Students wrote blog posts during Summer 2018 as part of the requirement for their CAT 124 Practicum course.  Each week students were given a prompt and asked to reflect on the questions in 300-500 words.  Blogs are categorized by assignment and tagged with the students’ name, week, and other key terms.

Prompts for each week included:

• • Personal Biography (due Sun, July 8) – Please respond to the following questions: Tell us about yourself.  How do you identify and represent yourself to others? Where are you from? What college/year are you and what are you studying at UCSD? What sort of experience or knowledge do you have of the Pacific?  Why did you take this course? What do you hope to learn? (Optional: upload a picture of yourself with a brief caption)
  • Cultural Context (due Sun, July 15) – Conduct research on the context of your patrol report.  What can you find out about the geographical area, time period, culture, languages, religion, resources, colonial history, etc?  You are encouraged to explore the vast resources on Melanesian Anthropology available through the UCSD library.  Provide proper citations using APA formatting.  (Optional: upload images related to your patrol report.  Be sure to cite the original source).
  • Aboutness Statement (due Sun, July 22) – Reflect on how you analyzed your sources and construct aboutness statements. What was easy about the process? What was difficult? What are the possible implications from the way you described the Patrol Reports? How might technology change then use of the reports over time, e.g. microfilm vs. online access?
  • Words and Representation (due Sun, July 29) – Reflect on how you chose the subject terms for your own patrol reports.  What terms did you choose? Why did you choose them? How was this similar or different to the way you identified subjects in your partner’s reports? What are the implications of the words you chose for future audiences?
  • Final Analysis (due Friday, August 3) – Explain how the subjects terms were chosen for your patrol report while providing a critical analysis of the personal biases influencing your analysis. Summarize the findings and key terms identified from your patrol report analysis. Take into consideration your background and personal biases in interpreting the patrol reports. Reflect on the course themes: Who controls knowledge? How has your perspective changed by analyzing the perspectives presented in the patrol reports and readings? Incorporate at least two of the course readings into your analysis. Consider how the readings affected your interpretation. Make an argument explaining why you chose these themes and how your analysis connects to topics discussed in the course.