How to become the consumer of your own Productivity?

This semester is over.

Take a moment to look back and ask if you participated fully.

Being a mere listener and reader in class is not enough.

Asking questions, challenging others' views (including the professor), and sharing insights and reflections as well as triumphs and failures without any loss of power, all are VITAL to learning.

You cannot learn simply from listening. Remember the expression in the syllabus?

What I hear, I forget.
What I hear and see, I remember a little.
What I hear, see, and ask questions about or discuss with someone else, I begin to understand.
What I hear, see, discuss and do, I acquire knowledge and skill.
What I teach to another, I master. Mel Silberman, Active Learning (1996)

This is based on the following Chinese philosophical expression:
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
by Xunzi (340-245 BC), one of the three greatest Confucian scholars of early years.

Colonialism, Memory and Massacres in India

Pavneet Singh shared about the massacres that took place in India/Pakistan in the late 1940s. He wanted to share this sad and brilliant ethnographic video of a elder Sikh man recalling the massacres from his past. Very emotional. What kind of courage does it take to share this still today and what kind of courage and compassion do ethnographers need to bring?

Sharing Your Final Reflections (AFTER our ebook is done)

Please submit your reflections after the SPEAK ebook is complete. (Originally posted for Fall 2009 deadline)

Discover if you popped this semester and what you learned from ANT1001. Before you begin, take a moment to review your own work from start to finish.

After reviewing your own work and reading our final version of SPEAK, reply to 2 (two) of the following questions (of your choice) as a comment below this blog post.

You must indicate what questions you are responding to in your comments. Keep it simple: cut and paste the question into your comment before you answer.

1. 1. Share how readings in the Kottak and/or the Conformity & Conflict reader created a shift in your view of the world? In other words, how did you come to see the world with lenses from another culture (even if momentarily) this semester? Please use etic terms to help explain what happened whenever possible.
2. 2. How might the ebook SPEAK challenge ethnocentric thinking about being a student or about being in college (You can address the collaborative process and/or the collective essays but not exclusively your own essay--THINK BIGGER PICTURE)?
3. 3. Clifford Geertz wrote that it "takes a certain kind of mind to sail out of sight from land in an outrigger canoe" ("Anti Anti-Relativism," 1984). In other words, letting go of what you already know and embracing the unknown is not a normal thing for us humans. What ethnocentric thinking did you learn to let go of in this course? What could you apply that process to that you have been resisting letting go of (i.e., prejudice, bias, ethnocentric thinking about this or that group of people as different)?
4. 4. You were acknowledged as a GREAT ONE every class. You have been a "participant-observer" (revisit Kottak pp. 48-50) all semester in this course experiment. What do you see from an etic point of view about "cultural adaptation" (see Kottak, 3-4), "agency" (see Kottak, 35-36), or the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (see Kottak, 73-74 or revisit the C&C essay)?
5. 5. You can make a counter-offer for one question if you want to say/write anything else.

There are posts from previous semesters recorded in the comments sections. You can read them if you like.

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

At 2:18": "What's important here is not technological capital but social capital. These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring....Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen ANYWHERE that people can take for granted that we are in this altogether."

Collaboration