iPod Faculty

Faculty currently using iPods in the classroom:

Mark Auslander, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African Art and Aesthetics and Lecturer in African & Afro-American Studies, Anthropology, and Fine Arts (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1997)

On emerging technologies in the classroom:

"Whenever possible, I like to see students develop mastery in some area, imaginatively bringing their critical engagement with readings to bear on certain concrete problems and data in a way nobody else has ever done. So I'm always attracted by digital technologies allowing widespread dissemination of student work, especially if this can be done in a reflective, deliberative fashion that emerges out of class discussions about how we want to present our shared intellectual journey to wider audiences and interlocutors."

On PodCasting:

"The potential beauty of podcasting is that it allows students to develop audio content that can be detached from computers and institutional indoor spaces, (information commons, library computer clusters, dorm rooms), and tried out by users on their ipods or other portable digital playback devices."

On teaching at Brandeis:

"One of the luxuries of teaching at a place like Brandeis, I should note, is students' flexibility and enthusiasm in these kinds of pedagogical experiments."

David Jacobson, Professor of Anthropology, Ph.D. University of Rochester, 1967

The cultural shaping of new technologies and their impact on social behavior are important topics, and, to pursue those issues, I developed and began to teach two courses (ANTH 138a, Social Relations in Cyberspace, and ANTH 174b, Virtual Communities) in which students go online to study the ways in which people use email, IM, listservs, and other forms of computer-mediated communication. Typically, they collaborate in data-gathering which they share, using WebCT. All of this work is facilitated by the support of the people at LTS. In addition, I have begun to incorporate new technologies, especially iPods, iTalk, and digital cameras, in other courses (ANTH 158a, Urban Anthropology), as instruments for collecting, analyzing, and representing data, again using WebCT to distribute the results of student research projects. These efforts have been fruitful and enjoyable for students and for me.