The students in the 2013 edition of my Language and Societies course are extremely proud to present abstracts of their research papers which they have been working on for the past three months, published at our course blog of the same name. As has become an annual tradition, I am sharing this work with a broader audience. I invite you to take a few ( Read more... )

Once again, the students in my senior / graduate linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written abstracts of their research papers, which I have now posted on the course blog of the same name.    As always, I am casting a wide net, looking for comments from anyone interested in these subjects.     If you have a few spare ( Read more... )

As always, the students in my upper-level / graduate course, Language and Societies, are posting abstracts of their research papers over at the course blog. I'm trying to get them to think about how they present their research in a public forum and to encourage discussion. Several students are considering submitting their work to conferences and ( Read more... )

As I discussed in my recent Glossographia post here, I'm thinking seriously about putting together a student assignment for next year where each student (or possibly small groups) investigates the history and context of origin of a particular word, phrase, or group of related words, or a similar etymological puzzle, using online tools like Google ( Read more... )

I was talking about minimal pairs in class last week (among other subjects), because the ability to form contrastive syllables is central to the ability to productively form a wide enough range of distinct words to be useful. And inevitably, this course is turning into an ethnographic examination of Arthur's speech patterns, so I mentioned his ( Read more... )

I had been meaning to watch Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture' since his death hit all the major news outlets last month. Never got around to it until today, since the lack of human contact is getting to me and I find that I need to see human faces, even if only on a screen. Ahhh ... yeah, I probably should not have picked today to watch it; probably ( Read more... )

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Pretty crappy day start to today ... We're both feeling pretty cruddy about the move and the dislocation of all our friendships, our social ties, etc., as we go to Detroit-Windsor. Marking ... meh, so-so at best, they just aren't flowing as fast as I would like. Dealing with administrative teaching-related claptrap this afternoon didn't help. ( Read more... )

So I have just spent the past 6 hours in the wonderful town of Hampstead, Quebec, as well as northwestern parts of the neighbouring borough of Cote-de-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de Grace, and a couple of weird little slivers of Cote-Saint-Luc. Why, you may ask? I and three brave students from my Arch Methods class, together comprising Team Valiant, spent ( Read more... )

Over the past several weeks, my senior class and I have been working on, and have now completed, The Dollarware Project. What on earth is that, you may ask? Nothing less than the world's first scholarly archaeological analysis of discount store ceramic drinking vessels, that's what ( Read more... )