(from our storymap ) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance. At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online. The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support. So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class. How can I do X online?" Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos. But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts. The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reprodu...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.