with my old friend Vicki Levine and her family and to become friends with new-to-me folks, especially Ginger Farrer.  For facilitating my visit, special thanks go to the staff of the CC Department of Anthropology (including its chair, my distinguished folklore colleague Mario Montaño), the CC Office of Summer Programs (where everyone was so helpful), and the Tutt LIbrary (where Daryl Alder and her colleagues were an amazing support to my students and to me in my research too). Of course I wish to thank my students too for taking a chance on what might have seamed an enigmatic course taught by an unknown professor. To everyone at CC, have a great new school year.

Photos below the fold. Read more

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