MUSEUM FATIGUE

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

Require Presence in Virtual Classes, but Keep Cameras Optional

January 15, 2021 by Museum Fatigue

The question of presence in online classrooms is so interesting. Do we require students to have cameras on or off? How can one be virtually present online, when all they need to do in an actual classroom is show up and breathe—precisely what we want to avoid during a pandemic! Requiring cameras turned on in a virtual environment is an easy equivalent to just sitting in class, and does make students accountable for at least the minimal engagement of showing […]

Categories: Teaching • Tags: cameras, online teaching, surveillance

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Seeing Ghosts of the Anthropocene

October 20, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

This week in our First Year Seminar, The Planet We Have Made, we have been making our way through the incredible book, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Among the topics we have discussed are how to see the ghosts of the world in which we live—the connections between the dead historical pasts and the living world in which we find ourselves. How is it possible to see the ancestors—the beings and animals and relationships—that move across the landscapes […]

Categories: Anthropocene, Haunting • Tags: ghosts

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College Was Already Remote Education

October 17, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve been trying to tack down this education-related pandemic frustration that has been bugging me. This fall colleges have been trying to figure out how to approximate a normal educational experience for students (and normal tuition-dollar revenue) despite the drastic difference of online/remote learning or limited physically-displaced and masked in-person engagements. College management and educators—sometimes working together or other times working at cross-purposes—both agree they want education to continue and universities to survive the unknowns of a pandemic economy. So […]

Categories: Debt, Higher Education, Uncategorized • Tags: Debt, higher education, pandemic, student debt, student loans

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