(Note: The Prezi associated with this blog entry is from a collaborative brown bag lecture given by Barbara G. Hoffman, Ph.D. and me at Cleveland State University on October 24, 2013. The essay below is an adaptation of my part of the lecture and as such, it does not reflect the opinions of Dr. Hoffman or Cleveland State University.)
There
is – indeed, there has been – a movement afoot in higher education to utilize
emerging technologies in order to augment our ultimate goals. For me, this
ultimate goal is to contribute to educating an informed electorate. The
objectives that lead to that point include making knowledge available and
accessible. In the pursuit of the goal, we have witnessed this movement take
many forms:
- Educators use Twitter to engage their students about their subjects while academics and professionals use Twitter to live-tweet conferences and lectures.
- Instructors are employing stylish presentation software with which to present their lessons, not only in the classroom, but over the internet as well.
- Researchers are publishing in open-access journals, some publishers are beginning to meet that demand by considering new models, and still more open-access online journals are starting up.
- Prestigious universities are offering massive online open courses (MOOCs) for free, in which anyone can take part.
- Within my own field, mobile apps and social media are being used to deliver live fieldnotes to both colleagues and the lay public alike.
This
past summer, my advisor and I began to develop our own contribution to this
pedagogical shift with cloud-based fieldwork training. Rather than going into
the field alone with little training, and unable to enroll in a cultural
anthropology field school, I chose to return to the community where I had
studied abroad last summer – Dakar, Senegal – to conduct ethnographic fieldwork
under the mentorship of my advisor in Cleveland, using the cloud as a point of exchange ideas and advice.
