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This essay is a landmark in cultural criticism. Among other things, it asks what happens to a work of art when it can be so perfectly reproduced that there are no qualitative differences between the "original" and the copies - as with, say, film stock. The questions of what happens in the virtual reproduction of a classroom are different. But I think there are interesting analogies to be made. I wonder in particular about the loss of what Benjamin calls "aura" - of the ritual dimensions that are present in any really great class. Can those be reproduced? If not, what is lost? And - the question that makes Benjamin more interesting than some of his contemporaries - what might be gained?

This 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

The theoretical difference between formative and summative assessment strategies is explored in this paper as well as the fact that on-line assessment is a new field of study with very little written about it.