Tag Archives: UNT Online Master’s

Practitioner in Training: Entering into a Community of Practice as an Online Graduate Student

06 Sunday Sep 2009

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This is an article I wrote for Anthropology News in 2008:

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.”

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My SfAA presentation is now available as a podcast “The Scholar-Practitioner in an Organizational Setting”

02 Friday May 2008

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My advisor, Christina Wasson, and I have been doing research comparing students’ experiences in the same graduate course for the last year and a half. The data that was collected came from an on-campus and online version of the same course, taught at the same time, and by the same professor.

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 🙂

The “graduate experience” and UNT’s online master’s program in anthropology

06 Thursday Dec 2007

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Since I’ve never attended graduate school in an on-campus program, much of what I see as the “graduate experience” comes from hearsay and others’ experiences. Part of my hesitation about enrolling in the online master’s program was about if I’d get the “graduate experience” (whatever that is).

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.

2007 AAA Days 3-4

05 Wednesday Dec 2007

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The AAA conference in DC went on until Sunday, December 2 but Saturday was the last day I went in. By the time our session was over on Saturday, I was completely conferenced out!

I spent the majority of the day on Friday in various meetings/meet-ups/etc. I had a much needed f2f meeting with my advisor and we’ve figured out an approach for finding my practicum idea- I have several ideas, but nothing ‘perfect’ yet.

We presented our research on online-on-campus education on Saturday morning. The session went pretty well and we had some questions after the session. There were about 50 people in the room while we were presenting- this was an improvement over last year’s 8 🙂 If anyone has interest in reading our paper “Using Linguistic Anthropology to Compare Online and On-Campus Learning Experiences” let me know. The focus for the paper was on the experiences in class discussions.

Overall, I felt like this year’s AAA conference was much better than last year’s. It’s likely that I’ll attend the 2008 meeting in San Francisco, but I’m not sure if I’ll chose to go after I graduate- the SfAA conference is much more comfortable for me and is of more interest to me as well. I was in one of three ‘applied’ sessions at the AAA and it wasn’t as ‘applied’ as you’d find at the SfAA (some papers were, some were not). I do not like non-applied anthropology; I’ve always been in an applied department and I plan to always do applied work.

The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) is a group within the AAA, as is Ethnography in Praxis Conference (EPIC); if I continue to be part of the AAA post-graduation it will likely be because of these 2 organizations.

I’ll be at the AAA conference this week in DC

26 Monday Nov 2007

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After a little encouragement from those around me (and most importantly from my research team), I’ve decided to attend the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting again this year.

I went to the meeting in San Jose last year and I was less than impressed with it. My main dislike for the conference last year was the general vibe, it felt stuffy, too academic, and semi-dull. After a few days there I felt better about it, but I still did not like it as much as the SfAA conference. People told me that last year’s Meeting was stuffier than usual, so that on top of presenting, convinced me to give it another go. Well, I’ve never been to DC so that is an added bonus!

I’ll be presenting, along with my advisor Christina Wasson and the other RA Megan Bannon, on Saturday morning (8 am is when the session starts!). Our panel is called “Issues in Applied Linguistic Anthropology.” It’s sure to be an interesting session for those of you interested in linguistics and there are some big names in the almost 4 hour long session! We are presenting on our online-on-campus research (and here and here).

I’ll be tweeting during the conference, so you can find me here on Twitter.
Let me know if you’ll be at the conference too, here’s my email.

I’ll be in DC from Nov. 27 – Dec 3.

My third semester at UNT is wrapping up…

15 Thursday Nov 2007

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My classes are winding down and the end of this semester will be much easier than the last two. I’m taking Organizational Behavior (elective) and the UNT department’s required pre-practicum course.

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.