Human - Object - Tool
Toward an anthropology of technology

Finn Sivert Nielsen

 
How to read the course texts

Go to the course homepage

 
Understanding the articles
The reading list for this course consists of 38 articles and text extracts. A few of these are anthropological, but the majority are written by specialists in other fields: e.g. psychology, musicology, archaeology, computer science etc. In some of the texts you will therefore come across specialized terms, vocabularies, methods, statistics etc. that you will not have the qualifications to understand. It is not recommended that you try to understand these articles in detail. Instead, try to grasp their general argument and to incorporate it into the general scheme of the course.

Coordinating your reading with the teaching schedule
Lectures and student presentations will be concentrated into two 3-day periods in weeks 37 and 40 respectively. (The two 3-day periods will consist of one 3-hour session (day 1), one 7-hour session (day 2) and one 3-hour session (day 3).) Because of the structure of the course, you will have to read the entire first half of the course curriculum before the course even starts in week 37; some of you will also have to prepare a student presentation for this week. The second half of the literature must be read before week 40, and additional student presentations must be prepared for this week. Details on the student presentations will be published on this website well before the beginning of the Fall semester.

Please, therefore:

1) Register your participation in the course with me as soon as possible (this will give you access to the course literature and the online course forum).

2) Start reading the texts for week 37 as soon as possible.

3) Start preparing the student presentations for week 37 as soon as the assignments have been made public.

4) Start using the online course forum (HOT_Tech) well before we meet for the first time on September 11. Use the forum to exchange viewpoints on course texts, ask questions of the teacher, discuss student presentations etc. HOT_Tech is accessible from: www.necenedu.net/ (username and password will be supplied on registration to the course).