I graduated last month from the University of North Texas online masters program in applied anthropology. Finally. My practicum consumed most of my life for the last year as I was also working full-time in a market research agency. No excuse really, but I’m back now and that’s what counts.

Since May 15, 2008 (the last year post) sort of in this order:

• Changed my blog name from Synthesis of Thought (but I’m not sure what I’ve changed it to yet)
• Got an internship at Intrepid Consultants, Inc – a Seattle based market research firm specializing in technology
• Moved to Seattle and started my internship/practicum in “Translating Virtual Ethnography from Academia into Practice”
• Got married – eloped in San Francisco on the second day of the AAA last November
• Gone back-and-forth on if I want to go by “Jen Kersey” or “Jen Cardew Kersey” or “Jen Cardew” professionally, but Kersey legally… it’s tough
• Continued to work on the SfAA Podcasts (the quality is SO much better this year, check them out www.sfaapodcasts.net)
• Wrote a 99 page write-up about my practicum
• Went to Hawaii
• Graduated!
• Went to EPIC2009 in Chicago

I’m still working on fixing links on this site and getting it organized. Once that’s set, I’m going to start a series about my practicum.  The work itself is confidential but the issues I encountered in translating an academic methodology into practice are ones that I can talk about.

More soon.

This is an article I wrote for Anthropology News in 2008:

As a third year student in the University of North Texas’ (UNT) online master’s program in applied anthropology, I see graduate school as my introduction to a community of practitioners. As with students in more traditional programs, I have expectations that through my graduate experience I will learn about anthropological theory and research, meet other anthropologists and begin contributing to the discipline by producing my own work. I also expect—and have participated in—an experience that is in some ways quite different from the traditional.

The UNT program was designed to take advantage of the opportunities an online educational forum provides, and to manage the challenges that online students can encounter. For example, students are required to take a qualitative methods course that requires a class project conducted for a real client, which gives them experience not only with conducting anthropological research, but also with long distance collaboration and presentations. A lack of face-to-face communication can be a real challenge in developing close relationships with people you have not yet met. For this reason, each cohort of online students begins the program with a face-to-face orientation on campus. Relationships established during this time can be continued through communication in online forums.

Opportunities outside of the online classroom can also strengthen students’ educational experiences. In addition to working as a research assistant in the department and traveling to professional conferences, I have also been encouraged to join a local practitioner organization. An essential part of becoming an anthropologist is learning about the culture of the discipline through dialog with others in the field, which can be experienced through these local groups or online through blogs, listservs and various digital anthropological networks.

Jennifer Cardew is a graduate student in the online anthropology master’s program at the University of North Texas. In 2007 she initiated a project to make the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting more accessible to students by providing selected sessions as free podcasts online at www.SfAApodcasts.net. She is currently researching the graduate experience of on-campus and online students with Christina Wasson.

“Copyright 2008 American Anthropological Association. Reprinted from Anthropology News, Vol 49, issue 6, with the permission of the American Anthropological Association.”

Happy New Year!

Planning for the 2009 round of SfAA Podcasts is now underway. We’re asking for your help in selecting the 20 sessions that will be recorded so that we can ensure a wide range of topics and interests are covered.

Suggested selection criteria include:

• Topic is “hot”
• Topic is of widespread interest to many people
• Famous speakers

The preliminary program can be found here. In listing sessions, it would be helpful if you could copy and paste the session number and the session name, e.g. “W-01 Lessons and Questions from Applied Settings” directly from the program into an email or Word doc. We would like to request your suggestions by Friday, January 15. Please send them to Jen Cardew at jencardew@gmail.com or post them here in the comments field.

Every year people come up to me at the conference and ask why their session wasn’t recorded or how we select sessions so now is your chance to speak up

My advisor, Christina Wasson, and I have been working on a research project for the last year and half that explores students’ experiences in the same graduate-level course, taught at the same time, by the same professor, in an on-campus format and an online format.  We’ve presented on this research to our department, at the AAA 2007, and the SfAA 2008.  Most recently we were invited by the University of North Texas to present as part of the Center for Distributed Learning’s Brown Bag Lecture series.

Tomorrow, May 15, we will do an online presentation at noon CST and you all are welcome to attend!  Here’s information on how to attend:

Please join us online in Live Classroom this upcoming Thursday, May 15, 2008, from noon – 1:00 p.m. CST for the monthly CDL Brown Bag. This session will be held online, so you can join us directly from your desk!

Christina Wasson, Associate Professor, and Jen Cardew, Graduate Student, in the Department of Anthropology, conducted an applied anthropological study comparing a graduate-level course taught by a single instructor in both an online and face-to-face format. They will discuss how their ethnographic and linguistic analysis of the data shed light onto students’ experiences in both formats, and led to recommendations for the design of virtual pedagogy and building community in online courses.

To log into Wimba Live Classroom at noon CST on Thursday, May 15:

a. Go to: http://untlive.horizonwimba.com/.

b. If this is your first time to use Live Classroom, click on the “run the Setup Wizard” link to the right and then click “Start.”

c. Click “Finished” when you are done.

d. Enter your name in the Participant login box. (There is no username or password.)

e. Click on “CDL Brown Bag Room.”

f. Click the “click here” link provided on the screen to enter the room.

My advisor, Christina Wasson, and I have been doing research comparing students’ experiences in the same graduate course for the last year and a half. The data that was collected came from an on-campus and online version of the same course, taught at the same time, and by the same professor.

Our panel was selected to be in the 2008 SfAA Podcasts. It’s a coincidence that I was on the panel- a group of people vote on the sessions. You can find the blog post containing the podcast, our PowerPoint, and our paper here.

It was an excellent panel and I really enjoyed it so I recommend you listen to it

There was a two part series at the SfAA meeting entitled “Working with Governmental Agencies.” The sessions did not get as much attention as I expected them too. After all, Montgomery McFate is one of the most talked about anthropologists in the world these days and she was on the first part of the panel.

The SfAA Podcast team received permission to record four speakers from this two part panel. McFate’s paper is not included. The others are interesting though. You can find them here.

The second and third podcasts from the 2008 SfAA Podcasts are now available at SfAApodcasts.net

The session chairs Phil Young and Carla Guerrón-Montero have put together a nice summary of the main points for this two part COPAA sponsored session.  All of the speakers in this session have a NAPA Bulletin in-press that will be a more throughout account of the SfAA papers.

The first of seventeen 2008 SfAA Podcasts is up over at SfAApodcasts.net.

“Presidential Plenary Session in Honor of John van Willigen: The Art and Science of Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century” including Satish Kedia, Susan Andreatta, Metta Baba, and Erve Chambers is the first one up. I’ve only listened to portions of it, but I’m enjoying it so far.

One of the best things about having a podcast team this year was that I’m looking forward to the podcasts being published as much as everyone else. Last year I recorded each session so I heard all of them but this year I only recorded five

(x-posted at www.SfAApodcasts.net)

I’ve posted the tentative schedule of the 2008 SfAA Podcasts. I say it’s tentative because timely publication of the blog posts and audio is dependent on the speakers to an extent- I need them to submit their bio info for the post as well as electronic versions of the papers and PowerPoints (this is optional, but I encourage it). It’s also tentative because I may publish podcasts early if I have extra time to work on the editing. I chose the order based on the ease of coordinating with speakers and the amount of editing involved with the audio files.

Here is the (very) tentative schedule of podcasts for the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society of Applied Anthropology (SfAA).

14 April 2008 Presidential Plenary Session in Honor of John van Willigen: The Art and Science of
Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century

17 April 2008 Preparing Applied Anthropologists for the 21st Century, Part I

21 April 2008 Preparing Applied Anthropologists for the 21st Century, Part II

24 April 2008 Working with Governmental Agencies, Part I

28 April 2008 Working with Governmental Agencies, Part II

5 May 2008 The Scholar-Practitioner in Organizational Settings

8 May 2008 For Love and Money: Employment Opportunities in Medical Anthropology (SMA)

12 May 2008 COPAA International Invited Speaker

15 May 2008 Embodied Danger: The Health Costs of War and Political Violence (SMA)

22 May 2008 Mobile Work, Mobile Lives: Cultural Accounts of Lived Experiences

26 May 2008 Practitioners Rise to the Challenge: A Discussion of Methods in Business
Ethnography

29 May 2008 The Flawed Economics of Resettlement and Its Impoverishing Effects: What Can Social Scientists Do?

2 June 2008 Visualizing Change: Emergent Technologies in Social Justice Inquiry and Action,
Part I: Digital Storytelling and PhotoVoice

5 June 2008 Visualizing Change: Emergent Technologies in Social Justice Inquiry and Action,
Part II: Participatory Mapping and Visual Arts

12 June 2008 SMA Plenary Session: The Political Construction of Global Infectious Disease
Crises

16 June 2008 Anthropology Engages Immigration Reform

19 June 2008 Anthropology of the Consumer

This is from the AAA eNews for April 2008:

“Tune in regularly to our bi-weekly podcast for news and updates on the AAA. To listen to the podcast, visit the AAA website and look under the “New Features” section on the homepage. To download the most recent podcast, please visit this site.

To subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, please visit this site“

While I’m sure they will not be quite as awesome as the SfAA podcasts, I can admit I am a bit biased towards the SfAA podcasts

I’ll be interested to see how ’successful’ the AAA’s podcasts are. One thing I noticed in their announcement was they didn’t provide an explanation about what a podcast is, etc. If I’m having trouble making these concepts accessible within the SfAA I can only imagine that the AAA will face similar struggles.

Regardless, I appreciate the AAA’s move into the 21st Century- I doubt they’ll do any sessions from the conference though…