2014 Blogging Archaeology eBook

students. Particularly problematic is that, in blogging, the author takes awhile to develop his or her voice, and the blog takes a while to developan audience, especially if the author is not synchronously involved onother social media platforms. The Audio Challenge week held the mostsurprises for me. I am not a regular radio listener, but the short segmentsthe students created were interesting and well produced, leading me tobelieve that audio programming in anthropology, such as a podcast orregular feature on the radio, holds great potential.As anthropology is not generally taught in grade school, it has thereputation of being solely an ivory tower subject, when that couldn’t befurther from the truth. I am not sure if the course convinced students whowere not already using social media of the utility of it. A few studentscontinue to blog and to do public anthropology on an occasional basis,nearly a year after the end of the course, but the most engagedstudents were those already interested in public outreach. As thesestudents earn their M.A. degrees and look for jobs or PhD programs, it willbe interesting to see whether they use the projects they created or thenew skills they developed in this course to aid in their applications.Regardless, presenting anthropology is an important concept forgraduate students to learn, particularly since there are myriad ways ofcommunicating anthropological topics and being a publicanthropologist. Bringing anthropological concepts to the public isincreasingly important in an age of slashed funding for social sciences,and my hope is that all graduate students and practicinganthropologists find ways to communicate their research and interests toa general audience.Blogging Archaeology Page 43