It’s a scale, scale, scale, scale world (part 1)

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I have to begin by thanking the panelists and discussants who participated in our AAA panel yesterday. Everyone delivered wonderful talks, that, to my infinite happiness, fit together into a cohesive theme about the study of later Pleistocene human evolution despite the different lines of evidence and approaches utilized by the speakers. This is the first of what will hopefully be several posts dissecting some of what I heard, saw and said at the AAAs.

One of the themes that came through not just our panel, but the few other panels I was able to attend, was the critical role that scale plays in anthropology and the critical potential of anthropology to address issues of scale.

I first started thinking about scale at these meetings during a session I attended Friday morning on climate change, policy and adaptation (here is the session information). Common throughout the session was discussion of the intersecting scales of analysis, discussion and practice that permeate climate issues. One of the talks that struck me was given by Derek Owen Newberry (Univ. of Pennsylvania) talking about biofuel certification practices and their on the ground impact in Brazil. For a brief background, groups in the EU have become concerned over the potential detrimental impacts (via deforestation) of biofuel production in Brazil. Basically, no one wants rainforest cut down in the name of environmental conservation. To deal with this, the EU has established a process by which certain biofuel producers are certified for sustainable production status, based on the agreement to maintain a portion of “conserved” lands. The problem is that the certification process does not have a corresponding enforcement apparatus to force, or even to really check in on, compliance. Likewise, the corporations responsible for biofuel production do not have the motivation, or at times possible the authority, to force local farmers to abide by certified sustainable practices. In other words, the scale of the solution (certification of biofuel producers) does not match the scale of the problem (deforestation at a local level). The result, according to Newberry, is that the certification process itself becomes not only ineffectual, but potentially damaging by giving the appearance of action when in reality it lacks the capabilities to act.

I know that anthropology does not have any unique prerogative on scale. Economics has micro and macro. Biology has microbiology, organismal biology, community ecology and numerous other layers that you could slice or implant into the mix. And so do many other disciplines. But I cannot help but feel that anthropology has a somewhat unique approach towards issues of scale, driven by the reality that many of the different scales of research in anthropology involve fundamentally different lines of evidence and theoretical perspectives. For example, in the context of understanding the impact of climate change on agricultural populations in the SE United States–part of the subject of Wendy-Lin Bartels (Univ. of Florida) in the session listed above–think of the different ways that anthropology is of relevance. Wendy’s own work was focused on aspects of knowledge generation and transfer, as she and her research group have helped organize symposia on climate change that bring together farmers, climate scientists and technical experts. Using material evidence, archaeologists working the Southeast could produce evidence of the reaction of past populations to shifting climatic patterns. Biological anthropologists might provide perspectives on the impact to human health of shifting distributions of tropical diseases or of the long-term health consequences of mass disaster events like Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida durin the 1992 hurricane season. In other words, anthropologists look at issues not just across different scales but using widely varying lines of evidence and theoretical approaches. This might just seem like a confusing jumble, but done well, I think it provides an avenue for elucidating complexity. I am a visual person, so I made a somewhat clunky visual to try to illustrate this point.

The starting observation for this schematic is the series of dots in the upper left. Zooming in to a different scale (moving right), it can be seen that the dots (or at least one of them) is not simply a dot, but in fact a square. Zooming in a little further it can be seen that the surface of the square is actually characterized by a series of vertical lines. Viewing this arrangement across three different scales provided different evidence. Moving down from the initial observation, however, is my schematic of anthropology, where we are not only shifting scales but shifting perspectives. Now it can be seen that the square is not really a square at all, but actually a cube. Moving further down (lower left), it can be seen that the vertical lines are actually not just lines, but the product of small, narrow undulations across the cube’s surface. Again, this is a clumsy representation, but my point is that anthropologists not only work across scales, but across axes of variation.

Tomorrow I will follow this up with an examination of scale and its importance based on my session–multi-disciplinary perspectives on later human evolution–that featured paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, a human behavioral ecologist, a cultural anthropologist and primatologists. Each provided unique perspectives reflecting different scales and different kinds of data.

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Thank you San Francisco, AAAs

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I will hopefully have several posts over the next week or so recapping some of my experience at the AAAs, and particularly our session yesterday afternoon. The panelists and discussants for our session all delivered great talks that, by happy plan and luck, fit together beautifully. For now, I’ll just post this picture, which was the product of a post-session/dinner discussion between a couple of our panelists. I figure if your panelists feel the need to sketch out their ideas on the table five hours after the session has ended, the session was a success.

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My talk at the AAAs

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

If you are in the San Francisco area and interested in human evolution, you should stop by our session at the AAAs this afternoon. There is a great group of panelists who have agreed to contribute and I am excited to see how all of the talks fit together in the session. Here is a draft of my talk (link to dropbox).

*****

My paper will begin with a brief discussion of the problem presented by a lack of appropriate comparative models for questions in paleoanthropology. I will then suggest that Neandertals, rather than being a problem in need of explanation by paleoanthropology, represent one of the best available comparative lenses through which to view human evolutionary processes in the Pleistocene. The active production of genetic knowledge relating Neandertals and living and recent human populations, in particular, poses challenges to the commonly held view of Neandertals as a reproductively-isolated biological species, distinct from living humans and our immediate ancestors.

The hypothesis that I am interested in is whether other recognized Pleistocene taxa exceed the variation present in a combined Neandertal/fossil human sample. In addition to developing a multivariate characterization of the variability of this sample, I look at how that variation is patterned across time and space within the sample. I then apply these data to a much larger sample of Pleistocene specimens (143 in total), including fossils traditionally designated as Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo habilis, Australopithecus robustus, Au. boisei and Au. africanus (H. florisiensis and Au. sediba, too, but the samples are obviously limited for those comps). A couple of interesting results come out using the human-Neandertal variation as a guide. First, while temporal displacement only explains a very small amount of the variation in the human-Neandertal sample, it provides a very good prediction of the morphological divergence between the other well-sampled Homo lineages (e.g. erectus and heidelbergensis) and humans and Neandertals. In contrast, the well-sampled Australopithecine lineages fall well outside this prediction. In fact, while the average pairwise morphological difference between the well-sampled Homo lineages fails to achieve significance using a Neandertal-modern human critical value, all of the Australopithecus/Homo comparisons are significant. The remains from Flores and Malapa are also distinctive, though the limited sample of available data makes the comparisons more problematic. In other words, if you use the Neandertal-human comparison as a threshold value, basically outlining the limits of morphological/temporal divergence, the results support only a small number of hominin lineages in the Pleistocene, smaller than most traditional views hold.

Finally, I interrogate the theoretical basis of using a Neandertal-human perspective a little more. First, I point out that while time had only a small impact on the pattern of morphological variability, within constrained time comparisons, geographic displacement had a more significant impact. Furthermore, the validity of such comparisons depend on the impact other forces have on the rate of divergence across time and space. I end by considering how several other factors–demographic changes throughout the Pleistocene, climatic changes, and most importantly the application of cultural technology to ecological challenges–might impact evolutionary rates of divergence in Pleistocene humans.

Hopefully it is enjoyable and/or insightful.

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Live at the AAAs, Friday

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

9:00pm – The afternoon was a blur of meetings, business and personal. Heading to the Michigan alum + friends function in a bit, then off to bed to get ready for my session tomorrow.

12:00 – Q and A wrapping up. I am getting ready to head to BioAnth Exec meeting. Good morning of talks.

11:40 – the role of ‘discussant’ has to be the hardest at AAA

11:15 – Sara Alexander (Baylor) talking ato lot aboutto scale and climate changechange in Belize. Reason I like 4-field anthro and climate changes is its ability to work across axes of scale, temporal, ecological, human (practice and policy).

11:00 – Really like Derek’s talk. Basically, process of sustainable certification in biofuel production creates a sense of action, but in reality provides no mechanism to enforce corporate responsibility in absence of local policy enforcement. Seems like a solution, but really an inappropriate solution to a collective action/risk problem.

10:45 – Now Derek Owen Newberry (U Penn) talking about biofuel certification in Brazil. Certification processes, according to Derek, rather than solving problems, make them worse by applying inappropriate veneer of ethical action to a group action problem.

10:30 – I moved to a session on climate change, a topic that I feel four-field Anthro perspectives have a lot to contribute. Current speaker is Dr. Mark Calamia, who works for the National Park Service, talking about changing weather patterns and access to raw materials by indigenousa groups at Pipestone National Park.

9:45 – Sitting in on an interesting session on archaeological research on contemporary and historical immigration. Came into the session during Stephen Brighton’s talk on his work on contemporary transborder crossings in the Sonoran desert. Stephen collaborates with the Jason De Leon, who we had at Wellesley for a talk last week. Really ineresting work and a great example of archaology producing relevant knowledge for contemporary issues.

9:15 – No line with for registration, so badge and program collected. The competiton between my wife (MLA) and me over whose organization has the larger program heats up with this edition…700+ pages.

8:45 After arriving into San Francisco late last night, I am heading off now to register and begin my AAA experience. My morning began in my otherwise wonderful hotel room by discovering the shower has the water pressure of a nearly empty sun-shower. I had to crouch in the bottom of the tub just so that gravity had a little more opportunity to accelerate the water as it dribbled from the shower. Given the sound of rain outside my window, though, I may have been better served to just shower on the sidewalk. I have a few business meetings today, but I will try and provide some updates throughout.

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Fear of genomics strikes

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

And he just walked along alone
With his guilt so well concealed
And muttered underneath his breath
“Nothing is revealed”.
– Bob Dylan, The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

This Spring I am teaching an upper-level seminar, “Human biology and society,” for the first time. The course is intended to be a biocultural examination of personal genomics, balancing perspectives on both the creation of genomic knowledge through medical genetics and ancestry research and the consumption of that knowledge in clinical, journalistic and personal contexts. The pedagogical center of the course was intended to be an opportunity for the students to receive their own personal genomic data through services provided by 23andme. Unfortunately, as a little kick from the College on my way out the door to the AAAs, I received notice that my funding proposal was denied:

There also may be legal implications for providing this type of data to students without any of the genetic counseling often associated with this information. (Perhaps the Provost’s Office could put you in contact with the College’s legal team.)

Fear of genomic data is something that John Hawks and Holly Dunsworth have both commented on recently. In a follow-up post, Holly draws the connection between being told she would not grow anymore following a sports injury as an adolescent to being told about one’s personal genomic profile:

But another big part of the personal genomics dilemma is whether to make people worry over nothing (e.g. higher gene-based risk but the condition never ends up presenting). This is the paradox of probabilistic medical data. There was no such uncertainty about my growth plates, and since the news wasn’t about how I could get sick or die, that’s presumably why my doctor did not have to seek my consent to tell me this incidental finding of the radiography.

Personally, I like the analogy of being informed you have tested positive for a virus. For example, if a doctor informs you that your child has tested positive for Varicella (chickenpox), they are telling you something that has permanently changed in your child with uncertain implications for the future development of your child’s health. Once a virus enters our system, it becomes a part of us in a meaningful way. We do not have a great deal of knowledge about what the long-term consequences of such an event are, but in the case of Varicella we know that the virus can re-activate later in life in the form of shingles, a painful and potentially complicated illness. And yet we do not require any particular protections prior to learning this information about ourself or our child. In fact, we do not even actively prevent parents from intentionally exposing their children to Varicella.

As I have said before, there are legitimate reasons to be cautious about how you approach genomic data. The technology associated with it tends to give it an inflated privilege in comparison with other bits of information. Our knowledge about genomics lags behind our data about genomics. In addition to saying something about who you are, it potentially says something about who you might become. But all of these concerns are best dealt with through education, not through ignorance. What better environment to educate, what better environment to develop truly informed consent (or dissent–students would not be required to undergo testing), than a classroom?

The ironic thing is that I can run the course just as I intended with the twist that students would have to pay out of pocket for the opportunity to get their genomic data. Which is of course part of the reason for the course–direct to consumer personal genomics products are publicly available and increasingly widely consumed, with little critical examination of how the process plays out. So my students could do it anyway, with or without my guidance. I would of course have to add an additional lecture on the cost of genomics data and the role that plays in shaping inequalities and self-selection bias within the field, though…

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Upcoming AAA meetings

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I apologize for my blog silence of late. It has been a busy few weeks of writing. Later this week I am headed to the AAA meetings in San Francisco, however, and I will try to provide some updates on the conference while I am away. There is actually quite a lot of interesting biological anthropology at this year’s conference. The Biological Anthropology section and Evolutionary Anthropology section of AAA have a rundown of the sessions they are sponsoring. In addition, together with Jamie Clark (Univ. Alaska-Fairbanks), I am co-organizing an AAA Executive Committee-sponsored interdisciplinary session on modern human origins that will take place Saturday afternoon and, I think, will be quite interesting. Here is a brief rundown of our panelists:

Session Title: A SUM GREATER THAN ITS PARTS: MULTI-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON LATER HUMAN EVOLUTION
When: Saturday, November 17, 2012: 1:45 PM-5:30 PM

* Blurred Boundaries and Constructed Niches: Interweaving the Individual, the Group and the Community In Human Evolution – Agustin Fuentes (University of Notre Dame)
* Why Humans (especially simple foragers) Are So Egalitarian – Frank W Marlowe (Cambridge University)
* Territoriality, Tolerance and Testosterone: Hormonal Correlates of Male Chimpanzee Behavior and Their Implications for Human Evolution – Marissa Sobolewski (University of Michigan), John Mitani (University of Michigan) and Janine Brown (Smithsonian Institution)
* A Primate Perspective On the Evolution of Human Life History – Tanya M Smith (Harvard University), Andrew Bernard (Freelance Nature Photographer), Ronan Donovan (Freelance Nature Photographer), Zarin Machanda (Harvard University), Amanda Papakyrikos (Wellesley College) and Richard Wrangham (Harvard University)
* Childhood, Play and the Evolution of Cultural Capacity In Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans – April Nowell (University of Victoria and University of Victoria)
* Discussant – Milford Wolpoff (University of Michigan)
BREAK (3:15-3:30)
* Fuzzy Boundaries: The Importance of High-Resolution Datasets for Studying Behavioral Change Across Transitional Periods In the Later Pleistocene – Jamie L Clark (University of Alaska Fairbanks)
* Cultural Diversity and Rates of Change In Structured Populations: A Review of Some Recent Models and Their Implications for Understanding the Appearance of Behavioral Modernity During the Paleolithic – Luke Premo (Washington State University and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
* Neandertal Genetics: Drawing a New Boundary for Humanity – John Hawks (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
* If Not the Neandertals: Reproductive Barriers and Speciation In the Pleistocene – Adam P Van Arsdale (Wellesley College)
* Working Hard or Hardly Working? A Preliminary Study of the Metabolic Costs of Stone Knapping – Eric Martin Heffter (University of Arizona), David Raichlen (U of Arizona and University of Arizona) and Steven Kuhn (University of Arizona)
* Language, Myth and the Symbolic Mind: Cultural Anthropology Enters the Middle Stone Age – Alan J Barnard (University of Edinburgh and University of Edinburgh)
* Discussant – Julien Riel-Salvatore (University of Colorado-Denver)

I know that for a number of our panelists, this will be a first-time visit to AAAs, something that Jamie and I had as a goal. Should be fun. Now back to writing…

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Climate change, Hurricane Sandy and contemporary human infrastructure

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Late last winter I wrote a brief post about what I called the Age of Global Weirdness in relation to climate change. If there is any good that comes from the recent megastorm Sandy that has wrought havoc on the Caribbean and East Coast of the U.S., it is that it has once again brought a spotlight of attention to the topic of global climate change (a topic that has been noticeably and amazingly absent from the U.S. presidential campaign). Mark Fischetti has a nice post at Scientific American on the question of whether climate change can be implicated, specifically, in the case of Hurricane Sandy:

Here’s where climate change comes in. The atmospheric pattern that sent the Jet Stream south is colloquially known as a “blocking high”—a big pressure center stuck over the very northern Atlantic Ocean and southern Arctic Ocean. And what led to that? A climate phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)—essentially, the state of atmospheric pressure in that region. This state can be positive or negative, and it had changed from positive to negative two weeks before Sandy arrived. The climate kicker? Recent research by Charles Greene at Cornell University and other climate scientists has shown that as more Arctic sea ice melts in the summer—because of global warming—the NAO is more likely to be negative during the autumn and winter. A negative NAO makes the Jet Stream more likely to move in a big, wavy pattern across the U.S., Canada and the Atlantic, causing the kind of big southward dip that occurred during Sandy.

Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.

Warmer climate means warmer seas which mean changing patterns of energy transfer on the planet which means more extreme weather. But extreme is a relative term, defined in relation to a set of expectations. One of the curious things to realize is that human expectations for normality are very narrowly defined. Humans have only been systematically recording climate observations, for example, for a few hundred years, a small scale in the context of the geological and astronomical forces that help shape patterns of climate change.

In contrast to the relative long cycles of climatic processes, humans operate on very fast cycles. The human world as we know it is primarily a product of the past several hundred years. Most of the world’s population lives in urban centers, a huge fraction of those urban centers are along coasts, and most of the construction and infrastructure development within those urban centers is a product of the past fifty years. The result of (more frequently occurring) extreme weather then becomes stories like this (from The Scientist):

At New York University’s Smilow Research Center, on the eastern edge of Manhattan, which lost power shortly after Sandy struck on Monday night, hundreds of biological samples were destroyed as freezers thawed and refrigerators warmed. And as animal care facilities in the basement flooded, hundreds of mice and rats were killed—animals that had been painstakingly genetically engineered for use as disease models.

“Animal resource staff was on site continuously to mitigate the damage from the storm, but due to the speed and force of the surge, animal rescue attempts were unsuccessful,” NYU officials said in a statement released on Wednesday (October 31). “We are deeply saddened by the loss of these animals’ lives and the impact this has on the many years of important work conducted by our researchers.”

Gordon J. Fishell, associate director of the NYU neuroscience institute told The New York Times that his lab alone had lost about 2,500 mice, including 40 different strains. “These animals were the culmination of 10 years of work, and it will take time to replace them,” Fishell told the NYT, which reported a total of some 7,500 more rodents lost from other labs in the Smilow building.

Humans have a phenomenal, technologically-enabled, ability to adjust the world around them to our needs and our expectations of reality. Our expectations of reality, however, are not necessarily an accurate assessment of reality given the narrow scale of human existence. Global climate change and a greater number of extreme weather events (i.e. global weirdness) are only likely to increase our awareness of the discrepancy between our expectations of “normal” weather and the reality of a dynamic global climatic system.

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Math and paleoanthropology

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Holding true to my promise to add more math, and reflecting the fact that class registration for the Spring semester begins next week at Wellesley, here are some thoughts on the math courses I have had that I find the most valuable for my work as a paleoanthropologist.

Probability Theory: Earlier today I tweeted that one thing elections (and election coverage) show that is relevant to paleoanthropology is that we could all use a little better understanding of probability. As a discipline that continually finds itself facing small sample sizes and non-normal distributions, correctly understanding probability and the mathematical properties of several commonly encountered probability distributions is essential. Hypothesis testing is all about understanding probability, and when the more traditional statistical tests associated with large, normally distributed datasets are unavailable, a good knowledge of probability helps greatly.

Calculus (differential equations): Evolutionary questions are, essentially by definition, interested in change over time. And if you want to mathematically address questions about change over time, calculus, or at least the ability to understand the concepts associated with differential equations, is unavoidable. A good working knowledge of calculus can be an important tool for turning a qualitative idea into a quantitative and testable hypothesis.

A lot of people are scared off by the idea of calculus and reflexively respond to the notion by suggesting that she/he is “not a math person.” That is crazy. I took an evolutionary theory class as a graduate student from Doug Futuyma, which was wonderful, in part, because it was math-heavy. This, despite the fact that Dr. Futuyma made it clear that he was “not a math person.” Math, particularly the concepts and language of calculus, are critical for systematically representing the actions and dynamics of evolutionary processes. We did not “do” a lot of math in the class, in the sense of solving equations or finding mathematical answers, but nearly every evolutionary concept we encountered we illustrated conceptually through mathematics.

Matrix Algebra: There are a lot of specialized mathematical approaches that can be useful depending on the exact kind of data or questions your research is focused on. In my experiences, matrix algebra, being able again to conceptually understand and operationalize the relationship between interconnected sets of data, has been highly useful. Again, there are simply a lot of evolutionary questions, particularly if you are interested in patterns of morphological variation, that can be broken down into matrix-algebra derived hypothesis tests.

That is it. I am sure a lot of people would, when asked what math class is most essential, would immediately suggest some kind of stats course. And indeed, the math class probably most required of anth/bioanth grad students probably is some kind of stats class. But given the varying kinds of data and questions encountered in paleoanthropology, most of what you would encounter in a standard stats class is not directly applicable. Instead, I would suggest that knowing the concepts that form the basis of most statistical tests is far more useful, because it allows you to move between different techniques and evaluate different kinds of methods based on the underlying principles and not just trust the results of a particular test.

UPDATE: And one quick update…the ability to program in some kind of usable/useful language is also enormously helpful. Plug and chug statistics packages simply are not much help for asking and testing evolutionary questions. You really need to be able to construct programs to work with data sets that have regular and varying “problems” (e.g. missing data) and write code for hypothesis tests specific to the question/scenario you are interested in exploring.

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Paleoanthropology Picture of the Day

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I am going to try to post occasional (every week or so) pictures of paleoanthropological significance. Here is a photo looking at the Block 2 excavation area at the Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi, with the Dmanisi museum director, Gocha Kiladze, in the foreground. The walls are remnants of the medieval citadel complex that runs throughout the site. The roof structure was part of the project, initially opened in 2008, to create a site museum at the locality.

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More thoughts on Wellesley College and online learning

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Next week I will be part of a roundtable discussion focusing on Wellesley’s consideration of moving into the world of online education. I previously had an online discussion with Dr. Holly Dunsworth, of the University of Rhode Island, on the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of online education more broadly. This is an expansion of those thoughts in the specific context of Wellesley College

Additional thoughts on Wellesley College and online learning

I support the interest of Wellesley College in exploring potential online learning platforms for the College. Technology has always been an essential component in expanding the reach and efficacy of academic institutions, and while internet technologies may differ in important ways, particularly in their ability to sever the physical space of learning from the process of learning, these are not by themselves reasons to be wary of online education. It is my hope that the College does decide to pursue future online learning endeavors.

In order to evaluate the proper path for the College to take, however, it is necessary to understand what goals the College has in pursuing an online initiative. In the absence of a stated set of goals, what I present below is several potential goals and what I see as the relative merits and challenges of each of them. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but do at times reflect refinements of one another.

Goal #1 : Simply establish an online presence in order to have an online presence

Harvard. MIT. Stanford. NYU. Wash U. Emory. And on and on. Online educational initiatives, either for profit or open access, are a widespread and growing phenomena in academia at elite Universities and Colleges. There is some value I suppose, from a brand marketing standpoint, in keeping up with the model of peer institutions.

Yet as a goal, simply being online is a low hurdle to clear and provides little in the way of direction. Wellesley College is already online in numerous real ways, with podcasts of lectures and special events freely available to the public. Presumably the College’s aims are to strive for something more meaningful and engaging than simply being part of the growing herd.

Goal #2 : Expanding Wellesley’s teaching environment to a greater number of students

I believe that for most faculty, this is the goal in mind. What Wellesley does well is educate and train young women in a diverse array of subjects and disciplines. At the moment, this learning experience is only available to the students physically present in our classrooms. Why not expand that opportunity to a greater number of students by creating virtual online classrooms?

As a goal, I think this is an admirable one. As a direction for the College to pursue, I think there are several distinct and potentially difficult challenges.

The biggest challenge I see is that the model of teaching that occurs at Wellesley and that is the College’s strength does not seem consistent with a model whose goal is to significantly expand the number of students engaging in Wellesley classroom-style experiences. Much of the real value-added at Wellesley comes from the direct and close interaction between faculty and students.

Whether it be one on one mentoring in a lab, individual consultation on a research project, extended personal feedback on a piece of writing, or mentorship in guidance in transitioning from Wellesley to life beyond Wellesley, the essential element is intensive contact with the Wellesley faculty. While online learning platforms might allow this process to occur outside the boundaries of Wellesley’s physical campus, I struggle to see how they can reduce the actual work and time that goes into such interactions. Scalability, perhaps the most exciting and enticing component to online education, seems counter to both the philosophy and value of a Wellesley education.

I will use my own experience as a model. Prior to arriving at Wellesley in the Fall of 2008, I taught for a lecturer at the University of Michigan for two years. At Michigan, most of my courses were large lectures with 150+ students. The expectations of me as an instructor was to design the course content, provide up to 3 hours of engaging lecture each week, and coordinate small-classroom experiences that were led by graduate student teaching assistants. This model of teaching is highly amenable to the mixed asynchronous/synchronous content style of some online learning platforms. However, it is not, by and large, the model of Wellesley College.

From my initial job candidate visit to Wellesley to the present, students, fellow faculty, and administrators have impressed the notion of the “Wellesley way” of teaching upon me. My transition towards becoming a Wellesley faculty member has, on the pedagogical side of the ledger, largely been an effort to move away from the style of teaching I employed at Michigan towards a kind of teaching that is less obviously amenable to an online setting. In particular, I have worked to be less of a talking head, the kind of course content that can easily be accessed asynchronously through online videos or podcasts, and more a cultivator and moderator of individual student understanding and ideas, pedagogical elements that require direct interaction.

It is possible to produce synchronous online learning environments—the kind of environment that parallels what is available on campus—but is it possible for Wellesley College to do so and still be Wellesley College? An expansion in the number of students being taught by Wellesley in the “Wellesley way” would require a larger faculty. There are obvious financial, space and logistical issues with a faculty expansion. How do you maintain quality with an expanding faculty (the current system has many redundant and overlapping processes that ensure teacher quality)? What position do members of an expanded, virtual faculty possess relative to the “regular” factulty? How is online teaching compensated? Are online courses offered simultaneous, or in parallel to, traditional courses?

Goal #3 : Increasing revenue for the College

The College might also seek to raise revenue through online learning endeavors. Additional revenues might allow Wellesley to expand its academic mission in other ways or lower costs/provide additional financial support to current students. But without knowing a great detail about the business model that supports specific online learning platforms, it seems that as a source of revenue online learning is inevitably tied to issues of scale. Large expansions of scale might produce large additional revenues, but at a modest scale, the cost associated with the development of online content might actually entail a net cost to the College. For the reasons outlined above, I am skeptical about the College’s ability to scale up via online learning.

Of course, the question of revenue assumes the College pursuing an open access course model. The question of whether to pursue an open-access or fee model of online learning is a broader philosophical question for the College community to consider, and one that by and large I will leave for others to address. Given my skepticism in the benefits of scale to Wellesley, however, I think the College is best suited to pursue online learning with a revenue neutral goal.

Goal #4 : Enhancing the currently available resources of Wellesley College

I feel the best path available to Wellesley is to consider online learning and online educational initiatives might be to consider the issue in a broader context. Specifically, I think the College should consider its unique strengths as an institution and the potential of those strengths to be enhanced and broadened in an online setting.

Classroom teaching is surely a huge strength of the College. But it is not one that is necessarily, or frequently in the case of Wellesley, amenable to the technology offered by online learning platforms. Instead, Wellesley should pursue a mixed combination of online educational initiatives. This might include some limited courses, defined in the traditional sense, where such courses might be appropriately refigured as online courses. But it might consist more of an expansion of the capabilities of existing unique strengths of Wellesley such as the Newhouse Center for the Humanities, the Wellesley Center for Women, the Madeleine Albright Institute, the Davis Museum, the Botanical Gardens/Greenhouse, the Women in Public Service Project, and a host of other institutionally specific foci of student and faculty research and learning.

Some of these on-going projects and events might be expanded from physical places and events on Wellesley’s campus to virtual online communities and resources. Such expansions might take in partnership with existing chapters of Wellesley’s alumnae network or affiliated collaborative institutions around the globe. The form they take could be highly varied, but the goal would be to make Wellesley College—its students, faculty and space—the hub of a larger virtual online community of learners and educators.

I think pursuing such a non-traditional online model is a more ambitious, more difficult, but ultimately a more rewarding path for Wellesley College to take. I think such an approach, designed and implemented effectively, would work specifically with the unique strengths of Wellesley as an institution rather than trying to replicate the success of other, larger institutions that bring a different set of capabilities and resources to the online learning landscape.

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