Twitter in the Classroom:

If you would like to see other ideas for using twitter in the classroom, check out http://tinyurl.com/25u2cx

Twitter in the Classroom Update

It took two weeks for tech services to install a twitter widget on the podium computer in my classroom. That widget, Twitterlicious, seems to be quite unstable and wigs out every ten minutes. The client I use on my Mac, Twitterific, is much more stable. We're trying to find a better widget. Simply projecting the Twitter webpage takes up too much room on the screen. I need that space for other projection.
The students seem quite enthusiastic about this new way of communicating. There are four active twitterers, but all the students pay attention. This does reduce anonymity, but they don't seem to care. They also happen to be four of the more active students in the class. Some students enjoy bringing their laptops to class, while others know they can use their text message on the cell phone to add a comment. only 50 to 60% of the comments are pertinent.
However, that is not the point. What Twitter does is to even out the balance of control over the direction of the conversation in the classroom. Students feel they can redirect the topic thru a "tweet." I look at the thread from time to time, but usually because of some reaction among the students.
It is still tool early to evaluate whether this technique improves learning. When asked, students who don't twitter in class still defend having it there. They feel it gives them greater ownership of the class experience. This week, I'll begin trying a full classroom "capture" (video, audio and screen projection) where the twitter steam is less important. It will however enable me to demonstrate the technique to others when the course is over.
If you want to follow the tweets in the class, go to http://www.twitter.com. Then, create an account, search for PapaFranz and click on the "follow" button.

Twitter in the Classroom

I've decided to try a new experiment in my theory class this term. I'm going to sign all the students up on twitter and have them follow and direct post an account I created called Papa_Franz. Twitter is a microblog. You are confined to writing no more that 140 characters. During class, I will encourage students to capture their thoughts, reactions, criticisms, and ideas and put them in these short blogs. Then, I'll run a application that shows the messages posted to Papa_Franz live as a strip on the right hand side of the computer screen I project on the wall.
Why am I doing this?
There are several kinds of communication that take place in the classroom. There is the most obvious one, called the front channel, that takes place between the instructor and the students. There is also a back channel of whispered communication, passed notes, glances and looks, and audible punctuation that takes place between students and students. I want to see what happens when we capture the back channel and make it part of the front channel.
I saw this demonstrated at a session at an Educause meeting in October and in the hands of the pros, it worked very well. I'm interested to see how it works with students.
The students can bring their laptops or they can access twitter as a text message from their phone.
I'll let you know what happens.

A Private Universe

Another video that can be used to trigger student-faculty discussion about learning is “A Private Universe,” also available free as streaming video on the web from Annenberg Media; it was produced by Matt Schneps and his team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. You have to create a sign-in to watch it. But the questions are for assessment purposes and not invasive. The streaming video is not as smooth a download as I would like. I have to keep stopping it and starting it when it would freeze up. It's worth the effort though.
Why is this video important? It shows exactly how difficult it is to change people's preconceptions of how the world works. Since that is our project, especially in anthropology, the video is a sobering reminder of exactly how subtle and how difficult the task we face really is. Anyone who still thinks they can construct a lecture that will do the job after seeing this video has their head in the sand.

A Vision of Students Today

If you have not yet seen this video "A Vision of Students Today," you must! Mike Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, created it in his introductory cultural anthropology class. It is a great example of a SUNTA-style course design. One compelling project, collection of data from nearby "field, " discovery of patterns, some of which are commonplace and others of which are surprizing, and the assembling of a report that communicates these finding to others, all withy the instructor tutoring the method, rather than supplying the information.
Mike produced a video last year that was a major meme (a link that gets repeated in multiple blog posts) called "Information R/evolution" that you might have seen. He's doing wonderful, cutting edge work and he deserves more recognition and support from SUNTA members.

The Washington AAA Workshop

Even though the deadline for pre-registration is past, you can still register in Washington for the SUNTA-sponsored teaching workshop. Last year ten colleagues from all over the country participated. From the emails I received after the conference, it was evident that they found the experience valuable. The workshop provides a forum to discuss successes and concerns that SUNTA members experience and to work together to develop stronger classroom presences for our approach to anthropology. The workshop is particularly valuable for colleagues in their first five years of teaching, including graduate teaching assistants teaching their own courses, but colleagues with all lengths of teaching experience are welcome. Some of the topics we consider include how to develop a SUNTA inspired introductory course, how to teach without a textbook and still satisfy the knowledge-base exposure departments want, and how to effectively build and assess out of class exercises into classes.
I lead the workshop but take no remuneration for doing so. All proceeds from the workshop go to the SUNTA account. My interests in doing so lie in strengthening what I believe to be a valuable approach to teaching our discipline by encouraging students to learn about culture "where we are and with the people we live among."
Unless the workshop is supported by the membership this year, it will not be offered in the future. If you think this is the sort of discussion that is valuable and appropriate for us to offer during the annual meetings, then please set aside Friday afternoon from 2 to 5 PM, register for the workshop when to pick up your materials, and bring your experiences. I look forward to meeting you.

Designing Introductory Courses

This summer, I'm finally getting around to reading the ten year old book "The Teaching of Anthropology" edited by Kottak, White, Furlow and Rice (Mayfield, 1997). As I read through it, I'll post my reflections here on the blog. Please feel free to react with your own comments.
One of ideas immediately relevant to the design of introductory courses appears in full form in the introduction. I refer to the issue of the relative effectiveness of designing the course around case studies or designing it around a text book. In this volume the champions of the case study approach are the Spindlers (as one might expect) and the champion of the textbook approach is Kottak (gain, as one might expect).
My take on this is: "A pox on both your houses!" Neither choice is an effective way to design a course because both designs start with the literature the students will read instead of what you want them to learn. OK, I hear you saying "Hey, what I want them to learn in what they read in the book(s)." Well, sorry, friend, but that just won't cut it anymore. You are allowing authors and textbook editors to do your thinking for you. More importantly you are letting them do the thinking for your students. There are very good reasons for choosing to read case studies and very good reasons for choosing to read textbooks. I actually use both. I also use trade books that are neither case study now textbook and sometimes not even remotely related to the canon of introductory anthropology. It all depends on what I see as the role of the text in support the learning promises I have made to my students.
Here are some examples of what I mean. My 100-level general ed-style cultural anthropology course has been taught two ways. In one of them, my goal is seduce students into loving anthropology. I throw out all the stops. I choose only activities, treading and films that I know will delight my students and convince them that anthropology is just about the coolest thing they've ever seen. I find three or four case studies that wild and push the limits. Take Paul Stoller's "In Sorcery's Shadow." Based on his research in Mali, it is an unabashed ghost story, complete with things that go bump in the night. I remember when I was an undergraduate that Carlos Castenadas "Teaching of Don Juan" had a similar fascination. The difference, of course, is that Stoller's work is defensible ethnography. He has pictures.
The goal of my introduction to linguistic anthropology for majors is for them to get deep enough into conversation and discourse analysis for them to see the relevance of studying language use in society, even if they choose never to do linguistic work ever again. Here Is use a textbook, Duranti's excellent "Linguistic Anthropology." The emphasis here is on capacity building through the development of control over increasingly complex concepts. I need to take them from phonemics to metapragmatics in ten weeks. The textbook provides a consistent structure for this journey. I can assess their progress at every step. However, the fit between the textbook and the major learning activity of the course, an analysis of five minutes of conversation involving four or five of their acquaintances, is weak. Duranti address most of what they need, but at a crucial stage in the project, adjacency pair analysis, he comes up short. Textbooks always have their weak spots.
The goal of my 100-level general ed-style "Food and Culture" course is to have my student remember three different ways of thinking about culture: culture as mediation (between humans and nature), culture as a system of unevenly distributed knowledge and culture as a system of participation. The idea is to illustrate these tropes using food entirely. This is where I am likely a trade book, like Michael Pollan 's "The Ominivore's Dilemma." Pollan is a journalist who writes extensively on modern food system issues. The book lends itself to all three tropes. However, I add research on their personal food habits to the mix for stronger evidence , especially in the unequal knowledge and social participation tropes. Please notice, there is neither an ethnographic case study nor a textbook involved. The database they use to analyse their food diaries is on-line. Yet, contemporaneously relevant aspects of anthropological perspectives are effectively communicated.
Finally, I have 100-level general ed-style cultural anthropology course that has no books at all! It is based entirely on research projects through which the student write their own texts. That text is literally an introduction to the anthropology of where they live and with whom they live. This is about as totally SUNTA a class as I can imagine. Those projects include several hours of observations in a coffeehouse, hair salon/barbershop, bookstore or bar (anyplace with regulars); several hours in a food shop where the student can't read the language of the signs in the window (obviously possible in large cities only); several hours of observation in traffic court; and several hours of observation at a public festival or sporting event. If you want to try this, start with a small class and work your way up to your college's norm. The scalability is there but depends upon setting up several smaller learning clusters within a larger class. The tipping point is about twenty students. Don't worry about having a schedule of topics. They will emerge as the students report on what they have observed. If you'd like some backup on the coffeehouse/barbershop/tavern project, pick up a copy of Ray Oldenburg's "The Great Good Place."
So, my response to the debate between case study enthusiasts vs. textbook aficionados is "all if the above and more." It all depends on what kind of learning you want the students to do.