Observations: The First Step to Field Work

Whether you are observing a group of people or analyzing an object, you should recognize that your unique perspective and prior assumptions will bias what you see. Somehow, you need to try to get beyond what you see initially and dig deeper into what is going on with your field site or with your object of study. Rituals that seem strange to you might be commonplace among the group you are studying; for example, anthropologist Horace Miner describes the strange rituals he observed in "Body Ritual among the Nacirema." Also keep in mind that what seems boring upon first glance might be extremely interesting upon further examination, as graduate student Samuel Scudder learned in "Look at Your Fish."

Pecha Kucha

Your third major assignment for the semester is a field work group project that will culminate in a pecha kucha presentation to the entire class. A pecha kucha presentation is a PowerPoint presentation of 20 slides that stay on screen for just 20 seconds each. The point is to limit yourself to about 6 minutes and 40 seconds of talking and to emphasize the visual over the textual in your slides. In other words, you do not read from your slides (that's boring), but rather you present images that enhance and illustrate what you have to say.

I searched for the meaning of the word pecha kucha and learned that it comes from a Japanese term meaning chatter. The format was created by a couple of Tokyo-based architects: Apparently architects do a lot of presenting and tend to talk too long, so they wanted a presentation format that would force speakers to be more concise and give everyone a chance to speak and share their work. To learn more about pecha kucha, visit http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ where you can also view pecha kucha presentations. If you're wondering how to pronounce pecha kucha, watch the short video.

A Self-fulfilling Hoax

Hungry Beast is a weekly topical news program in Australia, which came to my attention recently through a YouTube video posting of one its program segments.

The video presents the hoax Hungry Beast perpetrated on the Australian media: A study conducted by The Levitt Institute proclaiming the gullibility of TV viewers in Australia. Neither the study nor the institute are real, but some media outlets didn't notice that because they didn't read critically and check their sources.

Read critically and check your sources.

Was the Moon Landing a Hoax?

Americans love a conspiracy. A government agency doing its job is just plain boring, even if it is doing something extraordinary, like sending a man to the moon. But maybe sending a man to the moon is a little too extraordinary. How do we know for sure it really happened? What if it were all a hoax?

Now that's something to get excited about!

Conspiracy theorists can seem pretty convincing if you don't have all the facts--but what are the facts? It sounds crazy to believe the moon landing was a hoax--or does it? How do you evaluate online sources that seem wildly opposed to one another? Check out the following sources and do an evaluation of your own:

The Moon Landing Was Faked!
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
http://www.moonmovie.com/moonmovie/default.asp
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm

The Moon Landing Was NOT Faked!
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/photogalleries/apollo-moon-landing-hoax-pictures/index.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23Feb_2.htm

Be Sure You Actually Say Something in Your Blog Posts

Our conference discussions, our class activities, your readings on your chosen research topic, and the assigned readings in your textbook should give you plenty to write about in your blog posts. You don't have to cover it all, but you should focus on something that is specific and significant to you, and you should have something substantial to say about that something.

Citing Online Sources: It's Tricky

The first week of the semester, one of your class activities was to work in small groups to create a bibliography of the print sources I brought into the classroom: books, magazines, and academic journals. This week you're going to create a bibliography of online sources, which is much trickier: e-journals, academic articles from databases, online books, online magazines, and websites. I didn't cover all the possibilities with this activity, not by a long-shot, but at least you'll start to get a feel for how many different kinds of online sources are out there.

The library at Valencia Community College has what I think is a very helpful website for visually understanding all the parts of an online citation. I happened upon it through a Google search because--guess what--online citations are confusing for everybody, and I wasn't sure how to cite a YouTube video. This website provides simple, clear explanations that you can even download as a .pdf. I like how color and call-outs are used to show exactly what goes where.