Rakiraki, on Fiji's central island of Viti Levu, is some 8,000 miles and 16 time zones away, about as far as you can get from Schenectady.
But you wouldn't know it from Fiji.net, an interactive Web site that brings seven students doing anthropology field work in the Pacific archipelago as close as your nearest computer.
With few clicks, you can check in on Erinn Gregg '00, Megan Lee '01, Michelle Nason '01, Apryle Pickering '01, Stephanie Sienkiewicz '00, Emily Sparks '00 and Andy Spitz '01.
There are dozens of photos of the students with their homestay families, detailed field notes about everything from learning local customs to joining celebrations, and e-mails, lots of e-mails. The site is popular with the students' friends on campus and with students in Introduction to Anthropology. Naturally, the site's biggest fans are parents and other family members of the students.
Fiji.net is the brainchild of Prof. Steve Leavitt of anthropology, who with his wife, Prof. Karen Brison, is leading the field program. Leavitt, who updates the site almost daily from Fiji, says he hopes his “experiment” can be useful in creating a model for connecting the campus to students abroad.
“We've never done anything like this with a term abroad before,” said Bill Thomas, director of International Programs. Thomas, who accuses Leavitt of being somewhat modest about his creation, adds that he thinks the site can be a model for connecting students abroad with the campus. (Union's “virtual term abroad,” started in 1996 by Prof. Ron Bucinell, uses the Internet to join design teams of Union's mechanical engineering students with their counterparts at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.)
Leavitt says he found during the 1997 Fiji term that students were a “bit more diligent” in their field notes if they knew an “interested-but-uninformed audience” – their parents — would be reading.
Leavitt has been involved in a collaboration with Hobart and William Smith Colleges to explore ways to enhance connections between students on campus and those abroad.
“One way to follow through on these things was to develop a Web site chronicling the progress of the term abroad,” Leavitt said last week via e-mail from Fiji. “From there, I came up with the idea of including the two sections of Introduction to Anthropology. I wanted it be interactive, so I developed the idea of e-mail questions/comments going back and forth.”
The “intro” classes, taught this fall by Prof. Ian Condry, have always had a strong field component (such as writing ethnographies on area bingo halls), so it was natural to involve those students, Leavitt said.
Fiji.net shows the anthropology department's strong emphasis on field research by undergraduates. “There's no question that (ethnographic field school) is the ultimate term abroad experience,” said Chair George Gmelch, who developed the Barbardos field term on which the Fiji program is modeled. “The students are out there living in the community by themselves, and that forces them to examine the host society in ways that do not happen in a classroom.”
Leavitt says he thinks the site may be valuable to the Fiji students long after the term is over. “They'll be able to read each others' notes, show Web photographs to friends, alert professors and fellow students to passages that may relate to issues they're studying.
“The parents have loved it, and that alone has justified the time we've spent,” he adds. Says Susan Pickering, mother of Apryle: “It's wonderful that you can feel so close. As a parent you are apprehensive and you miss them so much. To see their pictures and see what they are going through is very reassuring.” Adds Corki Gregg, Errin's mom, “I don't know how our family would have made it through these past eight weeks if not for the Web site.”