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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.

This short blog by an anthropology professor resonated very much with my own state of mind out this. The importance of doing assessment right, alongside the numbing effects of assessment as a hugely time consuming new set of bureaucratic requirements. In the end, the author provides some really helpful reminders about how this works in practice. It helped me to realize that assessment itself is a topic we need to continually assess, for our own educational goals.

My department spent a lot of time this year thinking about assessment in a process driven by accreditation. We came up with some fairly broad learning outcomes and not much in the way of detailed assessment. So I am very impressed by this webpage from the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology in Ohio. Their departmental webpage includes very detailed assessment information that may be useful for everyone to keep in mind, but probably does not do much to attract students. In our own discussions we sometimes ran into confusion between providing information for current students about what we would be assessing and departmental advertizing-- two very different things.

This article talks specifically about the applications of the ADDIE model and the Dick & Carey Model for teaching about culture and intercultural communication. While the authors talk about an English as a Second Language course in Vietnam, their instructional design can be used for any course looks at cultural norms, including languages, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and human health. Also, while their plans are not specific to an online course, their ideas transfer to an online or hybrid course quite easily. I was really pleased to find this article, especially as it supports my own ideas about using a hybrid of these two models to teach about intercultural communication. It makes concrete the theoretical assignments and organizational tips that I had in mind. I know I will come back to it often.

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year.