Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology SASW, 206 Waters Hall Kansas State University Manhattan, KS 66506 Phone: 785-532-6866 Fax: 785-532-6978 Email: mwesch@ksu.edu

Wesch graduated summa cum laude from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and returned as a faculty member in 2004 after graduate studies at the University of Virginia. There he pursued research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, living in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003. Wesch has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, Explorer's Club Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays International Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Currently Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. The first outcome of this work was a short video called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video was released on YouTube on January 31st 2007 and quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and the #1 featured YouTube video on February 7th 2007.

Wesch has also actively pursued the possibilities of digital media in extending and transforming the way ethnographies are presented. His first experiment with digital ethnography, Nekalimin.net, has been listed by the Cardiff School of Social Sciences Hypermedia and Qualitative Research Project as "by far and away the most interesting web-mounted hypermedia ethnography to date." Following his interests in digital media, Wesch created "Virtual Snow," a growing on-line resource on the life and work of Edmund Snow Carpenter, an anthropologist who was instrumental in developing the foundational ideas of media ecology which inspire much of Wesch's work with digital ethnography. Carpenter revealed many of his main ideas through a study of the ways different media were transforming Papua New Guinea in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wesch is now in the beginning stages of a multi-media project presenting the insights of Edmund Carpenter's media studies in Papua New Guinea 35 years ago and evaluating their usefulness in understanding the media environments of Papua New Guinea in the present day.

Wesch is also a multiple award-winning teacher active in the development of innovative teaching techniques. Currently he is involved in the Peer Review of Teaching Project, a nation-wide consortium of universities pursuing new ways to improve and evaluate student learning. As part of this project, Wesch has developed a "World Simulation" for large introductory classes in cultural anthropology. You can read more about the world simulation and other aspects of Wesch's innovative teaching techniques at SavageMinds.

For more information on the Carpenter project, click the link below: