Teaching

My colleague Helen Cho has had enough with travelling with poster tubes to academic conferences. She’s decided to instead have her poster printed on fabric, something that can be easily transported in her carry-on bag. In helping her figure out the best way to do this, I found the following review from the American Society for Cell Biology. In anthropology, we don’t use or value posters as much as we should, so the best source of advice could be found among the scientists who do value posters for academic presentations.

If you’re not looking forward to the prospect of traveling with a giant cardboard tube, yet you’re reluctant to return to the days of the multiple-panel poster, consider printing on fabric.

https://www.ascb.org/careers/how-to-print-a-fabric-poster/

Jessica Polka recommends a service called Spoonflower. She suggests using a performance knit that brings out colors and has good wrinkle-resistance. In 2013 prices, she finds the cost of a 36″ x 58″ poster (including shipping) with a 10 calendar day return time is $25.00 (2014 Update: prices haven’t changed in a year, $24.60 with shipping).

This looks like a much better alternative to paper posters. With all the poster presentations that students have done over the years, my office is covered with rolls of paper. With polyester knit, I can maybe make shirts or other clothing with old posters!

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they?

Many of us academics are struggling with what to do with the internet, in our teaching, learning, and research. There are many resources out there, in terms of organizations that push academic frontiers for open source journals, new methods of teaching and research, and proponents and opponents of MOOC‘s, OER‘s, LMS‘s, and other acronyms. Here’s another educational buzzword for you – lifelong learning, or even better – the lifelong learning locker.

The L⁴ would be an adaptive learning management system. The purpose of this system would be to select educational content based on individual learning styles and observed learning behaviors. Unlike other learning systems with a similar goal, this system will be customizable and adaptive—becoming uniquely personalized and tailored for the user. This learning system will be the optimal teaching interface, by adapting to the user’s individual learning style, interests, and current skill level in that subject.

National Academies Keck Future Initiative: The Informed Brain in a Digital World: Interdisciplinary Team Summaries

The National Academies Press (NAP), publishers of the proceedings above, is itself a good resource for lifelong learning since everything is free (electronic copies, that is). NAP publishes reports from the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council – what people in the social sciences call a GONGO (government-organized non-governmental organization). (Here’s a link to the entry in wikipedia, another lifelong learning resource).

For lifelong learning to be attainable and widespread, the knowledge produced by academia must be accessible – open to people who are searching for it. This is the goal of many academic groups that promote “open access” – the capability to read journals and books that are many times produced with the unpaid labor of academics.

Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing difficult problems are all disincentivized. Following 17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of science in the 21st.

Why is Science Behind a Paywall (gizmodo.com)

While open access is laudable, open methods are even more critical for lifelong learning. Here is where another ‘open’ is vital – open source software.

In later posts, I will overview a number of open methods that students of all kinds can explore. In the meanwhile, here are a number of links that say more about open access and open methods.

• The Digital Anthropology Group (DANG), an interest group within the American Anthropological Association.
• Open access, scholarship, and digital anthropology (Daniel Miller).

When Wikipedia first came out, I had the typical academic response to Wikipedia – don’t use it, especially don’t cite it. I mean, how can something legitimate come out of a source that can be written by anyone with an internet connection, the same internet where no one knows that you are a dog and that has produced such phenomena as Rebecca Black, Michael Jackson-dancing inmates, and has given new life to Rick Astley.

Well, I was wrong. There is a lot of good stuff on Wikipedia, especially when someone is beginning to explore a topic that they either do not know anything about or they know a lot about but don’t remember exactly the exact equation or who said what. As an anthropologist, it’s second-nature to take seriously the wisdom of crowds (large or small); it’s surprising then that we would react like our academic peers in an unwillingness to acknowledge a potentially “unauthorized” source. In the end, like the knowledge that we produce through the peer-review process, Wikipedia overall is a pretty useful (and accurate) medium that reflects the conflicts, consensus, and ignorance that is part of what it means to be humans embedded in a particular social system.

I will still tell my students not to cite Wikipedia, and to rely on professional, peer-reviewed sources for their papers (where you can positively identify the source of the idea). But I will also not hesitate to tell them to check Wikipedia or to begin their exploration of a particular topic on Wikipedia. In the end, this reminds me that what we academics produce is as socially-conditioned as anything else (as science and technology studies constantly remind us), and that the peer-review process is not infallible. I’m reminded that Bernie Madoff was also peer-reviewed, and in the end was further judged by his peers in a court of law. And having Wikipedia around does not in any way diminish the importance of Ms. Frizzle to her students.

From XKCD, via Gizmodo.