Why I used twitter in my class

I always incorporate some sort of ‘new media’ technology into my classes. Like David, I want my students to feel accountable for what they are doing to a larger audience than just myself.  Additionally, I want them to realize that their opinions matter, and there is a world beyond the classroom that might be interested in the research they are doing.

This semester, I had my upper level Indigenous Cultures students create Twitter accounts.  Each student was responsible for monitoring contemporary indigenous issues in a different region of the world. They were expected to retweet relevant articles, and be prepared to discuss these issues in class as well.   My goal was to have students recognize that Indigenous peoples are actively dealing with a variety of issues around the world, and they are not archaic groups we only study in books. While I believe students did learn this, the project was not the idyllic educational experience I had envisioned.

The Set-Up

Like David, I had each student create a Twitter account using his or her own name, and I asked them to follow each other and myself.  While I used the hashtag #soa311 occasionally, and created a Twapper Keeper for it, no one else ended up using it.  None of the students had any experience with Twitter, and in general were reserved about trying to explore this new technology.

At the beginning of the semester we used the college’s laptop cart in class to get everyone on Twitter at once, and start looking around the website to see how it worked.  This took nearly a whole class period, yet it still didn’t seem to be enough time – I expected students to do more poking around on their own outside of class, but most did not.  Perhaps the fact that I only made this a small % of their grade is the reason, but it really wasn’t meant to be the primary focus of the course, so I couldn’t justify making it worth too much. Whatever the reason, students, generally, did not engage with the larger Twitter-verse.

As they set up their Twitter accounts we also went over the dos and don’ts of Twitter and talked about how to tweet as a professional.  I showed students some examples of the information I could find about other young people on twitter, related to drinking, sex and other issues, to discuss why this is inappropriate and make them realize that anything they said on Twitter was 100% public. I showed them my own tweets, which are a mixture of anthropological tweets and personal comments, but nothing I would be embarrassed to say face-to-face to any of them, as an example.

I created a Twitter list for all the students to follow which included large indigenous media feeds like @indiancountry , some prominent Anthropology blogs like @savageminds and local feeds like @almacollege and @jessenramirez. I had hoped this list would help students find new tweeps to follow that focused on their particular research regions and interests, while keeping connected to the local community as well.  I also showed them how to search for keywords using #hashtags which might help them locate people with similar interests. One of the greatest obstacles to starting a Twitter feed is finding a community, so I wanted to give them a starter set.

Challenges

The challenges to this project were multiple.

The first was that I did not keep on top of it in class.  I would retweet to students, and ask other tweeps to give my students suggestions for who to follow, but once we got into the classroom I would neglect to bring up the topics students were finding on twitter, because I was focused on the lecture material I had prepped for the day.  Towards the end of the semester I got better about this, but it was the main reason this project never really got off the ground.

Language barriers
Most people tweeting about indigenous issues in Asia are not tweeting in English.  This was something I hadn’t considered carefully enough. And while there were some people tweeting about these issues in English, most students seemed to give up rather than really challenge themselves to find this information.  Again, had I been talking about it more in class, it would have helped to encourage them.

Non-hackers.  I had hoped that as students saw the way Twitter worked and interacted with one another and others on it, they would engage more with the program and take it and make it their own.  However this was not the case. Although some students found it interesting, even they felt that they were too busy with other obligations to spend time exploring twitter.

The positive outcomes

There were some good sides to the Twitter project, and I think these could be improved upon more in the future.

Networking I knew about my students’ interests in the class, and also about their career goals and other interests.  Via twitter I was able to introduce students to some experts in their areas of interest, experts that live hundreds of miles away but like to talk to others about their passions.  I also showed them how to use Twitter to find out more about research topics. For example, I had a sociology major who was talking to me about the relationship between space and poverty issues, but had never heard of G.I.S.. I sent out a tweet asking for examples of Sociology projects using G.I.S.; within an hour we had a reply with a great example from Toronto.  Students became aware of the professional side of twitter and how to access this network of interested and friendly scholars.

Evaluating Media: As we talked about articles students found, we also discussed the sources of these articles and the potential for bias in these materials. We also had great examples of the power of words, and choosing your words thoughtfully. The best example of this came in a Survival International announcement about ‘uncontacted tribes‘ in the Amazon, and a few weeks later a great analysis by Greg Downey, who blogs at Neuroanthropology with @daniel_lende .  This was a wonderful teaching moment because we problematized the original Survival International announcement in class, and a few weeks later Greg Downey basically came out in agreement with the students and gave them much more context to understand the history of calling people ‘uncontacted’ and the power of these words on peoples perceptions of these communities. This helped the students to see the relevance of what we were studying, and affirmed their analysis skills for them. It brought the material out of the books and into their world.

Incorporating Indigenous Perspectives: Much of mainstream media excludes or misrepresents Indigenous issues.  Twitter gave students access to alternative media streams and the voices of individual people who could offer their personal opinions on a topic. When a student in Alma Michigan is able to follow the tweets of a Maori language teacher in New Zealand or an Ojibwe elder on a reserve in Ontario, it opens their eyes to different perspectives and a way to see how the people in a community feel about a situation, rather than just a mainstream media assessment of the issue.  Additionally, twitter offers up the opportunity for students to dialogue with these folks.  What a great opportunity for an anthropology class!

Creating a professional internet identity

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that my students and I discussed the dos and don’ts of tweeting, and the internet more generally, at the beginning of the term.  I am one of those instructors that believes I should teach some professionalism skills in class, not just pure anthropology, so I try to cover these types of issues.

About two weeks after finals, Matt Tuttle and I had an experience with some undergraduate students (not our own) on Twitter that led me to e-mail my students with a post-term lesson about your public face on the internet. Matt has already done a good job of describing the incident on his blog, but I will give a quick summary here as well, and discuss the follow up that I did with my own students.

As Matt describes, a student used the keyword #anthropology on Twitter to search for someone to write his papers for him (he explicitly said this).  Another student replied to this, and a discussion of the quantity of work, the potential payment amount, and the deadlines ensued.  Ultimately the student said she could not do it, because it was too much work in a short amount of time.  This entire discussion was on their public Twitter feeds. The student who had considered writing the papers had a link to her blog, and a photo of herself as her avatar, and it was very easy to figure out who she was and what school she went to. Her self-summary said she was an ‘aspiring anthropologist’.

After publicly calling out this student on considering if she should write papers for payment, I wasn’t sure what to do.  She hadn’t cheated, she had only considered it.  Perhaps it had been a momentary fantasy about the $400 the other student had offered.  So while I considered e-mailing her professor about it, to give her a heads up, I held back. I felt like a snitch, and I didn’t know what had gone through the student’s head. What is the ethical response to this scenario? I hadn’t seen this issue before – a public discussion of whether to cheat, now saved as screen shots on my computer. So I paused and pondered what my role should be.

But then I noticed something.  She replied to a general query I had made about ‘What anthropologist do you wish was on twitter?’ but she made no other comment to me about what had transpired. And then she changed her Twitter handle.  Twitter doesn’t change your handle instantly, so I was able to keep up with her as she switched her handle, though if you look up the old handle now it says ‘That user doesn’t exist!’. She deleted all of the tweets related to the cheating incident.  She removed the link to her blog and she changed her photo. She still said she was an ‘aspiring anthropologist’.

And that’s when I got angry.  Any doubts I’d had about her intentions went up in smoke when, rather than acknowledging a mistake in judgment she went into hiding.  At this point, I looked upon her as someone who wants to someday be my colleague.  So I e-mailed her professor to tell her what the student was doing. This was not to punish her (because she hadn’t broken anything but norms at this point), but so that her instructor could possibly talk to her about the importance of academic integrity.  If this person wants to be my colleague, I want her to be stellar.  Perhaps an inspirational professor could help her understand why academics do not support cheating. If one of my students had been considering cheating and someone else knew about it, I would want them to tell me so I could talk to the student about it before they crossed that line.

I then sent an e-mail to my students, relaying the story to them. I gave them the following list of ‘morals of the story’:

1. Don’t plagiarize.
2. Don’t do stupid things in public if you don’t want to get caught. Most of the internet is public.
3. The internet is like tattoos – you just need to be thoughtful about what you put there because it is a pain to get rid of it later if you change your mind. Don’t post a comment or blog if you wouldn’t be able to stand in front of someone and say the same thing.
4. Google yourself every now and then to see what from your past is showing up. And for pete’s sake check the google images too – you never know when a friend’s facebook pic of you doing something inappropriate is visible through their account instead of your own.
5. There are tech savvy professors out there. Don’t assume the internet is the realm of college students alone. Even if you have a non-techy professor, s/he has helpful colleagues.
6. Own up to your mistakes.
7. Deleting things on the internet doesn’t make them all go away, and even if they disappear it may take a while.  There are lots of programs that archive old websites. Your internet past does not go away.

I think this was a good lesson for the students; I have heard from some of them that they have gone out and Googled themselves to be sure that nothing untoward shows up when they do so.  Had my students not used Twitter themselves, that story might not have had so much impact on them.  However, since they had tried it themselves, they had a context to place those lessons into, and I hope they have developed some internet savvy.  There really isn’t an appropriate place to incorporate that into a college education, but it is an integral skill for students to have as they move out into the workforce, and is a basic part of learning how to be a professional.

I have only seen one of my students post anything on Twitter since the semester ended, so this project was not as successful as I’d hoped for. However I do believe that students got a lot our of the experience, and if I do teach with Twitter again, I will be sure to leave more time in the class schedule to have classroom discussion about the materials they are finding online.

Since the term has started, revolutions have erupted in so many countries, and the responses are all so different.  I want to incorporate this into my Introductory Anthropology course – this seems like the ideal time to show students how anthropology is applicable to current events.  The trouble is, this isn’t my area of expertise in the slightest, so I’m not sure where to start.  Here are some of my thoughts thusfar:

Cultural Change: I can talk about the different ways that culture is transformed – diffusion of ideas, revolution and uprising.  This is nice, but it doesn’t help to explain the current situations, it just uses these to help students understand concepts from their book.  I want to flip that on its head.

Political organization – How do individuals and organizations create and maintain power? What are the different forms of political organization? How do groups use power and how does power exchange hands?  This is better.  However it makes me want to start discussing Foucault and the Panopticon, and we’ll only be discussing cultural anthropology for 3 weeks, so that seems a bit too heavy.

The relationship between culture and political systems: I think this is where I really want to go, but I am not sure I know enough about the region to do this effectively.  The media are talking about how democracy is moving into this region.  However, few people are yet discussing the fact that democracy in these countries is likely to look very different than what we Americans think of as democracy.  We associated democracy and the republic with our own historical and cultural development, and there are aspects of democracy that we see as ‘natural’ to the concept.  This is easy enough to see by comparing law and politics in the USA and mainland Europe.  Individual rights to own guns, public health care, the amount of money it is reasonable for the government to take from our paychecks, these are some very easy examples to share with students.  Religion and the right to practice religion publicly is another good example.  So how might the cultures of Tunisia, Egypt, Libia, Bahrain, etc… affect the way they develop beyond this moment, assuming they actually attempt to become democracies.

It would also be useful to try to help students understand how individuals raised in a dictatorship might not understand or embrace democracy as we conceive of it.  This is where I get WAY over my head – I do not have a good understanding of the culture of an individual raised in a dictatorship. How does that individual think government works? Does that individual expect that bribes and nepotism will (and should) still control who gets powerful jobs? Do they have a naive expectation that anyone will be able to run for a position in government? Are they right? Do I have a cynical view of how democracy will play out, based on the US system, whereas the people of these other countries will find a way to create a system that DOES allow anyone, regardless of their financial ability, to run for elected office?

What do you think? Are there other topics I should discuss? Can you give me some guidance on any of the above ideas?  Do you think this makes any sense whatsoever, or should I avoid this and stick with the textbook because I only have 3 weeks?

Dearest Anthropology,

Years before I knew you, I loved you. Looking back on my school projects, it is clear you were on my mind.  I suspect my first notion of you came about through my mother.  She had a love for listening to other folks’ conversations in public settings, which she shared with me.  Together we would analyze the behaviors of people we watched and overheard, trying to determine relationships and infer cultural patterns.  She was trained as a nurse, observational skills were necessary for evaluating her patients.  I enjoyed the challenge of entering into a situation and figuring out what was going on, who was in control, and what types of interpersonal dynamics were at play. People were just interesting to me.  But I did not know yet what I loved.

Then came college, when many of us find our first true loves.  I had thought my love was physics, but I was quickly scorned.  Nothing I could do would make that relationship a peaceful one.  Physics had standards I could not reach.  We could not communicate with one another.  I probably could have tried harder to make it work, but a relationship that required so much effort seemed wrong.  I didn’t expect love to be easy, but a constant struggle was going to break me.  After a year and ½ together, I knew I needed to save myself.  And so I spent the second half of my sophomore year cheating on physics and flirting with other disciplines. And that is how I found you.

I really ought to thank my friend Andy, he introduced my to you unintentionally.  I was planning to flirt with history, geology and political science, while still seeing physics.  I had room in my schedule for one more date.  And Andy had moved out of the dorm and I missed spending time with my friend.  So when he suggested I take ‘Archaeology of Ancient Egypt’ with him, I said yes.  I did not say yes for you, I said yes for my friend.  He had no idea where this was going to lead.

I enjoyed my flirtations.  All of these disciplines were interesting to me.  But during that term, the Egyptologist told fanciful tales of adventure.  They were enticing, they took me out of a dull physics laboratory full of little spring loaded cars into another country that was active not because of force vectors, but because of human energy.  More than that, though, I discovered that there were other people in the world who enjoyed observing and interpreting what people do all day.  Sure, we eventually discussed Pharonic Egypt and the Pyramids, and that was fantastic.  But for the first 1/3 of that semester we discussed things like microliths – small slivers of stone that were used to make compound tools.  I was entranced to discover how much we could discover about people by looking at these little blades.  The rest of the class was falling asleep and groaning about the fact that we were not yet discussing King Tut.  This was the moment I realized that you and I could have something special together.  I connected with you in a way that others did not connect with you. This was the begin of my love for you, anthropology.

I went home one of those days and pulled out my course catalog, a thick book full of class listings and departmental information.  I had no idea what department my archaeology class was even included in – I just signed up for the code Andy had told me to type in.  I looked up Anthropology in the catalog. This word was new to me – we had never discussed it in high school. It was not a program anyone I knew was in. I read the two paragraph description of the discipline.  Never had I read such wonderful words.  I do not remember the original words, but I can tell you how I translated them in my head “Dear Megan, there are people who spend their lives researching what it means to be human.  They go to all the different regions of the world to spend time with people, to look at the remains of our ancestors, and try to understand how we got to be so interesting and different from one another, but at the same time so similar.  Humans are amazing! And unusual! And you can combine your love of history, geology and political science by becoming an anthropologist! If you can connect your interest to humans, you can study ANYTHING YOU WANT in anthropology! And you can study all of it! There is a discipline just for you! We’re sorry no one told you about us before.  Since we interweave with so many other fields, sometimes people do not even realize they are studying anthropology. But we are here, come love your species with us!”

I made an appointment with the anthropology advisor right away, and shortly thereafter became an anthropology major.  I loved everything about you anthropology, I still do.  When I applied to graduate school I applied to programs that would have my studying the environments of early hominds, and I applied to a program that would have had me studying Native American communities in the 1600s.  I got into both, and I had to decide.  My decision was a bit sheepish – I went with ethnohistory in part because I feared I would not survive the paleoanthropology programs.  I do not regret my decision though, it was right for me.  As an ethnohistorian I have an opportunity to combine cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology and history together – it allows me to be as near to a generalist as one can manage these days.  And I have retained my passion for human evolutionary studies – teaching Introductory courses allows me to keep up on this section of the field as well.  I am a generalist at heart; I am fascinated by what makes us all tick, and what makes some of us tock instead. While my research has necessarily narrowed, my passion for understanding how amazing our  species is continues.  I maintain ties with colleagues in several different sub-disciplines and do not hesitate to ask them questions about their research and fields.  So too, do I ask questions of non-anthropologists.  Every person I meet has knowledge about humanity to pass on to me.  From the carpenters at Yellowstone National Park who identified my metal pipe not as a part of an historic building but as a fishing rod ferule, to my Anishinaabeg friends who invite me to ghost suppers and share their family stories with me.  I could learn some of this from books, but it would not be as clear, and it would not be as interesting a life to live.  Anthropology, you enrich the world for me, and make every day a new opportunity to gain more insight into the human world.  I am forever grateful, and can not imagine my life without you.

Love,

Megan

From what I’ve read on the interwebs, the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS)has been discussing their concerns about the changes in the AAA long range plan (LRP) since the meeting, and sent an e-mail out to SAS members encouraging them to contact the AAA about concerns over the removal of the word ‘science’ from the LRP (you can see the changes made to the LRP at Recycled Minds).  Earlier today this led to an article on InsideHigherEd.com entitled ‘Anthropology without Science’. The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article a few hours ago entitled ‘Anthropologists debate whether ‘science’ is part of their mission‘ (thank you for the more reasonable title, CHE). This article discusses the various reasons members of the Society for Anthropological Sciences are concerned that the LRP was changed without notice to the membership. While some are concerned about the fact that the word science was removed from the mission in the LRP, others are concerned about a shift in focus from representing Anthropologists’ concerns to doing public outreach.  I’d like to look at each of these issues.

Does the word Science need to be in the mission of the AAA?

First of all, the change in wording has been done in the mission of the LTP, not the Statement of Purpose of the AAA.  However, the wording in these statements was identical until two weeks ago, so it is almost a moot point. Changing one implies changes will be attempted in the other.

Let us compare the Mission Statements of several professional science associations, to see how they define themselves and their goals (the link to the page with the mission statement is posted above each statement).

American Anthropological Association:

• to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research;
• and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems.”

American Sociological Association

• Serving Sociologists in Their Work
• Advancing Sociology as a Science and Profession
• Promoting the Contributions and Use of Sociology to Society

American Economic Association

1. The encouragement of economic research, especially the historical and statistical study of the actual conditions of industrial life.
2. The issue of publications on economic subjects.
3. The encouragement of perfect freedom of economic discussion. The Association as such will take no partisan attitude, nor will it commit its members to any position on practical economic questions.

Association of American Geographers

• The Association of American Geographers (AAG) is a nonprofit scientific and educational society founded in 1904. For 100 years the AAG has contributed to the advancement of geography. Its members from more than 60 countries share interests in the theory, methods, and practice of geography, which they cultivate through the AAG’s Annual Meeting, two scholarly journals (Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer), and the monthly AAG Newsletter.

Geological Society of America

• GSA’s mission is to be a leader in advancing the geosciences, enhancing the professional growth of its members, and promoting the geosciences in the service to humankind and stewardship of the Earth.

American Chemical Society

• “To advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people.”

American Physical Society

• Be the leading voice for physics and an authoritative source of physics information for the advancement of physics and the benefit of humanity;
• Provide effective programs in support of the physics community and the conduct of physics;
• Collaborate with national scientific societies for the advancement of science, science education and the science community;
• Cooperate with international physics societies to promote physics, to support physicists worldwide and to foster international collaboration;
• Promote an active, engaged and diverse membership, and support the activities of its units and members.

It is some of the social sciences that include ‘science’ in the descriptions of their fields, as if they feel the need to define the fact that they are sciences.  Hard sciences do not question the fact that their disciplines are sciences.  Personally, I don’t think that anthropology should have to defend its identification as a science.  It is a social science. At many universities there is a College or Division of Social Sciences, and that is where you find anthropology. Perhaps this recognition of the Social Sciences as a cohesive group of disciplines that use the scientific method to study humanity is more recent than the origin of our disciplines? I don’t know much about the history of academic institutions, so I can’t say. I don’t believe that we should need to justify that anthropology is a science in our Mission Statement.  I DO believe, however, that the website of the AAA should clearly state that Anthropology is a social science in its definition of anthropology, rather than saying social science is one of the places we “draw our knowledge” from.

Should the mission of the AAA be to “advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects”?

To me, this is the real issue to be debated. Previously, the LRP said the mission of the AAA was to “advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research; and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists; including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems.”

Now it says the mission is to “advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, archeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research. The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.”

This new statement shifts the focus to public outreach, while at the same time deleting the information about the reasons why anthropological research is beneficial to society (solving real-world problems).  Considering how many anthropologists do applied research these days, and how many anthropologists work outside of academia now, this is particularly surprising to me. Additionally, by removing the word anthropology from the first sentence and replacing it with humankind, the statement fundamentally shifts the outreach from teaching people about our field and how we do our research to the people we are working with and the cultures we are studying. Both are important – shouldn’t our professional organization promote both?

If you look at the mission statements of the other professional societies, the only one that does NOT put the advancement of scholarly research and their members first is the American Physical Society.  They also explicitly state the goals of advancing information about physics, it is for “the advancement of physics and the benefit of humanity.” The AAA LRP Mission says no such thing. My reason for joining the AAA was not to teach non-anthropologists about humankind.  I joined because I wanted to be part of a network of anthropologists that facilitated my communication with other scholars and spoke up for us when universities tried to remove our programs or funding sources tried to stop supporting us.  I joined because I wanted to part of an organization that taught others about what anthropology is and what it does – so that students entering university will have HEARD of anthropology when they show up on campus, and so that political leaders will have some appreciation for the value of our research when a relevant piece of legislation crosses his/her desk. The wording of the new LRP mission statement currently makes me feel like an afterthought, and causes me to be concerned about what the society actually plans to spend its time doing in the coming years.

I really don’t think the AAA was trying to ‘remove science’ when they made these changes - the statement still talks about biological anthropology and archaeology, which use all sorts of scientific methods, and many cultural anthropologists I know are very scientific in their work.  And I think all of the uproar about the removal of one word, particularly from people who only read the InsideHigherEd blog and not the original document, is akin to interpreting an archaeological site from one unprovenienced artifact; we all know that context matters. And we know that even when you do have the full document (or, say, feature excavation data) – we still were not there when the features or documents were created, and we can’t know what the creators were thinking about when they decided to make them; all we see is the result.  I DO see problems in this statement and I definitely believe the organization needs to have some dialogue about this.  But lets not all make assumptions about what led to this document and raise up the anti-science cry until we have actually talked about it.

1) I wanted students to learn about a particular culture in close detail

2) I wanted the book to be accessible to freshman students from all majors

3) I wanted them to read something recently published

4) I wanted them to read about a contemporary community

5) I wanted them to read a book about a different culture written BY a member of that community.

6) The Alma College Mission is “to prepare graduates who think critically, serve generously, lead purposefully, and live responsibly as stewards of the world they bequeath to future generations.” I wanted to include a book that gave students a model for how to do work that benefits the community.

The Price of Stones met all of these requirements for me.  Right now, each student is taking notes on a different anthropological topic as they read the book (such as food preparation, medicine/health care, marriage practices, etc…).  At the end of the month, they will all upload their notes to the course blog, and each student will use the compiled notes to write their own ethnographic essay, with a research question they have selected.  It seems to be going well.

But now I need a new book for next term! I love this book, but I am sure there are other great works out there which I don’t know about.  Do you have any suggestions? One of the great aspects of this book, for my anthropology class, was that Mr. Kaguri describes his village in vivid detail.  This allowed my students to view it as a data set, not just a book about building a school.  I am thinking of looking for a book about someone doing some sort of health care project or working on women’s issues, but I’m open to ideas.  If you have read a book that you think would work well for my class, please let me know!

Only a history geek takes photos of addresses because they correspond to significant dates.

And WOW. It has been an amazing weekend for me.  There are several of us doing research that relates to the post-dispersal (post-1649) Huron-Wendat.  I thought I knew most of the folks doing research, but our session brought together some other folks I hadn’t met before as well.  In some sort of interesting phenomenon, several of us are finishing up dissertations this year that relate to the post-dispersal Huron-Wendat in some way or another, after several years that have seen limited scholarship on these communities.  Getting us all into the same town for a few days was fantastic.  I learned a lot about Huron-Wendat communities outside of the area I study, and in time periods beyond my own research focus.  Additionally, the discussions and debates about kinship, community relationships, and language have my mind reeling with new ideas and ways of studying the diaspora of the Huron-Wendat that I had not considered before.  Excluding a few papers on ethnogenesis and migration that I popped in on,  I really stayed in my Huron-Wendat bubble and took advantage of having all these scholars within arms reach.  It is very easy for each of us to get caught up in the specific data we are studying for our own research.  Looking at the long-term patterns over several communities is too difficult for any one of us to do, but seeing what others have found really improves my own scholarship.  I think we are like the academic version of Voltron.

Form feet and legs! Form arms and torso! And I'll form...the head!

Individually, we are are doing good scholarship.  But when we come together, our research is unstoppable!

Maybe that’s a little overdramatic, but the point still stands.  All of us are improving one another’s research.  This is why we need a community of scholars.  I am excited about the direction our research is going to take moving forward.

I heard an interview on NPR with Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From. In it he discussed the coffeehouse culture that Benamin Franklin participated in. Johnson suggests that you get several people with different interests and information together for conversation.  Conversing about the ideas at hand, along with conversing about other topics helps these individuals to build new ideas, stacked on top of information and ideas that come from the others.  I definitely feel that part of the reason this weekend was so enlightening for me was the fact that I was talking with historians, art historians, anthropologists and linguists.  We presented formal papers, but also met informally and talked about contemporary political issues, pop culture and blogging in addition to our research. We shared drinks and food.  This allowed us time to brew ideas and return to them as they developed.  It also laid the foundation for future discussions – we now feel quite comfortable posing questions to one another and I suspect that when we see tidbits in our data that may be of interest to others, we will pass them on.  At least I hope so.

For those of you interested in my panel, here is the list of folks involved:

Organizers/Presenters:

Tom Peace : Huron-Wendat Land Use and Conceptions of Territory in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Canada

Kathryn Magee LaBelle : “Part of the Same Body” : The Wendat-Algonquian Coalition and the Process of Relocation, 1650-1701

Discussant:

John Steckley

My own presentation was titled: Material Culture and Wendat Identity, and compared symbolic materials from pre-dispersal archaeological sites to materials from the western Wendat through 1701.

Stephany is a faculty member in the Spanish Department at Alma College. She was a field producer for the Film “Which Way Home”, which follows Latin American children who are attempting to cross into the United States to meet up with their families.

We hardly ever hear the stories of migrant children, and those children who are migrating alone are particularly vulnerable. It is great to see them being given a voice, and for this type of documentary programming to be rewarded by the Academy.

If you have HBO Latino or HBO On-Demand, you can watch an upcoming rebroadcast of the program:

• October 7 HBO Latino East 2:30pm (ET)

• October 7 HBO Latino West 5:30pm (ET)

• October 9 HBO Latino East 2:45pm (ET)

• October 9 HBO Latino West 5:45pm (ET)

• October 4th thru November 7th Which Way Home will be available on HBO-On Demand

Congratulations!

Regardless, Frankenfish was a catchy name, and it reflects the feelings of many Americans about the dangers of a genetically modified fish – it may seem benign right now, but the second you stop playing your violin, it could go berserk. And while it might not intend you harm, it could cause disaster nonetheless.  We’ve been well trained to appreciate the danger of invasive fish species, it is easy to see why a genetically modified species would also cause concern.

But here’s what I find so interesting, and don’t understand. Americans have been eating genetically modified corn and soybeans for YEARS, with minimal concern (some people are concerned, but they are a vocal minority in the USA).  But the second we have a genetically modified animal, it’s a totally different ballgame.  Is it just a case of better publicity and a catchy nickname? Or does this reflect some cultural conception of what is ‘natural’ to Americans?  Is the fact that a fish can move around the reason it bothers more people than corn? If you think there’s a danger of them escaping into the wild, you should know that genetically modified canola plants are found all along the highway shoulders in North Dakota – genetically modified plants escape too. Is it because we can SEE a physical difference in the fish, thanks to the genes they have modified? Or perhaps it is because we tend to eat fish as a food, and corn and soybeans are more often ingredients in another food? I suspect we have a tendency to see plants as part of the background, and animals as part of our active, lived space. But that’s pure speculation.

I’m not saying people should or should not be concerned about GMOs – I have mixed feelings about them myself.  However I do think that people should either be concerned about ALL GMOs or NO GMOs.  The genetically modified corn and soybeans are in virtually every boxed food you buy at the store, so before you get into an uproar about ‘Frankenfish’ take a look at what is already on your shelves.  If you are content with the genetically modified corn and soybeans in those boxes, ask yourself what is so disconcerting about the genetically modified salmon.  You might learn something about how you view the world, and how the media helps to get us in an uproar sometimes. Or else you might throw out the boxes.

“I realized that we live in a time when discrimination can land you in jail, but I must risk it and say that you stand a better chance of taking on an inexperienced male volunteer than a female. Digging is, after all, a masculine occupation, and while more women than men are likely to do well in the pot-washing shed or in the laboratory, shovel-wielding females are not everyday sights in Western society. If they are to be useful on a site (and the right women can be splendid excavators), they must be prepared to be accepted as men, eschewing the traditional rights of their sex. It is vastly time-wasting for men in one area to be constantly hopping up and down to push barrows for women working in another. Besides, it is inorgdinately restricting after clouting one’s knee with a shovel to have to look around ot see if women are in earshot before commenting on it.

…Effective archaeology demands complete concentration on the work in hand, and the more feminine the woman the more lax the concentration. One lady volunteer improperly dressed for the occasion can cause havoc throughout the crew as well as damaging the ground on which she walks. High heels and low décolletage are a lethal combination.”

Ivor Noël-Hume, Historical Archaeology p 60, 1968 (emphasis mine)

Noël-Hume has just published a memoir; I will be interested to see if he discusses the changing demographic of archaeology in it. He’s a great writer, it should be a fun read regardless.

A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist, by Ivor Noël-Hume, 2010

I wanted students to understand these four causes of population variation:

• Mutation - the actual transformation of information within the sex cells, leading to new alleles
• Genetic Drift - the random change in allele % over time. I particularly emphasized the founder effect (when a small portion of the population breaks off, and they do not have the standard % of each allele, so certain traits get over-emphasized), because for early humans living in small groups, this led to a lot of diversification
• Gene Flow - the inflow of new variants, by the arrival of new members to the community
• Natural Selection - an allele that is present becomes more advantageous that other alleles and survives at a higher rate within the population, because it has become adaptive

To show the students how these play out, I decided to attempt some in-class breeding (not inbreeding).  I have about 30 students in class.  I gave each student a pair of alleles (2 strips of paper, held together with a paperclip).  Each allele was labeled: G, g or Y.  Using the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium Principle, we started off with the following genotypes:

~25% students Homozygous Dominant (GG)

~50% students Heterozygous (Gg)

~25% students Homozygous Recessive (gg)

and one student was a mutant (YY)

GG and Gg both had a phenotype of Straight Green Hair. gg had a phenotype of Straight Purple Hair. YY had Curly Yellow Hair.  To make change occur fast enough for class time, anyone with a Y allele also always had identical twin babies (linked traits among my alien population!).  Students who had offspring with Y alleles brought them to the front of the room so I could give them a second set of matching alleles.

The first thing I had students do was select one of their alleles to pass on.  I encouraged them to pick it randomly.

Next I said ‘everybody mate’ , and they had to go find a mate and combine their selected alleles into an offspring.  Each parent was to take their unused allele and put it aside.  Everyone got a kick out of picking someone to pair up with.

To make counting our results functional, I then told them to let one person keep the offspring. These students raised their hands as I called out genotypes, so we could get a count of our new generation. This was a good way to reinforce comprehension of terms as well – some rounds I said ‘who is Homozygous Dominant?’ and some rounds I just said ‘who has GG?’; it depended how confused I was making myself.

Our first round was surprisingly in line with H-W, though I think that was a fluke.  So I discussed the possibility of Founder’s Effect, and how it could have impacted us. Per our mutant, We ended up with two gY babies (curly purple haired kids).

Our next round I had all the offspring holders stand up and again randomly mate.  We lost one of our Y alleles at this point, so I’m glad I had they having twins, or we might not have had all the effects I was hoping for in the example. Just discussing it was a good example of how you can lose some of your variability in a small population, though. Somehow we also ended up with an odd number of offspring, so I told the leftover person that she got eaten by a tiger and didn’t get to reproduce, and was no longer a part of the gene pool.  As long as I made it part of the story, students didn’t mind being taken out of our population.

We again counted up our genotypes.  We had a higher percentage of Homozygous Dominant and Recessive genotypes this time, an example of Genetic Drift.   And we now had 2 GY babies (Curly green haired babies).  The students found that interesting – the Y gene got passed on, but mixed with a different allele that the previous generation, so the curliness stayed, but the color changed.

By the third round there were not many students participating, so it was time for some Gene Flow. I handed out the BB mutants (the fuzzy blues), who came from another population.  This helped keep everyone’s attention, because more people were again participating in mating. I meant to have 7 fuzzy blue people, but I left some of them in the office by mistake, so I only had 3.  It was not ideal, but it worked alright.

I again had them stand up and do random mating.  This time the Y that got passed on mated with a B, so I created the twin for them, but it was only after they sat down that I told them our unfortunate news – it turns out that YB is NOT a compatible set of alleles, and none of those offspring survived.  So all the YBs got knocked out of the gene pool (and that was the last of the Ys).  I intentionally did not tell them this until the first YB offspring was created – because I did not want to bias the mating process. We then looked at our new allele distribution, which now included some GB genotypes with Blue-green hair (I couldn’t decide which should dominate, so neither did!).

We ran out of time, and had very few offspring due to the small population of fuzzy blues, so I didn’t actually perform the next round of mating, but we talked about the plan.  The next occurrence was going to be an environmental shift: our main food source died out!  But it turns out both the Y and B alleles allow individuals to process other foods in the area, a preadaptation. So anyone with a Y or a B gene survived, while those without either died. Thus, Natural Selection.

We then discussed the dilemma at hand – a YB infant does not survive, but the only aliens that can live in this environment are those with either a Y or a B gene.  And then I told them about the relationship between the sickle cell mutation and malaria, to show them something similar really happens among humans (That is – people who are homozygous for sickle cell anemia often die from it, but they can’t get malaria.  Those with no sickle cell alleles get malaria and can die from it.  Those who are heterozygous for sickle cell anemia do not get malaria, and rarely die from sickle cell.  So sickle cell alleles have both positive and negative effects in malarial regions. This is why sickle cell is so common in these regions, but virtually non-existent in other areas of the world.)

And that was my day of encouraging random mating in the classroom.  I asked students afterward if it made sense, and if it helped them understand the concepts.  I got a resounding yes (with a ‘plus it was fun!’ tossed in).  Ultimately, we’ll see if it was effective come exam time. It’s an interesting activity because you can’t tell how it’s going to work out – we could have wiped out our Y mutants fairly early, or had some other unexpected occurrence.  But I think that is part of what kept the students paying careful attention – this wasn’t something they could reproduce on their own; it was happening in real time and required all of these people, and had the potential to go horribly wrong, which made it all the more interesting. It also gave me the opportunity to discuss how nature works – when one student was sad that he didn’t get to claim a curly haired fuzzy blue baby as his own (since the YB pairs were non-viable) I responded ‘well, we don’t get to decide how nature works.’

Earlier I was thinking about how you could do this with a larger class. If you had clickers for students to use in class, I think you could do this.  You could pass out the alleles as students came into class, and after each round, have those with the offspring click in their results.  It would be interesting to have someone try this and see how it works.