UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY - DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY ARCHAEOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
PERFECTURE OF THESSALY
International Conference:
Folk/Traditional/Popular Culture and the Internet
Volos, 6-7 November 2013
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Abstracts
- Penelope Papailias (Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας)
The Journey to the Moon....and Other Adventures in Teaching 2.0
In this presentation, I reflect on my experience teaching two courses in digital ethnography in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly: specifically, the «Ethnography of Virtual Worlds» in the spring semester 2011-12 and «Digital Ethnography: Studying Life in Virtual Worlds and Social Networks» in the spring semester 2012-13. The aim of these courses was two-fold: on the one hand, to analyze some of the social transformations taking place in the digital age (i.e., the internet as an ethnographic «field») and, on the other, experimentation with the tools of Web 2.0 in teaching, research and presentation/ communication of research findings. In this presentation I will focus on the second aspect, and explore issues such as the virtualization of the classroom (through asychronous modes of communication), the experience of collective fieldwork in a virtual context, the use of microblogging for fieldnotes, collective research documentation and authorship with wikis, etc. For me and for the students, these classes were stimulating, fun and, in the final analysis, incredibly productive as a conduit to social analysis and an experiment in pedagogy, communication and expression. This presentation will serve as an introduction to presentations by the students themselves, who will speak about their experience in the class and their research projects.
