Q.1: We’ve spent a good part of the second half of this semester reading and thinking about how anthropology is adapting so that it can study people and objects in motion. Give at least two examples of this, with your own evaluation of how successful anthropology has been in this study. (Not to mention seeing whether the experiment works!) - Jim You don’t yet know what group you’ll be in, and we’ll need to review the “rules of the game” together.
#HOW TO USE GOOGLE DOCS IN THE CLASSROOM PLUS#
Before class, I emailed a set of five questions to all students, each with a web link to a publicly accessible Google Document, which appeared as follows:Īnthro 201 Questions for GoogleDoc exercise: One numbered question (Q1-Q5) per group, plus one for all. But don’t work on this til the class starts please. In order to answer these questions, I developed an exercise using Google Docs as a platform for students to complete the activity. Would public writing in groups during class stimulate or burden discussion? Would public writing produce a usable document or trash? Would a document represent a group or one highly motivated individual? Was this a reasonable way to help students prepare for a final exam, produce useful study materials, and give them some experience with new digital technologies? It was late in the semester, and we were doing a small unit on digital culture. Forty students were enrolled in the course, half freshmen, a quarter sophomores, and the rest juniors and seniors. While Google Docs had been a great tool for research collaboration with my peers, I had a lot of questions about how the experience of using it would translate for students in the classroom. In the spring of 2013 I decided to test this public editing approach with my Introduction to Anthropology course at Trinity College. But the joys of the exercise were that we were all authors and all readers and all editors false starts and new beginnings could take place before our (collective) eyes. I felt sometimes like we were elephants on parade, dropping words behind us, with the sweeper tidying up at the end. And a third might silently follow along with a cursor just behind the author’s new words, cleaning up. One of us would claim, “We need a sentence here to introduce this next idea.” Another would reply, “How about this one?” while simultaneously writing a draft sentence. Google Docs editing is efficient (we avoided at least a few rounds of consecutive edits), but more importantly it offered our research team the opportunity to shape our ideas publicly instead of privately. This last step offered the precedent for my classroom experiment. Our collaboration on research documents moved forward in 2008 when we began to use Google Docs to post documents to the web to facilitate exchanges. In 2011 we had four co-authors in a seminar room at the University of Michigan, all simultaneously editing and viewing changes on the same document. Later we made manuscript changes page by page using the Microsoft Word “Track Changes” feature.
For more than a decade I have been part of an interdisciplinary and international team studying the effects of social change upon human health. Given the size and complexity of our topic, our papers tend to have multiple authors. The form of our collaboration evolved from multiple iterations of documents sent around on e-mail, to phone conversations and face-to-face meetings where each researcher had a computer window open to the same document. How can we help contemporary college students employ their multi-tasking and tech-savvy skills while pursuing the more venerable scholarly goals of discussion and documentation? Based on my own experience of research collaboration with my peers, I offer one possible strategy: cooperative writing using Google Documents.
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