Category Archives: social sciences

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Selling Myself Long

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Been attending sessions by Meri Aaron Walker about online methods to get paid for our expertise. Meri coaches teachers about those issues.

MAWSTOOLBOX.COM

There’s also a LearnHub “course”: Jumpstart Your Online Teaching Career.

Some notes, on my own thinking about monetization of expertise. Still draft-like, but RERO is my battle cry.

Some obstacles to my selling expertise:

  • My “oral personality.”
  • The position on open/free knowledge in academia and elsewhere.
  • My emphasis on friendship and personal rapport.
  • My abilities as an employee instead of a “boss.”
  • Difficulty in assessing the value of my expertise.
  • The fact that other people have the same expertise that I think I have.
  • High stakes (though this can be decreased, in some contexts).
  • My distaste for competition/competitiveness.
  • Difficulty at selling and advertising myself (despite my social capital).
  • Being a creative generalist instead of a specialist.

Despite all these obstacles, I have been thinking about selling my services online.

One reason is that I really do enjoy teaching. As I keep saying, teaching is my hobby (when I get paid, it’s to learn how to interact with other learners and to set up learning contexts).

In fact, I enjoy almost everything in teaching (the major exception being grading/evaluating). From holding office hours and lecturing to facilitating discussions and answering questions through email. Teaching, for me, is deeply satisfying and I think that learning situations which imply the role of a teacher still make a lot of sense. I also like more informal learning situations and I even try to make my courses more similar to informal teaching. But I still find specific value in a “teaching and learning” system.

Some people seem to assume that teaching a course is the same thing as “selling expertise.” My perspective on learning revolves to a large extent on the difference between teaching and “selling expertise.” One part is that I find a difference between selling a product or process and getting paid in a broader transaction which does involve exchange about knowledge but which isn’t restricted to that exchange. Another part is that I don’t see teachers as specialists imparting their wisdom to eager masses. I see knowledge as being constructed in diverse situations, including formal and informal learning. Expertise is often an obstacle in the kind of teaching I’m interested in!

Funnily enough, I don’t tend to think of expertise as something that is easily measurable or transmissible. Those who study expertise have ways to assess something which is related to “being an expert,” especially in the case of observable skills (many of those are about “playing,” actually: chess, baseball, piano…). My personal perspective on expertise tends to be broader, more fluid. Similar to experience, but with more of a conscious approach to learning.

There also seems to be a major difference between “breadth of expertise” and “topics you can teach.” You don’t necessarily need to be very efficient at some task to help someone learn to do it. In fact, in some cases, being proficient in a domain is an obstacle to teaching in that domain, since expertise is so ingrained as to be very difficult to retrieve consciously.

This is close to “do what I say, not what I do.” I even think that it can be quite effective to actually instruct people without direct experience of these instructions. Similar to consulting, actually. Some people easily disagree with this point and some people tease teachers about “doing vs. teaching.” But we teachers do have a number of ways to respond, some of them snarkier than others. And though I disagree with several parts of his attitude, I quite like this short monologue by Taylor Mali about What Teachers Make.

Another reason I might “sell my expertise” is that I genuinely enjoy sharing my expertise. I usually provide it for free, but I can possibly relate to the value argument. I don’t feel so tied to social systems based on market economy (socialist, capitalist, communist…) but I have to make do.

Another link to “selling expertise” is more disciplinary. As an ethnographer, I enjoy being a “cultural translator.” of sorts. And, in some cases, my expertise in some domains is more of a translation from specialized speech into laypeople’s terms. I’m actually not very efficient at translating utterances from one language to another. But my habit of navigating between different “worlds” makes it possible for me to bridge gaps, cross bridges, serve as mediator, explain something fairly “esoteric” to an outsider. Close to popularization.

So, I’ve been thinking about what can be paid in such contexts which give prominence to expertise. Tutoring, homework help, consulting, coaching, advice, recommendation, writing, communicating, producing content…

And, finally, I’ve been thinking about my domains of expertise. As a “Jack of All Trades,” I can list a lot of those. My level of expertise varies greatly between them and I’m clearly a “Master of None.” In fact, some of them are merely from personal experience or even anecdotal evidence. Some are skills I’ve been told I have. But I’d still feel comfortable helping others with all of them.

I’m funny that way.

Domains of  Expertise

French

  • Conversation
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Culture
  • Literature
  • Regional diversity
  • Chanson appreciation

Bamanan (Bambara)

  • Greetings
  • Conversation

Social sciences

  • Ethnographic disciplines
  • Ethnographic field research
  • Cultural anthropology
  • Linguistic anthropology
  • Symbolic anthropology
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Folkloristics

Semiotics

Language studies

  • Language description
  • Social dimensions of language
  • Language change
  • Field methods

Education

  • Critical thinking
  • Lifelong learning
  • Higher education
  • Graduate school
  • Graduate advising
  • Academia
  • Humanities
  • Social sciences
  • Engaging students
  • Getting students to talk
  • Online teaching
  • Online tools for teaching

Course Management Systems (Learning Management Systems)

  • Oncourse
  • Sakai
  • WebCT
  • Blackboard
  • Moodle

Social networks

  • Network ethnography
  • Network analysis
  • Influence management

Web platforms

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Ning
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Jaiku
  • YouTube
  • Flickr

Music

  • Cultural dimensions of music
  • Social dimensions of music
  • Musicking
  • Musical diversity
  • Musical exploration
  • Classical saxophone
  • Basic music theory
  • Musical acoustics
  • Globalisation
  • Business models for music
  • Sound analysis
  • Sound recording

Beer

  • Homebrewing
  • Brewing techniques
  • Recipe formulation
  • Finding ingredients
  • Appreciation
  • Craft beer culture
  • Brewing trends
  • Beer styles
  • Brewing software

Coffee

  • Homeroasting
  • Moka pot brewing
  • Espresso appreciation
  • Coffee fundamentals
  • Global coffee trade

Social media

Blogging

  • Diverse uses of blogging
  • Writing tricks
  • Workflow
  • Blogging platforms

Podcasts

  • Advantages of podcasts
  • Podcasts in teaching
  • Filming
  • Finding podcasts
  • Embedding content

Technology

  • Trends
  • Geek culture
  • Equipment
  • Beta testing
  • Troubleshooting Mac OS X

Online Life

Communities

  • Mailing-lists
  • Generating discussions
  • Entering communities
  • Building a sense of community
  • Diverse types of communities
  • Community dynamics
  • Online communities

Food

  • Enjoying food
  • Cooking
  • Baking
  • Vinaigrette
  • Pizza dough
  • Bread

Places

  • Montreal, Qc
  • Lausanne, VD
  • Bamako, ML
  • Bloomington, IN
  • Moncton, NB
  • Austin, TX
  • South Bend, IN
  • Fredericton, NB
  • Northampton, MA

Pedestrianism

  • Carfree living
  • Public transportation
  • Pedestrian-friendly places

Tools I Use

  • PDAs
  • iPod
  • iTunes
  • WordPress.com
  • Skype
  • Del.icio.us
  • Diigo
  • Blogger (Blogspot)
  • Mac OS X
  • Firefox
  • Flock
  • Internet Explorer
  • Safari
  • Gmail
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Maps
  • Zotero
  • Endnote
  • RefWorks
  • Zoho Show
  • Wikipedia
  • iPod touch
  • SMS
  • Outlining
  • PowerPoint
  • Slideshare
  • Praat
  • Audacity
  • Nero Express
  • Productivity software

Effective Web searches

Socialization

  • Social capital
  • Entering the field
  • Creating rapport
  • Event participation
  • Event hosting

Computer Use

  • Note-taking
  • Working with RSS feeds
  • Basic programing concepts
  • Data manipulations

Research Methods

  • Open-ended interviewing
  • Qualitative data analysis

Personal

  • Hedonism
  • Public speaking
  • GERD
  • Strabismus
  • Moving
  • Cultural awareness
Academia, Anthropology, culture, humanism, interdisciplinarity, media, science, social sciences

Fair-Minded Anthropocentrism

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As part of an anthropologist’s mission is the task, infrequently discussed, of determining what is “unique to humanity as a species.” Defining the human condition, we want to find that which is exclusively human. Not that we’re restrictive in our approaches. We are, in fact, very inclusive on the whole. We simply care about “what it means to be human.” Human beings are our main focus so we should be allowed to concentrate on them, using all those angles we like to use (through time and space, looking at diversity and universalism in culture, language, biology, etc.).

Yet, in this bio-obsessed neo-Darwinian world in which we live, someone’s focus on a single species is sometimes viewed as overly restrictive. In some milieus, “anthropocentrism” (like most other “-centrisms”) is perceived as a fault. In some contexts, especially in mainstream science media, “anthropomorphism” (like some other “-morphisms”) is conceived as a fallacy, a logical error.

As should be obvious, my perspective is somewhat different.

The broad reason I think about these things is a bit personal. I listen to a number of science podcasts and I encounter a number of news items about science. As an anthropologist, I’m particularly interested when science journalists or others are talking about humanity in a broad perspective. To be honest, I get slightly disappointed by the type of approach used in these contexts. In a way, those we hear on these issues tend to oversimplify the type of concept which warrants, IMHO, the most careful attention. Sure, there might be a disciplinary bias in my desire to get some concepts more carefully handled by “science media.” But there’s also a rational dimension to this desire. For instance, “culture” and “intelligence” are terms which are very significant when used with caution but become hindrances when oversimplified. A term like “species,” on the other hand, remains rather useful even in a simplified version. As a kind of hybrid case, “society” can be a fairly simple concept to grasp yet care is needed to understand what particular “social scientists” mean by it.

Clearly, there’s a type of “hard vs. soft” science issue, here. And though the disciplinary gap in science hardness is bridged by scholars themselves, science media outlets are often broadening this gap.

Became motivated to write this post after listening to the broadcast version of the latest episode of Radio-Canada’s science show. This specific episode included a panel on animal behavior, intelligence, and “culture.” This panel came at the end of a conference series on “animal societies” and related issues.

During the radio panel, one scholar dismissed the idea of using so restrictive a set of criteria to define intelligence that it would only apply to humans. The same scholar also dismissed criteria which would be so broad as to include a large number of species. In the end, this scholar’s goal is apparently to define intelligence in a quantitative way so as to encompass just enough species to be meaningful in the type of framework he has in mind.

“Fair enough,” I say. If people like him want to build a quantitative model of intelligence which includes some animal species and not others, there’s no harm in that. Science is model-building and model-testing, not “blind obedience to absolutes.” There wasn’t any discussion of why we would need such a model but, unfortunately, we can expect this kind of oversight in mainstream science media.

What I hope is also “fair enough” is that some anthropologists are attempting to build a meaningful (not exclusively quantitative) model of human intelligence which would, in effect, exclude non-human species. Not trying to say that human beings are “better” or more interesting. Just trying to show where humans and other species differ. Because many of us use do not restrict research to quantitative methods, it matters relatively little if the distance between humans and other species seems rather short. So much hinges on this distance that we can call it “significant.” It’s as much our right as the right to study phenomena which are in some ways similar to human intelligence. In fact, those who study non-human intelligence can help us in defining the outer limits of our field. Division of labor in academia is effective when people are open-minded.

During that same radio panel, another scholar dismissed the distinction between “culture” (“human culture”) and “proto-culture” (“culture among non-human species including proto-human hominids”). This scholar was using an (IMHO) awkward analogy having to do with the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. (Something to the effect that we didn’t need a new name of automobiles so we don’t need a new name for human culture.) The fact that the analogy isn’t very effective is slightly amusing. More importantly, the dismissive statement displays a “pushy” attitude which I don’t find conducive to interdisciplinary work. Oh, sure, scholars in any discipline might display this attitude on occasion. In fact, I probably said similar things in classroom contexts, in order to make a point about something I was teaching. What I find problematic has more to do with overrepresentation from simplistic approaches to culture in mainstream science media. I don’t necessarily want “equal representation” (that’s not the way science works) but I would be pleased if mainstream science media could occasionally have culture scholars talking about culture.

Ah, well…

Maybe it’s just a knee-jerk reaction on my part. That’s why it appears on my blog.

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