"Technology integration is the use of technology resources -- computers, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, digital cameras, social media platforms and networks, software applications, the Internet, etc. -- in daily classroom practices, and in the management of a school." I found this article helpful largely because it just reiterated that we need to set educational goals and then choose technology which is helpful, not the other way round.

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 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.

This guide to syllabus construction from Vanderbilt reiterates many points from our readings and is not specifically concerned with online teaching. However, one thing I had not yet seen in other readings that concerns us here is the importance of choosing the right tone for introducing the class to students. I am not sure that the warm and friendly approach recommended here is always the right one but it makes sense for us given the difficulty we will have in any case making personal connections with students in the online environment.

Thanks, Yu, I am just seeing this now. I think my draft syllabus was too formal and scary, but on the other hand I want to be super clear up front about expectations. I will need to tweak this,

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 is an extremely helpful chapter. I intend to use it carefully next week while designing a draft syllabus. I tend to leave spaces open in my traditional syllabus for readings that may be added as our conversation develops or subtracted as we come up against time constraints. My face to face students do not mind this, but I think I will need to be more disciplined about holding to a fixed syllabus in the online context. I am still thinking it all through.