GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT THIS SITE

and

Copyright Notice

First, a disclaimer

All pages that are part of my site are my own responsibility. Nothing included in the site should be construed as representing the views of the Programs in Anthropology, the Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, or Columbia University.

Overview

I remain somewhat skeptical about the transformative power of the web as a medium for education and social science.  I am less skeptical than I was when I started about the usefulness of the medium to provide material to students and colleagues about my work that cannot easily be distributed in other ways.  What remains an open question for me is the actual intellectual power of the parts of this site that are not just a compilation of sources otherwise available in print but were actually written and, above all, formatted, for the site.  Writing for the Web presents complex challenges for authorship and what is presented here must be considered as experimental. [ftn1]

It is well-known by now that the Web allows for a form of non-linear presentation with which we have little experience.  It also allows for continual updating of one's own work. This all but may, but need not, erase the traces of one's intellectual progression. [ftn2] Many have made extreme claims about the advantages and dangers of non-linearity and relative impermanence.  But we still do not have enough instances of publications designed for use within a discipline rather than as showcase for possibilities to decide not so much whether to continue publishing on the Web as how exactly to do so.  My main goal here is to provide something for professional anthropologists (academics and students) as well as any other persons interested in how the discipline approaches issues of general concern (e.g. the delivery of services in schools, hospitals, etc.).  

At this stage, I have mostly posted previously published work and current work in the discursive format used to present work in anthropology. I have also posted lecture notes for all my courses along with supplementary material.  This material (particular in the pages addressing the conversation about "culture", as well as the pages on anthropology of education) is developing into a kind of text book presenting both some of the most significant works in cultural theory and education and also my own take on the fundamental issues.  

Finally, and arguably most interesting, I am making available a major work in progress as an experiment in publishing research.   In the usual formats, publishing research on technical issues must be separated from making this same research available to a wider audience, or from using it  to teach the underlying concepts.  I am trying here to do all three within one overall site.   This work (building on earlier work by Mary Cotter) examines carefully interaction during a hospital labor ("How many doctors...?").

I would sincerely appreciate any comments about these pages, and suggestions about how to make them more useful.

 

Copyright issues

Some of the work included in the site is clearly marked as having been published in the traditional forms.  This material is a matter of public record and can be quoted in the usual manner (that is to the published version) and with the usual restrictions on copying.

I consider everything else to be "work in progress."  It is all available for scholarly use according to the usual rules for such use. Specifically, you may not quote from this material in print without asking for my permission.  You may however link your own pages to any of my pages, understanding that the content of all the pages is likely to change.  

In any event, I, obviously, preserve the copyright to all non-published material.

 

Acknowledgements

 

Footnote 1
For thoughtful papers about the possible contribution of this technology for education investigate look at the papers and documents of the Institute for Learning Technologies.

Footnote 2
It is the case that, in a large site, individual pages may have widely different dates of creation or updating and thus may represent quite different moment in one's development. In my case, the oldest pages date from as early as 1996. I intend to be quite systematic in indicating the dates of last updates which should be used when quoting from the site.