Blackboard at Benedict

This week has been hectic. I conducted a four hour session on Blackboard on Saturday, A four hour session on Monday, a four hour session on Tuesday, and then three sessions on Wed. that lasted from 9am to 9pm at night. Then On tuesday I met with the USC Blackbaord team and now I am off to teach my second class of the day. I have been organizing the faculty members in training groups and I plan on deploying the survey I created today. This survey will ask faculty members how their experience was with Blackboard training.

Wedding Bells In London

Observations: I attended a PLATINUM wedding. I mean, it was LAVISH, custom made furniture, 10k of liquor, limos and Bentleys. A fabulous dress, Tiffany's gifts for the wedding party. I never thought I would see this type of lifestyle beyond TV programs like the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Did I mention the Cuban woman who was brought in to hand roll cigars for the guests? The Multi-teared rum cake with some kind of candy coating? The fabulous wedding dress and the Platinum colored raw silk suit the groom wore?

Feelings: I am so excited to report that I have served as the Matron of Honor for my favorite student! She was wed in London on June 22 and I have a ton of photographs. I can't really express how happy I was to see her truly in love! As I watched and helped her craft her day it reminded me of the love I share with my husband. I hope that she finds as much joy as I have in my relationship!


Reflections: This wedding was a lot of hard work for the Bride and Groom. They wanted everything to be perfect, and in my opinion it was...but everything has a downside.

For example ...The very expensive swarovski crystal toasting glasses were misplaced by the wait staff (read probably stolen)...the fact that the Wedding Planner and the wait staff did not seem to know each other worked against effective execution of many of the special plans...the venue was 1.5 hours away from the city which was hard on everyone...I know it probably cost more than I make in a year to pull the whole thing off which is none of my business, but it is a reflection, because afterwards all you really have from a wedding is the photos. As much love as they have (I mean heat was emanating from them during the ceremony) they could have been alone on a beach in the South Pacific and it would have been just as beautiful. However, then I would not have been able to enjoy it nor would the other guests.

In the end I think weddings are really for the families not the bride and the groom. The bride and the groom get the least out of the deal. They spend all of this time stressing and planning for the perfect day and then people come in eat the food, complain and drop off a small gift that would not cover the cost of their meal. Why do we keep going for this? Who encourages these kinds of choices? Is it socialization or the type of symbolic ritual that supports our culture? I watched the Wedding channel and it made me think that I had not spent as much time and effort on my own wedding. But, I remember being Bridezilla! I refused to come out and walk down the isle because someone had misplaced my bouquet! I held the entire wedding up because I would not walk until someone went across the street and retrieved my bouquet from another building. I wrote a script for the entire wedding. I had everyone mapped out like it was a play! So although I did not spend as much money, I certainly spent as much time obsessing about details that I can't even remember now. I wonder if I did research on the cost of weddings and the associated memories and value people have for what they did a year later, what would it reveal? What about if the people get divorced? Does your divorce hurt more if you had a lavish wedding versus a courthouse ceremony?? Or is it just about the loss. Does the scale of the wedding ritual relate to the length of the relationship? Does doing it all in front of all of these people help keep you together in the long run....at least a little?

Blackboard vs. Moodle and Campus Politics

Linda in My FRN class said:

But I was amazed at the sites people had found: chemistry simulations, Merlot (learning objects, not the wine unfortunately), PRIMO (a great resource for our librarians), Bubbl.us (cognitive mapping site which some of my right-brain students would just love), and finally Moodle, open source software that does what Blackboard does and more but for less, in fact for free. My thought is that if we decided to switch over, we could make the argument that we should spend the money we now spend on a site license for faculty training, so that maybe our faculty would actually use it. Plus, the whole open source concept is much more palatable than the commercialization of WebCT/Blackboard. I doubt, however, that our IT department will have the staff or the inclination to change, and I wonder about faculty response too, since they keep saying there's no use to be trained in WebCT because the university will stop supporting it, and this move would likely be used as proof.

I thought this was absoulutely perfect. She voiced all of my concerns about Blackboard and changing to a more affordable product like Moodle. I can't even get excited about Moodle because I truly believe that if I initiated a change like this I would loose the support of the administration and the faculty who have actually tried to use Blackboard. But it is extremely attractive given its costs and if they actually did redirect the money to training it would be great. I just don't think it would happen.

Blogging for Academic Enrichment

I am very excited about blogging! I see how it can really jumpstart your education on any number of topics. I started looking at other peoples sites and I found this Blog about my 2nd favorite Anthropologist, Mary Douglas, posted on the Material World Blog:

May 18, 2007

Mary Douglas (1921 - 2007)

Students who came to several of the regular material culture seminars last year at the Department of Anthropology UCL were probably somewhat amazed that there, in the audience, was a slight woman, evidently in her eighties, who listened and questioned, and was still clearly an active participant, despite having become one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists long before they were born. After one of these seminars she came out with the rest of us to have a drink with the speaker. During which she beckoned me over. The conversation started in typical Mary Douglas style:-. `Aren’t you the person who is responsible for all this nonsense about materiality?’ We then had an entirely amicable conversation based on finding an academic whose influence we could both agree to heartily dislike, in this case, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby.

Her presence at these seminars was entirely appropriate because it is hard to imagine that they would have existed but for her influence on the department at which she was Professor for many years (1951-1977) and at which she wrote several of her best known works. In recent years there has almost always been one of the material culture PhD students working as her personal assistant in her continued writing – I believe she completed two further books this year. Its not that she ever associated herself with the term material culture, but rather that several of the many productive strands in her work were essential ingredients to what become the characteristic cuisine of UCL material culture. Even when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge it seemed almost impossible not to devote at least one essay to the application of Purity and Danger to almost any genre of objects that one chose. When you told people you were hoping to become an anthropologist it was the most common point of recognition. `Oh an anthropologist, you mean like Purity and Danger.’ For good reason; this was a book that simply changed the way people saw their world and made sense of every day distinctions that we observed but failed to understand. In my case the most important impact came with The World of Goods. Along with Bourdieu’s Distinction these were the two books that ensured that it was in some ways astonishingly anthropology, the discipline least associated with modern industrial society, that actually invented the modern study of consumption which was the path I took into material culture studies. Furthermore she established the essential grounds for those studies of consumption - the critique of economic assumptions as to why we desire goods and the critique of the consequences of those economic assumptions, for such fundamental issues as to what we mean by poverty.

More generally Mary Douglas became the conduit for the application of structuralist and semiotic studies to material culture. More immediately accessible, both in writing style, and in her choice of illustration than Levi-Strauss, it was her work, that at least in Britain, was the model for countless student essays. Applied to familiar terrain such as working class meals in Britain, comparative studies of drinking, or well known biblical texts, she showed how to see pattern and order in what previously had just appeared to be arbitrary behaviour, and then ground these in a Durkheimian perception of social order and social difference. I won’t pretend that I was equally enthralled by all her work. Some of her closest acolytes favoured her model of grid and group which always left me cold. On the other hand some of her most recent biblical studies such as Leviticus as Literature (1999) are to my mind quite brilliant and yet have been comparative neglected outside of biblical studies. But there is simply so much to her legacy. In my recent work with Heather Horst on the impact of the cell phone on poverty in Jamaica, the central point that we were trying to make had only ever to my knowledge been made clear by one academic - Mary Douglas. It was she who showed that previous studies only saw communication as a means to other ends and therefore failed to acknowledge its importance as a facility in its own right within modern development. In typically combative style she had written `a social being has one prime need – to communicate’. Something of an inspiration given the intentions behind our project.

When you then reflect on the extent of all her other work, on risk, on organisations, on culture more generally, it is a breathtaking landscape of intellectual argument and insightful interventions. Mary Douglas will leave a considerable and lasting legacy throughout the social sciences and humanities, and in her case this goes well beyond any narrow academic impact to have become part of the popular understanding of the world, something very few anthropologists have ever achieved. But I think that for material culture studies at UCL there was a more particular and more personal debt. It was her association with the department that prepared the local ground, the soil from within which what became our collective approach to material culture could take root and flourish.

Daniel Miller, UCL

Major Works

The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(1966)
Pollution (1968)
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
Implicit Meanings (1975) essays
Evans-Pritchard (1980)
The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood
Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky
In the Active Voice (1982)
How Institutions Think (1987)
Missing persons: a critique of the social sciences (1988) with
Steven Ney
Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996)
Leviticus as Literature (1999)
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of
Numbers (2001)
Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004)
Thinking in Circles (2007)

I am beginning to see Blogging has enormous possibilities for networking and information sharing. My examples of online materials that I find useful can be found at http://www.amazon.com/EthnoQuest-Interactive-Multimedia-Simulation-Anthropology/dp/013185013X and I cant wait to discuss it in class.

Authentic Tasks Design

After reviewing the authentic tasks web www.authentictasks.uow.edu.au/ I realized that I had been using two types of authentic tasks to challenge my online learners. First I have used a multimedia program called ethnoquest. http://www.amazon.com/EthnoQuest-Interactive-Multimedia-Simulation-Anthropology/dp/013185013X
and this program allows students to role play in a computer simulated culture. This activity may not be applicable to their real lives, but it is an excellent way to prepare students for fieldwork via role play. In the game the students learn to listen to the members of the village, collect data on their kinship structure, take fieldnotes, and learn the language. This simulation mirrors the practical skills needed to complete a real ethnography. The second task that I have used involves asking students to document their lives via photo essays that relate to the topics covered in class. The student uses the photo to express how they have experienced the particular topic and then they explain this to me in a short paragraph on the back of the photo. I found that students were better able to understand some of the key concepts in Sociology when they were forced to apply them to their real life experiences. I am glad that these types of strategies have been deemed as good practice for online teaching and learning.

FRN Reflections

This has been a blast. I applied to come and learn about the Internet and teaching and I have also learned a great new way to enhance my courses and contact with students. BLOGGING. I had heard about it but I did not know what it was. My professor here at the NYU FRN, Dr. Kim has opened my eyes to a whole new way to communicate. I am really thinking about how to evaluate my students and my faculty members. Tonight I am going to work on my homework and find a program example of online learning in my area. I am very excited. I think that this course will help me revise my annual report and enhance my faculty training program. Thanks Dr. Kim