I’m happy to announce our next guest blogger: Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University.

Mike was mentioned previously on SM in relation to his hypermedia project, Nekalimin.net. However, what caught our attention and led to him being invited on as a guest blogger was a news story about his innovative teaching practices. Specifically, a role-playing game he uses with his large intro-level courses:

Wesch has created a “World Simulation” project, where students are placed into 15 to 20 small groups, and have to survive in their environment by building their own culture, as different components are discussed in class.

“Everybody in the world is profoundly interconnected,” Wesch said. “Processes of globalization send products, ideas, media, money, and people everywhere throughout the world, connecting us all. This creates great promise, but also tremendous challenges. The ‘World Simulation’ allows me to challenge students to begin thinking about the world and our role within it.”

We look forward to learning more about his teaching methods and his use of multimedia!

Below is a brief bio/self-intro by Mike:

Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University
PhD 2006 – University of Virginia

Wesch’s primary research focuses on social and cultural change in Melanesia. Living in the Nekalimin region of New Guinea for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003, he examined the ways local cultural practices intersect with Western institutions such as formal education, Christianity, biomedicine, and statecraft – all of which were introduced just in the past 25 years. In particular, he explores how local beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft and witchcraft accusations are being transformed and negotiated in the new cultural environments created by their encompassment within a broader system of state governance.

Since Fall 2004, he has been an assistant professor at Kansas State University where he teaches large Introduction to Cultural Anthropology classes ranging from 200-400 students in each class. Hoping to subvert the “multiple choice culture” of large intro classes, Wesch created a “World Simulation” to engage students in learning about and addressing important issues of our globalizing world.

Wesch has been an avid reader of Savage Minds for several months now and has maintained an active interest in the possibilities of digital media to transform modes of academic discussion and collaboration while also actively pursuing ways to use digital media to extend and transform the way ethnographies are presented. Following his interests in digital media, Wesch created “Virtual Snow,” a growing on-line resource on the life and work of Edmund Snow Carpenter, a close friend of the late Marshal McLuhan, and an anthropologist who was instrumental in developing the foundational ideas of media ecology which inspire much of Wesch’s work with digital ethnography. Carpenter revealed many of his main ideas through a study of the ways different media were transforming Papua New Guinea in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wesch is now in the beginning stages of a multi-media project using Carpenter’s original footage along with his own to present the possibilities and limitations of applying Edmund Carpenter’s insights to the media environments of Papua New Guinea in the present day. He is returning to Papua New Guinea to pursue this research further next month.