The Academic Technology Specialist program works with faculty, lecturers, and researchers within Stanford's departments, programs, and schools to advance the application of software and information technology in teaching and research.
Recent Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) projects include an introductory course on online communities and ethnographic practice taught by Claudia Engel, ATS for Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology; and Nicole Coleman's (the ATS for the Stanford Humanities Lab) Winter Quarter launch of the Humanities Archive Lab and preparation of social software that will support the Humanities Center's Research workshops program.
Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology
Claudia Engel, ATS for Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology, taught an introductory course on online communities and ethnographic practice in the High Performance Learning Space in Wallenberg Hall.
A project-oriented course, it strived to introduce students from all interested disciplines to the experience of ethnographic research in virtual environments, and to familiarize them with methods, tools, and the challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship in online communities.
New approaches and frameworks towards a critical theory of information technologies are being proposed, but the intersection and interactions between virtual/real, online/offline, and remote/face-to-face still need clarification. Also in question is whether these commonly-used dimensions are adequate.
The Wallenberg Hall classroom provided the unique opportunity to cross virtual and physical boundaries of space. Connecting through their individual laptops students went on a virtual fieldtrip in a 3D online environment during one of the class sessions. The simultaneous physical and virtual presence allowed the interaction with other users of the virtual space and with one another on a virtual level, as well as instant debriefing face-to-face within the group.
The class met "online" once a week, thus providing students with an immediate experience in virtual communities. The course also made extensive use of CourseForum, an online discussion tool available in CourseWork.
Claudia has been collaborating in the design, development, and teaching of various courses in the past, with the objective of exploring alternative approaches to teaching and learning anthropology in different content areas. After assisting John Rick (Models and Imaging in Archaeological Computing) and Joanna Mountain (Genetic Structure of Populations), both faculty at Anthropological Sciences, and co-teaching Introduction to Cultural Studies with Paulla Ebron, Faculty at Cultural and Social Anthropology, this was her fourth experience in Wallenberg Hall's High Performance Learning Spaces.
Building on these experiences, Claudia's next goal is to replicate a similar environment outside Wallenberg Hall. This includes analyzing the activities performed in and around the courses to determine critical components of the supporting technology for the learning process, and to decide how these components can be transferred to other spaces.
Stanford Humanities Lab
Nicole Coleman, ATS for the Stanford Humanities Lab, has focused on two projects recently: the launch of the Humanities Archive Lab and the preparation of social software that will support the Humanities Center's Research Workshops program.
Both of these projects are designed to make authoring and publishing information to the web easy for the Research Workshop coordinators.
The Humanities Archive Lab (HAL) is a computing lab designed to facilitate digital authoring and the digital conversion of materials generated by Research Workshop program coordinators. In addition to the equipment that remains in the lab, there are kits that workshop coordinators can check out for content capture: audio capture kits, which include an iPod, microphone and a small digital camera; and laptop kits which come with a small video camera. With these tools, coordinators can record talks in either audio or video format and then return to HAL to edit the material (or not) and prepare it for streaming.
The next step is to post the newly created content to the web. Nicole is using an open source content management system to allow the coordinators to upload and manage their content through a web browser. Some of the workshops have excellent web sites already where they post their schedules and distribute workshop papers. The content management system will make this easy for coordinators who lack the necessary web site development skills. The also becomes a single point of entry to all of the Research Workshop activities. The hope is that it will be a place for a larger research network to grow online.
For More Information
For more information about the Academic Technology Specialist Program see:
