coursework

Welcome to the Post-Residency

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"Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orc...

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On August 1 we begin the post-residency and final portion of our field school. This portion will end August 15. Based on the presentations you gave in Beijing, a draft of the final assignment is due to be posted on the course blog on August 7. Unless we are notified we will assume that it will be posted on or before that date. We will have comments back to you on August 10. This post should be finalized on or before August 15.

For this portion of the field school, participants, working in teams, will be responsible for (at minimum):

* 2 postings for the course blog – one associated with each of the two fieldwork sites; categorize these as “field report” so that they are also posted to Vine Online!

To review, each post will include:

* interpretive text (formatted according to VineOnline standards; 750-1000wds)

* image gallery (7-10) AND/OR edited video (>5min) depicting one of the following and or a combination of the two:

– work/context of an artist interviewed (INDIVIDUAL FOCUS)
– work/context for an discrete aspect of cultural/artistic production (HERITAGE FOCUS)
– work/context for a geographic area/setting (PLACE FOCUS)

Full guidelines can be found here.

In support of your posts to the course blog, each team will create postings on the social media sites connected to ChinaVine (English & Chinese language) that points to their course blog content. This can include a tweet using the field school hashtag (#CVFS), a Facebook post on ChinaVine wall, etc.

Each team should create drafts of their planned posts on the field school website for comments by Doug, John, and other field school participants by August 7. These comments can be transmitted via email, or embedded in the draft itself (using brackets or some other easily identifiable format). It will be important to have some idea of where the video/photo editing process and text creation stands at that time so that teams can move ahead with finalizing their posts.

All final posts should be completed by August 15. Doug and John should be notified of how the links to the posts occurred through social media.

During these last two weeks of the field school you should feel free to consult with us at any time regarding the final assignment and/or any aspect of the field school.

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dispersal

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We’ve finished the fieldwork/residency phase of the field school, and rather successfully at that! Now we move on to various locations: Shanghai, Tsingtao, other parts of Beijing, or all the way back to Oregon. We will reconvene at the beginning of August—from wherever we all are—in order to process fieldwork materials into ChinaVine content (initially available via Vine Online). Continue checking this site for updates from the teams and ongoing conversations about culture, heritage, fieldwork, and interpretation. Great job and happy travels, everyone!

Field school progress…

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At this point, we are more than halfway through our Beijing-based, ChinaVine-driven field school, and everything is moving along according to—and in many ways, exceeding—our plans. As co-directors, we spent many hours planning and imagining the experience we’d like students to have in Beijing, the whole time realizing that, ultimately, much of the experience would be in their hands. And, luckily, they have taken that responsibility on and have worked with us to successfully conduct rewarding fieldwork and engage the tasks of documentation and interpretation with an enthusiasm that has made our jobs easy.

The results of their work will be visible on VineOnline (and our course site) toward the middle of August 2011. Each team of student field workers has been tasked with producing two posts for VineOnline—one for each site we’ve visited during our time in Beijing. The first site was Jiangou, a village to the north west of Beijing where we focused on cultural tourism (including “red” tourism efforts that explore the history of Communism), pilgrimage traditions, and rose cultivation. The second site was Songzhuang, to the east of Beijing. As an “artists’ village,” Songzhuang has grown in the past twenty-five years from a place where a handful of artistic pioneers sought affordable work space distanced from the urban renewal of Beijing to a home for over five thousand artists and the site of a “cultural and creative cluster” promoted heavily by regional government. In each site, the students have listened, interviewed, photographed, and otherwise documented the cultural practices and traditions we have encountered. They’ve also eaten, and the image at the top of this post represents a meal cooked for us by artist that ChinaVine has worked with for the past three years: Mr. Her Xue-Sheng. He graciously hosted us during our time in Songzhuang, preparing fresh noodles in the style of his home in the Ningxia region.

So, in the coming weeks be sure to check the VineOnline site in order to follow up on the work produced by the field school students. Their posts will be rich, multimedia explorations of the artists, places, and cultural practices that pull together documentation and interpretation in a manner that extends the mission of ChinaVine. In the meantime, be sure to poke around in this Flickr set highlighting some of the sights from our weeks in Beijing.

site updates and new information…

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Quadrant Altazimuth in Beijing Ancient Observa...

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We’ve been completing work on the onsite residency and post-residency sections of the course site, so please thumb through these pages and sub-pages in order to get a sense of what’s next in the field school. We’ll have plenty of time while we are all in Beijing to discuss the details for assignments associated with these upcoming phases, but do formulate any questions and bring them along!

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Assignment A: Wasserstrom book

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Wudaokou at night, Haidian district, Beijing, ...

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Hello! The first assignment for the orientation component of the 2011 Beijing Field School is due on Wednesday (6-22-11), and entails reading the Jeffrey Wasserstrom book. You can find the detailed guidelines here.

Remember to post your assignment in the blog stream, and categorize it as “Assignment A” so that it will be easy for all of us to gather the responses in one place. Feel free to use any tags you’d like, as these will help further specify the content of your response. In order to take advantage of this online format, and have us all in dialog with each other, do add comments to your fellow student’s posts.

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Posting and other tips/instructions

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From an email that all field school participants received the other day:

General Instructions:

1. General navigation: the site is divided into pages, all of which are linked from the home page OR from the “Site Pages” widget in the right hand side bar. For example, to get to the Orientation page (and it’s subpages) you can click on the link with that name either from the courses home page OR in the navigation widget

2. You can access the site without logging in, with two exceptions: A. to post anything, you will need to log in using your DuckID (email username/password), and B. to download PDF files of assigned readings, you will need to enter a password (I will provide that password shortly).

A. for posting, you will log in to the site by clicking the “Log in” link under the “Admin” widget on the right sidebar; then do the following:
* once successfully logged in, you will redirected to a general “Dashboard” for the AAAblogs system
* click on the “My Sites” link in the lefthand navigating column; you should see “Public Culture and Heritage: A Beijing Field School” as one (maybe the only) site option
* click the link to the “Dashboard” of the field school site
* this will take you into the dashboard/backend of the site; it is all built in WordPress, so if you are familiar with that environment you should recognize your surroundings. If you are not, there are links to various support and tutorial documents on the Orientation page of our course site. You can also find them here .

B. for posting, the section of the Dashboard you will be most concerned with is the “Posts” control panel on the left side (just under ‘My Sites’). You should certainly poke around in here and familiarize yourself with this tool prior to assignment due dates (all listed in the syllabus, which has its own page linked to the Orientation page).

General Tips:

1. we are using this system in lieu of BlackBoard, as it gives us more flexibility in general. That said, it also serves many of the same functions as BB in terms of delivery class content and allowing us to communicate with each other. While it might not look like BB, we will use it in some ways that parallel how you may have experienced BB in other classes; we will also be using it in expanded ways, primarily as a communication tool…
2. The blog stream will be our primary way of communicating, sharing info, and posting assignments; please start using it as soon as you’d like! We have started posting notes and materials of interest there already, and hope that you will each begin to contribute well before the course officially begins on June 20. If you find news items of interest, videos to share or books to read, or any other resources, please post them. We also recommend that everyone “follow” the blog in some way: use an RSS reader, generate a Feedburner that will send you emails when new posts show up, or just check the stream on a regular basis. Also, comment on each other’s posts…doing all of this will pave the way for smooth communication and navigation once the class starts and assignments start to show up in the blog stream.
3. With the assignments, we ask that you assign each the proper “category” when posting your materials; if you do not know what this means, no problem! It is very simple, and we are happy to explain (you can also find out on the tutorial pages mentioned above). Basically the assignments are lettered (A, B, C, and D) on the syllabus, and when you post we’d like you to assign the proper category (already created in the system by us). You can “tag” the assignments however you’d like, but categories should be consistent (which is why we created them).
4. We recommend drafting any posts in a word processor, rather than composing directly in the WordPress environment (especially for assignments!). Any network glitches could cause you to lose work, even though WordPress automatically/frequently saves drafts. You can easily cut/paste into WordPress, and there is even a special tool for getting around some of the extra code/macros that MS Word tends to include when pasting from it. If you use this program, and would like more info, please contact John directly (or look in the tutorial materials!).
5. uploading/attaching media such as photos or videos is fairly straightforward, and is only required for the final assignment. However, we suggest testing these capabilities out in various posts prior to completing an assignment so that you do not encounter last-minute stress!

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