Case Study #1 - anth101.com - Anthropology for Everyone

For my first case study, I decided to explore anth101.com . This is an online anthropology course run by Michael Wesch, Ryan Klataske, and Tom Woodward. What got me interested in this particular website to study was a tweet from @thingkering.

I clicked on the podcast link and was brought to a Soundcloud account and Episode 1: Professor's Night Out.

I started the episode on my phone while going through my usual morning routine of feeding my cats, making breakfast and making coffee. From the beginning of the recording, I was hooked. A college anthropology professor was playing the role of the student, studying the culture of his students by spending a night out with them. He starts off by literally jumping off a ledge with his students, starting in a place that is uncomfortable for him and no longer familiar to him. He hangs out with his students from midnight to 2 am in 3 different contexts -- climbing buildings, a college frat party, and dancing in the college bar district. Throughout his relaying of his night out, he interviews the students he's with, allowing them to tell their own stories. As he lets them tell their stories, he gives his insights and commentary on what he's learned. We the listeners follow him on his journey of discovery and wonder, and through it all, we learn what it means to be human and that even in the most unfamiliar circumstances, we can find common ground.

Something a student shared from when she took his class struck me: 

"You don't know who you are when you are surrounded by people who don't know who you are."

The student continues by saying that her college experience is very much like that. You come to a new place filled with new people, and it's easy to feel lost. And college is a time of self-discovery and learning where you discover who you are in this brand new context. That got me thinking about this course, INTE 5340, and who I thought I was and where my journey of self-discovery is taking me. This course is a brand new, novel environment for all of us, and together we are creating new experiences. And with new experiences come new stories and insights about ourselves and the world around us.

Following the podcast, I went on to the anth101.com main website. There I found a very clean, user-friendly layout. This is a course that you can take online, even if you are not enrolled in Michael Wesch's class. He provides an online textbook and a syllabus to follow. There are opportunities online for students who are enrolled in his course to communicate with one another. The course is experienced through 10 lessons and 10 challenges.

10 Lessons

10 Challenges

Within each lesson, there are multiple ways to engage with the learning material. This ties well to our theme of multimodality this week in INTE 5340.

I started with Lesson 1: People Are Different. Within Lesson 1 is a link to the relevant textbook chapter, an embedded video, the podcast link, and then the challenge tied to that particular lesson. The video is approximately 16 min long. This is Wesch's introduction to his course, telling us 3 lessons he learned from his trip to New Guinea. It is a video mixed with footage he shot from a lecture he has given, pictures from his trip to New Guinea, and new video clips. And his lessons are told through storytelling. 

Then there is a link to read the first lesson in Wesch's book, The Art of Being Human.

Lesson 1 in the book gives us an introduction to anthropology through Wesch's relaying of his own personal introduction to anthropology. He takes us through his very first anthropology class as a student 20 years ago. Very much like this course, INTE 5340, he focuses on the essence of anthropology (which is also the essence of learning through storytelling). Our learning comes from a place of connection and creation of new experiences.

One insight in particular made me think more deeply about INTE 5340 and the telling of digital stories.

A lot of the technological tools I have been exposed to in weeks 1 and 2 of INTE 5340 started off as "exotic oddities" to me, things I didn't quite understand. But then we started to dig deeper, ask questions of each other and ourselves, and connections began to form. Over the course of 2 weeks, "exotic oddities" became "exciting possibilities." We were a part of this ever-changing, ever-evolving beast of experiences, conversations, creations and connections. And from this we are creating the course week after week, hypothes.is comment after hypothes.is comment, tweet after tweet. We are sharing our stories with each other, bringing the course into interesting directions, and opening our world to many exciting possibilities for growth.

Everything is then tied together with a challenge, which is similar to our assignments in our assignment bank. The first challenge is to talk to strangers and document their stories. This is an opportunity to make connections and create, an opportunity to tell someone else's story and make it part of your own personal story. With each challenge ,the student is challenged to "live it" -- to live and experience the theme of the lesson.

anth101.com models for me what a living, breathing course can look like. When I look back to when I taught Drugs and Behavior and Intro Psych, I see the classes I taught as boring and lifeless. We as a class didn't create our own stories together, and we lost the opportunities to make connections. I really like how well-integrated all the various media for each lesson and challenge are on the website. And the more I dig into this site, the more I am personally challenged​ to design my classes to have more of an open pedagogy behind them and being okay with my classes being in the "beta" stage every week.