john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Getting students into communicating anthropology

Sat, 2013-01-05 21:01 -- John Hawks

From Kristina Killgrove, a syllabus for a graduate course in Presenting Anthropology:

A lot of the "reading" for the course, though, is going to be mandatory web-surfing, listening to podcasts, watching videos, and playing interactive games. Those links are currently within a private course wiki, but I'll think of a way to make that public by the end of the semester. And hopefully I'll convince most of the students to share their work, either here or on their own public space, throughout the spring.

In this context, I also want to link to the excellent work by Christopher Lynn and his students at the University of Alabama. By instituting a departmental blog network where graduate students and others in anthropology courses are encouraged to post, Alabama has radically reduced the entry costs the prevent graduate students from sharing their work. Plus, they called me a superhero!

I am so happy to see graduate education starting to shift toward interaction and broader communication.

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.