Been recording a lot of things since I got my iRiver H120, last summer. Despite my conscious effort at making sure everything would work, I still made several mistakes and ended up losing some material. Luckily, nothing I lost was mission-critical. Also, since Concordia’s Creative Media Services have been recording my lectures, I was able to really notice the value of having a specific person on the task. Multitasking is fun but it’s often more efficient to monotask.
Seems like we all learn by doing:
Synthesis of Thought: Blog post up for another SfAA session and a lesson learned the hard way
Actually, I mostly wanted to leave a comment but this blog’s TypeKey system seems not to work.
Hi there, I was clicking through my blog’s (Synthesis of Thought not the SfAA Podcasts one) links to see if they were all working and found your post on Technorati. Thanks for pointing out that our TypeKey isn’t working, I tried to comment on another anthroblogs.org site yesterday and I didn’t work. My thought was that I didn’t know my password, but now I think it’s a problem on our end.
I’m beginning to agree with your thoughts on “monotasking” more and more everyday, I can attribute the majority of the bumps in the road with the SfAA podcasts to the fact that it is simply too big of a project for one person! Next year I hope to have one person doing one task each; I figure that will be a great way to ensure everything goes smoothly (or smoother) and to get more people involved.
Thanks for you comments and thoughts! Jen
One difficult things about this kind of an organization is that dedicated individuals want to do everything. It does make things harder. And there’s something to be said about teamwork being a learning experience… 😉
On the other hand, it seems that you were able to put it together quite nicely.
Well thanks for the compliment on the site!
It seems odd to me now, looking back how the welcome the project has received, that this was the case- but believe it or not, I put out “calls for help” and no one volunteered. Well, that’s not entirely true, one person volunteered to help with editing and one very dear friend helped record at the conference. I’m really, really thinking (and hoping!) that this won’t be the case next year. We’ll just have to wait and see 🙂
Not only am I naïve but I made the case too simple. It always is hard to get people actively involved, especially to volunteer. We’re all over-extended, we don’t know what’s involved, we don’t think highly of our sk1llz, we think the stakes are too high…
But, what’s not so difficult, is to get people excited about the possibilities for doing stuff together. I tend to rely a lot on informal projects. The kind of “hey, let’s try this!” mentality. If someone can notice that setting up the recording equipment and check it during the talk is very easy to do, they might end up doing it “for fun.”
Actually, at some point, I may want to “organise” informal conferences online. You know, like those practise runs for junior grads. If people get involved then, in a safe context, they might end up doing everything as a team, later on.
On the other hand, my perception might be skewed, but most anthros seem to work alone, most of the time. “Independence training,” anyone? 😉
I’m going to be working on the podcasting project a lot this summer; training guides, how to’s, FAQ, schedules, etc BUT most importantly- funding! Hopefully we can offer a monetary incentive to folks next year 🙂
So, it appears, in my opinion also, that anthropologists are all about independent work. And, I believe, that mentality is instilled in us in our classes. BUT the anthropologists that are blogging (and various other web type things) don’t seem to have that mentality. I strongly believe that anthropology web 2.0 is going to help to revolutionize (maybe that’s too bold?) anthropology as a discipline.
With that said- I LOVE the idea of an unconference!! I’ve been throwing that idea around in my head for awhile and I too was using students as the inspiration– it would be an excellent way for students to get practice, to network, to meet people, to learn, to work together.. Maybe we can chat more about this over the summer?
Ah, the summer! Time to take a step back and look at what we’ve accomplished…
I agree that the most recent generation of anthros is more community-friendly. What’s funny is that, although I really see myself in this generation, I tend to be a loner in my anthro work. But this will change. For the first time, I’ve had teamwork done in one of my classes. A learning experience, for sure. And now that my blogging activities are slowly merging with my ethnographic activities, I can see room for informal collaboration (which I prefer to set teams).
All of this is linked, obviously.
We’re entering a new phase in the history of anthropology. Post-PoMo. Decidedly fun.