MUSEUM FATIGUE

Why Don’t Minnesotans Have a Word For This Thing That Gives Us So Much Joy?

March 6, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Every year as late winter begins the transition to early spring, Minnesotans enjoy a morning landscape punctuated by a unique ice formation. The ice I’m referring to exists as a function of the melting winter snow, when daytime temperatures rise well above freezing creating puddles on the sidewalks, and the partial refreeze as evening temperatures dip for a good portion of the evening. The result are early morning encounters with cold wet puddles capped by thin sheets of ice. When […]

Categories: Everyday Things, Video clips • Tags: chice, Minnesota, winter

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Breakout Discussion Groups in Minecraft

March 6, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

For the past few weeks I have been thinking about ways to standardize group discussions in Mineclass, yet not lose the spatial/creative component that is so special about working in Minecraft. When the semester first started I created breakout groups in Zoom audio and just asked students run off to some random place in-world to cooperatively construct a space and have their discussions. An unexpected side effect of that decision, however, has been that as groups have continued to use […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: breakout groups, class discussion, mineclass, Minecraft

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Student Feedback on Digital Anthropology Class in Three Modalities: Zoom, Minecraft and (Pandemic) In-person

March 2, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Since the beginning of the semester, the Digital Anthropology class has examined the material natures of the digital, the deep time of digital devices, and the way that human and non-humans interact in larger assemblages. We have looked at the different propositions for what digital anthropology might be and how we might consider the virtual and actual as both real. At the same time, since the beginning of the semester our class has been meeting virtually on Zoom and in […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Education • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft, Zoom

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A Different Sense of Space in Mineclass

February 24, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

In previous posts about our Mineclass I’ve commented on the many moments where students feel comfortable building and intervening in the our virtual world in ways that are very different from the way they act in the physical world. From the very first days of class unknown students took it upon themselves to build things, add things and make changes in-world without comment or permission. Students built a podium, added a blackboard and planted flowers in our cave classroom. On […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology • Tags: campus space, Michel de Certeau, mineclass, Minecraft, presence

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Getting a Change of Scenery in Mineclass

February 16, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Today we started class in our regular cave classroom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I first built the space I modeled it on the attributes of a physical classroom. It has a “front” with a podium and a blackboard and virtual books. At the time I guess I designed it thinking that those things would signal “classroom.” Using it for these first weeks, it has already come to feel like a classroom—albeit a much more cute and colorful one than those in […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft

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Unconventional Zoom Class Photo

February 16, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: photographic conventions, Zoom

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My Digital Birthday Cake(s)

February 12, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

This year my birthday happened to land on the same day as our digital anthropology class. This turned out to be a great opportunity to make a point related to some things we have been discussing in class concerning the nature of digital objects: How are the virtual objects different than actual physical objects but still real? Well at some point when I wasn’t paying attention a person or persons in the class festooned the area around where I stand […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft

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Week Two: Object, Place, Making, Beauty

February 6, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

This week, digital anthropology started with a few kinks to work out. Most importantly I needed to figure out how to free my class from various forms of entrapment and entombment in The Nether, and then get us all back to our cave classroom in The Overworld. On Tuesday I ran the first part of class on Zoom so that we could get through the discussion and content that I had planned in the syllabus. At the end of class, […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft

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So, I Buried My Anthropology Class Alive…

January 30, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

After my previous post about teaching a class in Minecraft, I had hoped that right now I would be excitedly tapping-out a follow-up post filled with cool descriptions and anecdotes of success. Sadly, as things turned out, on the second day of the semester I frustratingly entombed my entire class together in the fiery rocks of The Nether. Some backstory. When we started our second class it was clear that the Minecraft experiment had generated some heat. Students seemed engaged […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft, teaching

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Teaching a College Class in Minecraft?

January 27, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

Humans.Machines.Pandemic.Presence. Meeting online presents a challenge because we are synchronized in time, but not in place. While it might seem we are “together apart” like the advertisements proclaim, we aren’t together at all. Platforms like Zoom or Google Meets offer a stream of visual and audio information about what is going on in different places—making our synchronous exchanges more communicative, but the platform isn’t really anywhere. It just transfers incomplete flows of information about us across digital space that are […]

Categories: Digital Anthropology, Teaching • Tags: mineclass, Minecraft, pandemic, presence, virtual life

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