Digital Anthropological Resources for Teaching
This project formed a collaboration between Columbia University and the London School of Economics. It involved the two Departments of Anthropology and drew on a wide range of pedagogical and technical expertise within both institutions. This included substantial expertise in the development and use of teaching technologies and digital libraries; in electronic publishing; in the development and evaluation of innovative teaching methodologies; and in anthropological approaches to human learning and cognition.
Executive Summary
Drawing on collective skills and building on existing infrastructures, the project focused heavily on faculty and staff development. The investigators sought to initiate a meaningful and sustainable transformation of undergraduate education and professional practice in the field of anthropology.
We worked from the premise that one of the key skills university students should acquire is how to think critically. Anthropology is particularly productive for achieving this because ethnography provides so many alternative perspectives on taken-for-granted concepts. Taking a relatively simple methodology, we have developed digital tools and resources which enhance anthropology teaching in a variety of ways – and which also have the potential to enhance teaching in other disciplines. Further we have successfully integrated research on learning technologies into the career tracks of five young anthropologists.
A further goal of the project was to develop a digital library infrastructure to store digital resources such that they could be used and recombined in flexible ways and made available for wider use. This resulted in the development of a prototype DART library at Columbia, offering the digital library research community a new model for building interfaces that offer seamless transition from secondary teaching narratives to primary digital resources, metadata, and research navigation within a digital library catalogue.
Within the LSE, through close collaboration with the Centre for Learning Technology (CLT) and the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC), the DART project has been part of a broader process of institutional change.
We have explored the pedagogical challenges posed by the relationship between knowledge production (in this case, via ethnographic research) and knowledge acquisition (in this case, via reading ethnographies). The intention with our tool development at the LSE has been to directly address this issue to enhance the "practical" sense that our students have (both in the UK and US) – in spite of not having done fieldwork – of how anthropological knowledge is produced. In some respects, our colleagues at Columbia were less "pedagogy-led" – that is, they were (by design) less ambitious in developing digital tools for classroom use, and more ambitious in developing online resources that could (at least in principle) be used independently of any particular classroom context. As a result, they have arguably developed tools which may be more financially viable in the long term and which have a larger potential audience.
Overall, the project has had clear benefits for the LSE and Columbia units most directly involved (especially the Departments of Anthropology and the Centre for Learning Technology at the LSE) in terms of providing training opportunities, helping us with capacity building, and encouraging departmental and institutional transformation. We have developed tools which are easily modified for use in other courses/disciplines, and we are continuing to disseminate the findings of our project both in the UK and overseas.
The project also enabled both academics and learning technologists at the LSE to collaborate closely with their counterparts at Columbia University, and to learn from the very significant experience of Columbia in (amongst other things) the field of electronic publishing. More generally, we anticipate that over time the project will benefit the wider anthropological community, as well as scholars and students in other disciplines, as the lessons of our new approaches are disseminated.
The question of whether or not such development work would be possible without substantial outside subsidy is, of course, difficult to assess based on the experience of our project alone. However our intention is that the learning processes which have taken place at the LSE as a result of the DART project – thanks to the existence of external funding from JISC – will translate into long-term institutional benefits. As a result, future development work in these areas should hopefully require a smaller funding base.