As a third year student in the University of North Texas’ (UNT) online master’s program in applied anthropology, I see graduate school as my introduction to a community of practitioners. As with students in more traditional programs, I have expectations that through my graduate experience I will learn about anthropological theory and research, meet other anthropologists and begin contributing to the discipline by producing my own work. I also expect—and have participated in—an experience that is in some ways quite different from the traditional.

The UNT program was designed to take advantage of the opportunities an online educational forum provides, and to manage the challenges that online students can encounter. For example, students are required to take a qualitative methods course that requires a class project conducted for a real client, which gives them experience not only with conducting anthropological research, but also with long distance collaboration and presentations. A lack of face-to-face communication can be a real challenge in developing close relationships with people you have not yet met. For this reason, each cohort of online students begins the program with a face-to-face orientation on campus. Relationships established during this time can be continued through communication in online forums.

Opportunities outside of the online classroom can also strengthen students’ educational experiences. In addition to working as a research assistant in the department and traveling to professional conferences, I have also been encouraged to join a local practitioner organization. An essential part of becoming an anthropologist is learning about the culture of the discipline through dialog with others in the field, which can be experienced through these local groups or online through blogs, listservs and various digital anthropological networks.

Jennifer Cardew is a graduate student in the online anthropology master’s program at the University of North Texas. In 2007 she initiated a project to make the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting more accessible to students by providing selected sessions as free podcasts online at www.SfAApodcasts.net. She is currently researching the graduate experience of on-campus and online students with Christina Wasson.

“Copyright 2008 American Anthropological Association. Reprinted from Anthropology News, Vol 49, issue 6, with the permission of the American Anthropological Association.”

Our panel was selected to be in the 2008 SfAA Podcasts. It’s a coincidence that I was on the panel- a group of people vote on the sessions. You can find the blog post containing the podcast, our PowerPoint, and our paper here.

It was an excellent panel and I really enjoyed it so I recommend you listen to it

Here is the session abstract from Crysta Metcalf
“In this session we introduce and model the concept of the “scholar-practitioner,” practicing anthropologists who explicitly draw on theory in their work and contribute to theory development. Although such an integration of theory and practice has long existed, it has been gaining greater recognition in recent years, especially as more and more anthropologists are applying our discipline in organizational settings. The members of this panel draw on their experiences in both academic and organizational settings, presenting case studies and examples in order to explore the challenges and opportunities inherent in working toward the advancement of anthropological theory in applied practice.”

I’m excited about this session because I am co-presenting with my advisor and many of the other women on the panel are the ones that I’ve followed their work for the last four years. It’s quite an honor

I’ll upload a copy of the paper post-conference but I can let you in on a little secret…
it will be recorded for the SfAA Podcasts. I guess I’ve done a good job in finding my way into cool panels because this is the second year that my session was selected for the podcasts. I do oversee the selection of sessions but the sessions are picked from suggestions submitted by lots of people.

I’ve been some what inactive with posting the last two months, but I actually miss blogging so I’ll be making an effort to do so after the SfAA Annual Meeting next week. That’s something that has changed for me in the last year- I really enjoy blogging and feel like I have stuff to write about.

When I started this blog I really wasn’t sure what to write about. I was living in Southern Georgia working as a textbook manager at a college bookstore during my year off in between undergrad and grad. I was about to attend the Annual Meeting of the SfAA in Vancouver, Canada and with the strong encouragement from my boyfriend I started this blog in the hopes of the SfAA giving me something to write about. When I left for Canada I hadn’t really thought about grad school and I came home with the idea of applying to the University of North Texas.

Now, I’m in the middle of my fourth semester at UNT and applying for summer internships. UNT requires students to do a practicum in lieu of thesis, so I’ll be looking to do my practicum during the rest of 2008 and graduate in 2009. It’s fun for me to look back through old blog posts to see the evolution of my focus, building of confidence in my posts, and to remember the places I’ve been and things I’ve done. When this blog started I didn’t even know I’d be in grad school. I had NO idea that I’d start the SfAA Podcasts. I’m not even sure I knew where I’d be living.

Well, a year and a half into the program I feel like I can say I am getting it- at least a part of it.
As I’ve written about in the past, I’m a research assistant for my advisor in the department. I’ve had two opportunities to present at conferences so far from this research and publications are in the works. So, this is part of the “experience.”

UNT and the department of anthropology have made efforts to extend other parts of graduate school to the online students also though. Many on-campus students are presenting their practicums this week and next. At UNT students do a practicum (applied project with a client) instead of a thesis. The department is recording these presentations and will upload them for the online students to view. Some presentations will also be available in real-time via a teleconference line and Live Classroom (which is sort of like a desktop sharing app). I thought this was a neat idea.

Another thing that the on-campus graduate students have done for the online is to hold the graduate anthropology club meetings in a room that has a speaker phone and Live Classroom. The online students can attend the meetings virtually along side the on-campus students. This is cool because most of the time students will do short presentations about topics and discussion will follow.

Lastly, the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) at UNT makes presentations available in real-time via Live Classroom. In about an hour I will be attending a talk by Darrell Hull from the College of Education speak on this topic:
“An experimental design study was conducted to examine participant interaction toward social knowledge construction and negotiated meaning in asynchronous online discussion. Different instructional methods were examined that show significantly enhanced group discourse processes. The presentation will focus on the measures used to examine this phenomenon and a Vygotskian theoretical framework that supports the interventions and measures used for the analysis.”

(I’m attending because of our online-on-campus research)

I’ve been rather impressed by UNT’s and the department’s efforts to include online students.

From what I can tell so far, there have not been many (well, I have not found any) studies that have focus on both on-campus and online courses taught at the same time by the same professor. I have found a lot of articles in my extensive literature review that compare asynchronous and synchronous elements of an online course.

While the study was met to be more of a pilot (due to only being able to focus on three weeks) it’s turning out to be much more fruitful than a pilot! I would have never imagined we would end up with so much data!

We’ll be presenting Saturday, December 1, at 8:00 am at the AAA conference. Thus, we are working on the paper and presentation now. Much like it has been for the last two months of analysis- we’re finding that it’s difficult deciding what to focus on! There is so much to say, frameworks to use, etc. It’s been a good experience to have to help decide what to focus on, and there has been a fair amount of back and forth about it.

The analysis is somewhat interdisciplinary project in that we are drawing on distance education, education, computer-mediated communication, language ideologies, and of course, linguistic anthropology. This has also been a good experience.

The last important lesson I’ve learned is how quickly data can become overwhelming, both in quality and quantity!

The project is applied in nature and thus we’ve started making design recommendations from the data to inform both course development and the electronic learning software. I think our recommendations are great and when we presented preliminary findings to the department last month, we got some valuable feedback about the recommendations.

For AAA we’ll likely narrow our focus to ‘presence’ (as defined by Garrison and others) online and on-campus. I’ll post more about the actual findings after the conference, but I can tell you that we are finding that both on-campus and online have their strengths and weaknesses
We’ve been doing analysis

The pre-practicum course is meant to prepare us for our practicum. Master’s students at UNT are required to do an applied research project for a client in lieu of thesis. I like this approach because it provides far more practical experience than writing a research paper. The course has finally got to the point where we discuss our practicums, etc. Up until recently we’ve focused more on professional development (resume, networking, etc.) This has been helpful, but I have to admit I would have preferred for the course to focus more on our practicums. The course is being taught by someone who is not part of the faculty because the usual professor for the course is not teaching this semester. I’m not sure how different the course would be if we had the UNT professor – my guess is that it would focus more on the practicum.

I have to write a practicum proposal as the final assignment for the course. I wrote a project statement for it last week (think 30 second elevator talk for your project on paper).
I think the project proposal will be a bit difficult because the very idea of doing this without consulting with the client is absurd to me, but this is more for practice than for us to actually use.

I don’t have an organizational behavior exam, just our typical homework assignment, group work, and multiple choice test. Having just the one project due will be a refreshing change from the last year!

And, my project over winter break is to go back and tag old posts about UNT as such because I’ve since learned that people find those posts interesting and/or find them while doing searches about the online program.

The decision to go into the tech industry is probably not shocking to many people that know me. I’m making the move because the industry is not completely unfamiliar to me, I tend to like tech geeks (I know that’s stereo-typing, but I’ve found it to be true), I have a knack for picking up tech (especially web) knowledge quickly, and I have a genuine interest in technology.

We’ll see how the move goes for me. I’m looking forward to it and I have to admit that it’s comforting to have a destination in sight. I’m currently looking for an elective to fill and hope to find a web design type course. I’ve spoken to other design anthropologists in the tech field and it appears that you do not have to have “tech knowledge,” but it seems like it would make research easier.

After you conduct your research, the next step will likely be transcribing your interviews and/or focus groups, etc. I only have experience with transcribing one-on-one taped interviews and taped focus groups. I’ve tried a few different transcription software programs and Express Scribe is by far my favorite. It’s free software that is compatible with both Mac and PC (so the free part is a benefit). The reason that I love Express Scribe is the features it offers. It’s compatible with Microsoft Word, so you can set up “hot keys” (or short cuts) that allow you to play, pause, rewind, and fast forward while in Word i.e., you’re typing in Word and without switching back to Express Scribe you use “control+d” to pause. It makes the process much easier and you save a lot of time by not having to switch back to Express Scribe. Two other great features are playing in slow motion and automatic rewinding of 5 seconds upon pause.

I do not have any experience with transcribing video, but the other RA in the online-on-campus comparison research project used Transana to transcribe the class discussions in the on-campus class. I don’t think it was her favorite software, but it worked well enough. Transana is no longer free, but you can download an older version from their website for free. You can purchase a copy for $50 and it is compatible with Mac and PC.

I also like to make a few notes about possible themes/hunches while transcribing and to do this I usually use a mind map. I’m always super careful to make these notes because it’s really too early to be thinking about themes- but I always “test” them against the data once it is available.

Related post: My first experience with Express Scribe

Their latest comic, is about the new humanities character and it is especially funny.

It reminds me of my favorite quote:

“Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”
- A.L. Kroeber