Marcus Banks, University of Oxford, November 1998

Note: This is a revised transcript of an informal workshop talk - given at the workshop 'New technology: Epistemology, Pedagogy and anthropology' organized by the National Network for Teaching and Learning Anthropology. Oxford Brookes University 6-7 November 1998.

It acts as a companion piece to an earlier workshop presentation - Interactive multimedia and anthropology: a skeptical view. The current document is copyright Marcus Banks 1998 and is not to be cited without permission.

Contents

• Introduction
• Teaching (1): undergraduate and postgraduate IT courses
• Research - The HADDON Catalogue
• Teaching (2): Photographic & video work in visual anthropology
• Conclusions
• Notes

1. Introduction

Because I'll be talking later about very basic photography, as well as more recent computer applications, I here take 'new technology' to mean anything beyond ink on paper, or chalk on slate. After this brief introduction the talk has three main parts concentrating on substantive projects - one is actually a research project rather than oriented towards teaching, but I have included it to provide some additional insight.

I should also say something about the Oxford system (our pedagogical model, as some educational theorists might call it). Although things are changing, degrees at undergraduate and graduate level are not made up of separately assessed modules [1] - there are no 'courses', nor credits, nor transcripts. Students generally follow a series of lectures, classes and one-to-one tutorials throughout the year, and then take a set of written three-hour examinations. [2]

Finally, ISCA (the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, where I teach) is essentially a graduate teaching and research institution. Undergraduates are not unimportant but not there are not that many compared to those at other universities. The undergraduate degrees (Archaeology and Anthropology, and Human Sciences) are administered by bodies separate from ISCA (though containing members of ISCA) and hence ISCA has limited input into organizing the teaching.

2. Teaching (1): undergraduate and postgraduate IT courses

Archaeology and Anthropology undergraduates follow a Web-based, compulsory two-session IT and study skills course at the start of their degree. [3] I prepare a set of Web documents for the two sessions, as well as a printed summary brochure. I also prepare a Web form asking for feedback and comment (all these materials can be accessed by clicking here). The postgraduate course is similar, though less formal, and I won't discuss it here. [4]

The undergraduate sessions have twin aims:

• to introduce a variety of computing skills through the use of anthropological resources on the Web
• to introduce a variety of anthropological skills concerning the study of knowledge, its structure and manipulation

The course is not without problems:

1. It is generally considered a good idea for students to be introduced to the University's IT and computing facilities early on, so they can develop their (transferable) skills throughout their three years. Unfortunately, they know very little anthropology at this point so their basis for acquiring 'discipline specific' skills is rather limited.

2. Although it's all very jazzy and hi-tech to teach students through the Web, it requires considerable preparation. The Web documents are very simple - mostly plain text - but the time consuming element is checking and updating all the embedded links, as well as revising the materials. There was an initial effort in setting the site up three years ago, but I had assumed in subsequent years I would be involved in no more than minor updates. This was wrong. The speed of technological change, and the fluidity of the evolving Web means that the pages are essentially rewritten every year (I'm a Luddite - I code by hand). Plus endless testing. Both my graduate and undergraduate courses probably involved me in a week of solid coding this year.

3. In order that each student can sit in front of a computer I have to run the classes in the University's central computing centre rather than in ISCA's own computer room (the undergraduate cohort is around 25-30, which I take in two consecutive groups divided by prior experience level; the ISCA computer room only has five computers, compared to fifteen plus in the computer centre's teaching rooms). This means I am reliant on the centre's equipment and its maintenance (which to be fair, is always very good) and cannot make on the spot corrections as I don't have immediate access to the servers I use.

4. A whole new teaching style is required. Over several years of teaching computing skills, and observing others doing so, I have picked up some basic lessons - never touch a student's keyboard, for example - but even so, it's easy to confuse the less experienced, especially when trying to correct unexpected problems. In many ways it would be easier to hand over the course to the computing centre's staff, who have both the correct training and experience. The problem is that the discipline-specific element of the training would be lost, or reduced simply to showing the students Web sites of anthropological interest.

5. Related to the above, the use of any technology beyond chalk on the blackboard, quickly imposes a rigidity on the structure of one's teaching. With a purely verbal presentation (backed up by scribbles on the blackboard) I can wander off the track, explore side roads, etc. in response to the interest shown by the students in the class or lecture. Because I normally lecture from very sketchy notes, each lecture is - at least potentially - fresh; certainly freshly-worded. However, once a set of slides has been loaded into a carousel, or a set of video clips laid down on tape, or a set of bullet-pointed statements printed onto OHP transparencies, one is locked to a greater or lesser degree into a linear and pre-determined path. In my experience, such problems are exacerbated when computer-based teaching is involved. The further away from purely verbal and real-time communication you go, the more inflexibility you experience. The amount of mistakes one makes in preparing materials is probably the same, but ability to correct those mistakes decreases.

6. IT knowledge and experience are currently rare in the discipline and are not normally seen as discipline specific. [6] As a consequence those who have it, or express an interest, run the risk of becoming locked in and pigeon-holed as 'the computer person' or 'the Internet person' (a point Christian Talbot referred to later in the workshop with reference to his own research). This can lead to a virtual job downgrading - colleagues and students come to assume it is your duty or at least pleasure to provide IT advice of all sorts, which can lead to you becoming seen as a technician, not an anthropologist.

3. Research - The HADDON Catalogue

I now want to consider a rather more successful integration of IT, although this time with reference to anthropological research rather than teaching. The HADDON Catalogue of early ethnographic film is the result of an ESRC-funded project to gather a lot of information on early ethnographic films and lengths of film footage housed in archives, museums, libraries and other institutions around the world. The information gathered (length of film, subject matter, date, etc.) provide a good example of structured data (which is often rare for fieldworking anthropologists) and so were appropriate for organization within a computerized database.

I decided early on that

• a computer database was only viable storage medium
• distribution had to be wide and access flexible
• that the database had to be able to store and present images as well as text
• that after the funded lifetime of the project I wanted to be able to update the catalogue easily
• that after the funded lifetime of the project I did not want to be involved in issuing those updates to all users (therefore ruling out CD-ROM delivery, for example)

Consequently, at the start of the project I and my assistant recruited a tester group. We did this by mailing a wide spectrum of email discussion lists (in anthropology, in librarianship and information science, and in film/media studies) calling for volunteers. There was a clear bias in the group, all essentially self-selected and self-identified as those who might be interested in project, or the data, or managing access to the data for others. The group was world-wide in its distribution (with a heavy bias towards North America) and we communicated with them almost exclusively by email. Most of the tester group remained with the project for its duration, and as a consequence the catalogue database design was truly iterative, in that same group of testers responded over and over. [7] Along the way, particularly before the HADDON Catalogue was ready to be tested, the tester group were set a series of small exercises - for example, to visit a particular Web site that we already knew to be similar to what we were planning, perform an assigned search, and then report back on ease of use.

Comparing this aspect of the project with my experiences of the undergraduate IT classes described above, there are a number of marked differences:

• the undergraduates are required to take the IT classes, view it as a chore, and few - initially at least - see the point
• the feedback they are required to provide always comes too late to be addressed for that particular cohort; moreover the small numbers render the feedback rather idiosyncratic & unrepresentative

With the HADDON Catalogue we ended up with a high-powered database, responding to calls coming through a freeware web server running on a dedicated desktop machine, so serving information to entire (Interneted) world. [8] The Web barely known when the project was in the planning stages (1992-'93); my first thought was to employ a gopher, but image files were difficult to manage and cataloguing was unwieldy. It was a slight leap of faith to go with web, but luckily the ESRC was confident and tolerant enough to allow final decisions about delivery to be delayed until later in the project.

The lessons I learned from the HADDON Project were to set an ideal goal (admittedly with a fallback, worst scenario option as a backstop), which means starting from a possible, if not satisfactory anticipated solution, leading towards a better solution once the fine detail becomes clear.

In conclusion then, the project was very satisfactory (in its execution if not content). We chose technology to match the aim, rather than - as with the IT classes - feeling forced to start with the technology and from there devise an aim and a method of achieving it.

The 'problems' with the project, at least as far as it relates to this presentation, are that

• it was a pure research project
• I had a great deal of time and resources to devote to it (a complete year of my own time, followed by a year with a full-time assistant, all backed by a substantial budget)
• the whole thing was devised from scratch and fitted no agenda other than an intellectual one I had devised for myself

4. Teaching (2): Photographic & video work in visual anthropology

My third and final example is taken from my experience of teaching an optional course in visual anthropology (no computers). The course is normally taken by graduate students [9] (though it is on offer to final-year undergraduates) and falls in the second term, by which time they have acquired some anthropological knowledge. As it is an option students are self-selected and motivated.

Teaching for the course consists of a mix of classes (given by myself) and a set of lectures (on photography, given by Elizabeth Edwards) and one-to-one tutorials (given by both of us). I limit the numbers participating in the class to ten (ideally eight, but a couple more always squeeze in) because of the practical elements involved. [10] Throughout the term I also arrange a concurrent 'open' film screening program (using tapes in ISCA's own video library - this involves some compromise over films shown, but saves time and costs in hiring films from the RAI's Film Library, the National Film and Television Archive, etc. [11]).

The classes are variable in content. Some revolve around a standard seminar format, where readings are assigned the previous week, presented in summary form by one or two students and then discussed. However, these often act as intellectual preparation for various practical exercises. Over the years these exercises have been as follows (though I never done all of them within a single year):

1. photo elicitation: students spend the week before class interviewing a subject or group of subjects about an issue of ethnographic interest represented in or by a group of photographs (examples have included talking with a bride-to-be about her forthcoming marriage using a commercial bridal magazine; discussing a grandmother's life history in relation to a disturbing set of wartime photographs taken by her husband; learning about the tourist experience through a set of holiday snapshots taken by the subject)

2. video long shots: following a previous classroom session on observational cinema, students work in pairs in the classroom to shoot a piece of semi-staged action lasting approximately five minutes, without turning the camera off; every student shoots, and then all the footage is screened and discussed; the point of the exercise is to understand moving images as a uniquely-structured medium, not as a series of still images (a 'shot' of this, followed by 'a shot' of that)

3. video editing and narrative: following a classroom discussion on non-observational cinema and narrative strategies generally, students spend the week shooting a short (five minute) video film, the restriction being that they are not allowed to edit the footage, and must therefore edit 'in camera' and present the work the following week; the point of the exercise is to consider shots in relation to one another

4. film form and content: two selected students view the same video-taped film in the preceding week (the film is also screened the day before for everyone); one student uses a selection of clips to demonstrate the film's structural form, while the other comments on the narrative structure and the ethnographic content

5. photographic essay: all the students are given two rolls of 35mm transparency film at the start of term and have the whole term to devise a short piece of ethnographic research that can be investigated by the camera (there is a session on photo essays at the start of term); the results are presented at a day-long session at the end of term or the start of next term, each student making their own decisions about the relationship between the images and (in this case, spoken) text (past examples have included an investigation into Oxford's homeless 'street people'; street performers and their audiences; suburban boundary markers such as hedges and fences; the view of an Oxford college from the perspective of the cleaners, cooks, etc.)

A key - and possibly counter-intuitive - factor in the success of this class seems to be that we have no money and few resources. Students use their own stills cameras, and we have only two video cameras available to us and no easily accessible editing equipment (which is the reason for the editing in camera exercise) . The resource limitations instead promote a stress on ideas, talk, interaction - all freely available. I very deliberately don't teach 'button-pushing skills', partly because I'm not trained to do so, and partly because I don't see that as the purpose of the class. In fact, if 35mm transparency disposable stills cameras existed I would insist on them being used for the photo essay. I would advocate stills camera exercises over video camera exercises any day of the week, largely on the basis of the fact that for most students the technology is far more familiar. The overall purpose of the class is to get the students to consider how they - and others - see, not how to make movies.

Of course, the class is not without problems. In recent years I have cut back on video work, partly because of the time, trouble and effort in ensuring the cameras are free, the batteries charged, etc. The 'virtual job downgrading' refered to above is also evident. Colleagues and students see you as 'the video person' - people constantly ask about technical issues ('how does the video recorder work?' 'could you copy this tape for me?'), but rarely if ever ask about intellectual issues ('how should I choose a suitable narrative form for this ethnographic video I'm planning to shoot when I'm in the field'), despite fact that I always write and largely teach about latter, not former.

Nonetheless, I feel this particular example demonstrates the best blend of intellectual and technical content. Regardless of my teaching skills or lack of, the students invariably enjoy the class, the results of their practical exercises can be very sophisticated, and their written exam answers at the end of the year show a considerable understanding of anthropology generally.

5. Conclusions

1. Time: all new teaching styles require time to learn and perfect, but integrating new technology demands a great deal (remember: computers save only tiny amounts of time in most day to day tasks - most time spent at a keyboard is spent thinking not processing)

2. Effort: in theory the fungibility of bits versus the stubbornness of atoms should save time that would otherwise be wasted in rekeying (i.e. bits can recycled); in practice, this rarely the case (HADDON's existence, however, presumably saves me endless time in repeating information over the phone)

3. Embeddedness: all technology is socially embedded - IT teaching, and my own efforts in teaching visual anthropology could seek to communicate this while also teaching technological skills (disciplinary and transferable skills)

4. Interactivity: is generally seen as good thing. Remember though that young children are as happy playing with the cardboard box as with the expensive toy that came in it - technology beyond chalk'n'talk in teaching does not have to be hi-tech to be stimulating

5. And a last word to Lévi-Strauss: we should to avoid the trap of thinking (or letting others think) that new technology is merely bien à manger (i.e. that the consumption of new technology is inherently good and brings its own inherent rewards) - it best serves our purposes as anthropologists when we realise it is also bien à penser.
   

Notes

[1] Several other speakers at the workshop raised the issue of problems of assessment, in relation to compulsory requirements to contribute to discussions on email discussion lists. See, for example, Sarah Porter's presentation 'Less technology, more learning'. [Back to text]

[2] More details of ISCA's graduate and undergraduate teaching can be found elsewhere on this site. Click here, and then use the browser back button to return to this article. [Back to text]

[3] This rather contradicts what I said in note [1] above. In fact the undergraduates take three compulsory 'practical' courses in the first year - my 'Computing and Study Skills' classes in the first term, a set of archaeological lab practicals in the second term, and in the third term some classes to prepare them for a (compulsory) archaeological training dig conducted over the summer vacation. The second and third term practicals require them to keep practical notebooks, which are submitted as part of their year-end examinations. The notebooks are not marked or graded, but the notebooks must be written up and submitted in order for the students to proceed to the second year of the degree. For the Computing and Study Skills classes, I ask the students to complete a short Web-based form, the results of which are emailed to me. I then assure the examiners that the 'practical' requirement has been fulfilled. [Back to text]

[4] The postgraduates get one classroom-based session, where we discuss study skills generally - this is designed to address any questions our largely non-British students may have with the style and structure of teaching at Oxford. This is then followed by one session in front of computers, where they get a compressed version of the two-session undergraduate course. [Back to text]

[5] Amongst many others, see for example Goody, J. R. The domestication of the savage mind Cambridge University Press (1977) or The logic of writing and the organization of society Cambridge University Press (1986). [Back to text]

[6] A major exception to this is the HEFCE-funded 'Experience-Rich Anthropology' project co-ordinated by Michael Fischer and David Zeitlyn at the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent. Here there is a determined effort to utilise IT within a specifically anthropological context, rather than vice versa. [Back to text]

[7] Design iteration with an unchanging tester group does have at least one methodological drawback, in that testers come to 'learn' the project and therefore 'learn' to provide what they perceive to be the desired response. [Back to text]

[8] For more details, follow this link. [Back to text]

[9] ISCA runs two twelve month M.Sc. degrees in Social Anthropology (SA) and in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography (EME - to be renamed from 1999). All the students take one optional course, selected from a list of four or five, which is examined by written three-hour paper at the end of the year along with the rest of the degree. The visual anthropology option is an examinable course for the EME students (and can be for Archaeology and Anthropology undergraduates), although others may follow the course if there is room. Beyond the three-hour exam there is no formal assessment, and any project work done in class or outside is purely to enhance the teaching. [Back to text]

[10] 'Eight!? What a luxury!' I am strongly aware of a point made by David Zeitlyn later in the workshop: that we would all love the chance to work intensively with eight students if we could. As David went on to point out, one of the strong incentives to introduce various forms of computer- or technology-mediated teaching is to deal with ever-increasing numbers of students in our classes and lectures. (See also my earlier comments on this). [Back to text]

[11] This is one instance where new technology (video recording and playback) is actually far simpler than its precursor (film exposure, processing and projection). Although there is a significant loss of image quality in domestic video recording and projection (we use VHS-PAL for reasons of cost and ease) I currently consider this a fair compromise. [Back to text]