I have been away from my blog for good reason: since very late last year, I have been going through the process of getting hired to teach anthropology for a local community college! As of right now I am to teach a class on physical anthropology and another on cultural… Read more“Moving On Up”
Category: anthropology
Beat the T.A.!
Last time, I wrote about adapting a common college game for the purpose of education. Another type of game that I came up with as I hungrily took in ideas about teaching is something I call “Beat the T.A.!” The purpose of “Beat the T.A.” is to have the students… Read more“Beat the T.A.!”
Beer(less) Pong Study Session: Rules and Guidelines
Update: read this post, then continue to the 2017 update here. I’ve been reading and rereading a lot of the pedagogy of college teaching recently. I started by digging out my copy of Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (2004), combined with a lot of web reading centered… Read more“Beer(less) Pong Study Session: Rules and Guidelines”
Why We Teach About Race in Anthropology
One of my most important activities as an online instructor is to communicate with my students via the discussion forum. Each week there are two topics that the students have to write a thoughtful post to address. One of the second week’s topics is about race in our culture. As… Read more“Why We Teach About Race in Anthropology”
Anthropomotron 2.1 is Out!
I had a little break between online classes so I went to work on updating Anthropomotron. It’s been a whole 11 months since I last looked at all of the code! I fixed some bugs, updated the inside platforms to the latest versions, and added a few more sets of… Read more“Anthropomotron 2.1 is Out!”
A Poster Child for Academic Posters
Alison Atkin, graduate student of archaeology at the University of Sheffield, made a brilliant poster on the modeling of plagued versus non-plagued cemetery collections. The poster debuted at the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO) conference, where it won the Bill White prize (Atkin, 2014)! It will also be… Read more“A Poster Child for Academic Posters”
How to Write a Student Research Paper, Part 2: The World’s Wildest Introductions and Conclusions
In the previous part of this two-part series, I went over the basics of introduction and conclusion writing for research papers. In this part I will use an unusual example of this structure in the wild:Â The World’s Wildest Police Videos. Hosted by John Bunnell from 1998 to 2012, the TV… Read more“How to Write a Student Research Paper, Part 2: The World’s Wildest Introductions and Conclusions”
How to Begin and End a Student Research Paper, Part 1
Since I have been teaching cultural anthropology online, I have graded a lot of papers at all levels of quality. For papers that land in the B to C area, I have noticed some common pitfalls that can be fixed if the student knew more about the research paper format…. Read more“How to Begin and End a Student Research Paper, Part 1”
Online Videos of Anthropomotron!
Believe it or not, I had not thought of googling my app to see what the word on the street is until very recently. To my surprise, Anthropomotron has a few mentions out on the Internet that I had not known about. There are various sites that catalog apps on the… Read more“Online Videos of Anthropomotron!”
Only 2% of You Will Share These Four Paragraphs
Back when I was an MA student, all the way in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time at Ellis Library photocopying articles. As I pursued my graduate degrees, technology advanced and journal articles online became more prevalent. A divide grew between the typically newer articles online and… Read more“Only 2% of You Will Share These Four Paragraphs”