Connect@NMC: Michael Wesch and Digital Ethnography

We have lined up Dr Michael Wesch of Kansas State University for a Connect@NMC session scheduled for April 23, 2009 at 12:45PM Pacific Time (check your local time). 

You may be familiar with Michael's wildly popular YouTube videos, but he will join us along with the students who are in his current research class to share their latest bits of social media research and to share their approach for creating these projects. The working title for this year's Digital Ethnography project is “The Fight for Significance in the Age of the Microcelebrity: Anonymity, Anonymous, Smart Mobs, Mad Mobs, Bot Mobs and the Great American Poets” (learn more...)

Session Summary

We had 153 people check in sometime during the session with a peak of 115.  The recording of this session is now available
http://nmc.na3.acrobat.com/p44215300/

Mike has published a recap of the session with many of the mentioned links in a blog post Our Class on How We Run Our Class - this not only reviews the current project, but gives almost the recipe for the way the class is run

First off, we organize it as a research group, not a class. So, instead of a syllabus we have a research schedule. The research schedule is editable at any time by anybody involved in the project.

All edits are (almost) instantly reported at our Netvibes research hub via RSS. The hub also includes a Yahoo Pipe combining the feeds from each of the 15 students’ blogs. There is a second Yahoo Pipe that combines all the comment feeds from those blogs as well.

The course is entirely purpose-driven, so it does not have much of the traditional structure typically provided by a syllabus, but it is (loosely) structured.

The basic format is this:

• First 3 weeks: exploration stage
• Second 3 weeks: guided introduction to the field
• Next 4 weeks: self-guided research
• Due at 11th week: Research paper (followed by collaboration exercises)
• Final (16th week): Share with world (video, website, etc.)

Digital Ethnography Students

Mike's student's shared a clas photo taken 15 minutes before the session started:

and shared a set of discussion notes and links at
http://ksudigg.wetpaint.com/page/NMC+Discussion

About Michael Wesch

Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.  His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over 15 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

To learn more about Wesch's work, visit the Digital Ethnography Blog, the class resources on netvibes. or review the work this group did last year on the Ethnography of YouTube as he shared with the Library of Congress this past August:

Like other Connect@NMC sessions, this is a free online event.