My presentation ("Anthropology and Pseudoscience") at Mercer University on Friday went well, I think. Never having been there before, I'm not sure how the crowd I drew rated in terms of size, but given that the talk was at 4:30 on a Friday I was happy with the attendance and the response that I got. The flying watermelons went over well. It's the little things that make the difference.
One of the things I emphasized in my talk was the need to create what I called "persistent resources" to provide counter-points to the nonsense. When the genuinely curious search for information about a specific claim or idea, ideally they will be able to find something that provides a reasoned, evidence-based analysis. Making critical materials easier to discover by assembling them in a single place was the rationale behind creating The Argumentative Archaeologist website. Traffic on that site seems to be steadily increasing, and I'm hoping it continues to grow and be useful.
I'll be facilitating the construction of more critical infrastructure in conjunction with the Forbidden Archaeology (ANTH 291) class that I'll be teaching this fall. The students will be tasked with writing and editing a series of blog posts on various topics, and my plan is to make those available on a "Forbidden Archaeology 2016" website that we'll create and fill with content. I'm hoping we can branch out from blogs and also do some things with video. YouTube is an important battleground that I have yet to try to really understand or enter. This is a new class, though, so we'll have to see how things work out. The students will be doing final projects, so maybe I can provide an option for production of a video.
I'm really looking forward to this class -- it should be a lot of fun and, I hope, a very useful exercise in critical thinking and communication.
I'm really looking forward to this class -- it should be a lot of fun and, I hope, a very useful exercise in critical thinking and communication.
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