pandemic | MUSEUM FATIGUE

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

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

This School’s COVID-19 Video Has Filled Me With Dread

July 22, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

After watching this video I feel even worse about the upcoming semester. I am overcome with dread. I’m sure this school designed this video to make their students feel confident about the fall, but it’s a joke. It could have been made by The Onion or SNL. What is left behind in the quest to deal technically with the problem of a poorly managed pandemic is pretty much everything that makes teaching and learning in person valuable at all. No […]

Categories: Higher Education, Mythologies, pandemic, Uncategorized • Tags: COVID-19, pandemic

Concept for a Pandemic Graduation, May 2020

May 16, 2020 by Museum Fatigue

I’ve been talking to some of the seniors at my university and they are understandably sad that the arrival of the novel Coronavirus has destroyed their plans for the graduation ceremony they had imagined. After years of study and work, they naturally want to mark their accomplishment, and the transition to the next stage of their lives, with family and friends at a public ritual of recognition hosted by the institution that has shaped their lives. But how does one have […]

Categories: COVID Spring • Tags: class of 2020, graduation, Hamline University, pandemic