Search Results for: mooc

On the Porous Boundaries of Computer Science

The term “big data” brings up the specter of a new positivism,  as another one in the series of many ideological tropes that have sought to supplant the qualitative and descriptive sciences with numbers and statistics. But what do scientists think of big data? Last year, in a widely circulated blog post titled “The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble,” physicist Jake VanderPlas made the argument that the real reason big data is dangerous is because it moves scientists from the academy to corporations. (read more...)

Welcome to the New Team for 2014!

The CASTAC Blog is pleased to announce our new team for 2014. Joining our Web Producer Jordan Kraemer is our new Associate Web Producer Angela Kristin VandenBroek! Angela brings to the position significant experience in web design and development, and was the recipient of an EduStyle Award. We are excited to have her on board! I will be continuing on as Editor and will oversee the Blog’s content. At the same time, we are very pleased to announce our new team of Associate Editors (AEs) who will be responsible for bringing exciting new content to the Blog! Below please find their names and contact information listed for your perusal. Please feel free to contact them if you have ideas for blog posts in their areas! (read more...)

Happy Birthday to The CASTAC Blog! We Need YOU!

Well, this week marks The CASTAC’s Blog’s first birthday, and I think cake is in order! I’m ordering chocolate of course! It has been a wonderful and exciting year as we have kicked off a new blog that is dedicated to exchanging ideas about science and technology as social phenomena. We thank everyone who has posted about their research or their opinions on a staggeringly impressive range of topics, from drones to steampunk! I look forward to all the wonderful posts and commentary that we’ll see in the coming year! The CASTAC Blog is now working through some growing pains! We are pleased to announce that it is time to expand our team! We are seeking 6-7 Associate Editors and 1 Associate Web Producer to ensure the continuously high quality of content that you’ve come to expect from The CASTAC Blog. The job duties and descriptions are as follows: Associate (read more...)

EPIC 2013 Preview

The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference is being held 15-18 September in London. EPIC is an important international conference for sharing insight on current and future practices of ethnography in industry. Next month’s conference promises to be very exciting and productive. The program boasts a wide variety of topics, including a number of papers that will quite likely be of interest to CASTAC and STS practitioners and scholars. Many of the themes in the program, such as big data, MOOCs, and energy have been hot topics for The CASTAC Blog in recent months. IS DATA THE NEW OIL? Several papers at EPIC will be discussing “Big Data,” which is a topic that is heating up and is germane for anthropological theory and practice. Big Data, which has been discussed in a prior post by David Hakken, has been designated as a new asset class akin to oil and has consequently (read more...)

Rethinking Scale in Social Media: An Ethnographic Perspective

Scale has been a recent buzzword in discussions of social and digital media, as our editor Patricia G. Lange traced out in her January retrospective post. From MOOCs to Big Data, emerging communication technologies are making possible (and visible) large-scale interactions that have been attracting attention from many quarters, including anthropology. I want to revisit this conversation by discussing further what scale means in the context of networked media, especially social and mobile technologies. Is scale the new global? On the cusp of the new millennium in the late 1990s, there was a lot of buzz over the global reach of the Internet, linked to broader interest in how new communication technologies were entwined with globalizing processes. The World Wide Web itself was envisioned as spanning the globe, while globalism infected the popular imagination. Nearly twenty years on, the Internet has yet to bring about global equality or democracy, though (read more...)

Looking Ahead to 2013: A Question of Scale

The CASTAC community joined together in 2012 to launch this blog and begin dialogue on contemporary issues and research approaches. Even though the blog is just getting off the ground, certain powerful themes are already emerging across different projects and areas of study. Key themes for the coming year include dealing with large data sets, connecting individual choices to larger economic forces, and translating the meaning of actions from different realms of experience. Perhaps the most visible trend on our minds right now involves dealing with scale. How can anthropologists, ethnographers, and other STS scholars address large data sets and approaches in research and pedagogy, while also retaining an appropriate relationship to the theories and methods that have made our disciplines strong? As we look ahead to 2013, it would seem that a big question for the CASTAC community involves finding creative and ethical ways to deal with phenomena that (read more...)