Shared and Open Anthropology

= a project that examines the creation of anthropological knowledge through the use of communication technologies.

URL = http://www.anthropology-projects.co.uk/

Description

Angels:

"This project brings together a variety of educational and research projects in anthropology that span over ten years. It aims to join the growing pool of teachers and learners that 'open' their work and create 're-usable' learning objects for all to explore and share online.

Over the past ten years I have been involved in developing learning, teaching and research materials in social anthropology. These are scattered all over the internet (and on my several laptops and other hardware). This site here attempts to bring them togehter for the first time as an archive and as an exploratory open educational project.

It is both a contemporary project that reflects my current research and personal concerns, and one that traces the 'archaeology' of the fleeting life of many projects that were once online but they stopped being available because either the servers that hold them died or the institutional servers that kept them deleted them to leave room to other files or were replaced by newer ideas. In bringing these files back to life, I hope to get glimpses of modes of thinking and producing anthropology that depended on the production of technologies of the time and the effects of such dependency, in particular, on the creative adaptations to these technologies.

I am making the archived materials available on an open platform that it is simple to use. Initially I plan to showcase the projects on a format that is most accessible to all, that of Adobe PDF files and HTML pages. The size of some files is large and I the e-learning section has also Authorware applications, so at the early stages of this project I had to store them in separate servers and to MyOtherDrive. This last one makes the 'shared' process challenging as it works through inviting people to it until it is all completed. Gradually, other formats will find their place amongst these and it will become easily shared. Because this is a new site, it is still at the stages of 'work in progress', but it is committed to work." (http://www.anthropology-projects.co.uk/)