Ancient History Ramblings

Twitter?

I have been reading quite a bit about Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging program. Today I read an article by Jeffrey Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Forget E-Mail: New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter" which is actually a followup to an earlier article "A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom." The program allows you to send short notes (up to 140 characters) to other people's cell phones or computers. The success of the service so far has encouraged Blackboard to announce that they will be adding a similar feature to their content management system.

It was interesting to read the article, but I really had mixed thoughts about this. On one hand, I really like technology, probably too much since I have been accused of using technology merely for technology's sake. On the other hand, I am not sure that I see the value of this service. Most of the instructors in the article talk about using it to send out messages to their students in the morning before class or reactions and thought about a previous class. Now, maybe it is because I am not into text messaging (blame that on being old and/or cheap), but if I was a student I am not sure that I would want more of the instructor outside of class. I do see the advantage for being able to cancel class in a hurry, but how often does the need for doing that arise? I guess I will pass on this until someone can convince me otherwise.

RSM

SL Exploration

I had a CHSS (College of Humanities and Social Sciences) Tech Committee Meeting today. At the meeting we voted to ask our Dean to purchase an island for our college. The Dean has indicated in the past that he would look favorably on this request and if it goes through, this would be IUP's 5th island. Since this got me thinking about SL, I realized that it had been a while since I had searched SL for historical sites and I decided to see what I could find. I started out looking for medieval sites and there are a lot of SL sites that are medieval themed, but I did not see any that were historical. I then found a site devoted to Vikings - Viking Times. The site described itself as a "study in Viking architecture and culture." While not very large, it was interesting to walk around and look at. It had a small outside area

with a small trading vessel and some basic implements. The majority of the site was a museum designed to look like a long house with numerous artifacts inside. This was nicely done and enjoyable to walk around. My only complaint was that it would have been helpful to have some signs or notecards explaining the different artifacts.

RSM

PKAP Website and Documentary

The PKAP website is up and running, at least mostly. There are still a few bad links I am finding every now and then, but I think the current incarnation is the way it is going to be until the summer. We released another documentary short this week. "Former Student Advice" is a created from footage Joe Patrow shot at IUP before the 2007 fieldseason. He took some time out of his busy schedule and flew to Indiana where I arranged interviews with former PKAPers, as well as students joining PKAP for the first time. I had the opportunity to watch most of the interviews as he was shooting them and was struck by 2 things: 1) They all talked about the heat and the sun - and I have to be honest that since we moved our season to May/June it really hasn't been that hot. Now the year we were there in August, it was hot and humid; 2) They all kept looking at me as they answered the questions. It made me wonder if they were going to say something like "Don't go!" or "Run for your lives." I was worrying for no reason - they all actually said nice things.

I will say that I have been pleased with several things regarding our student volunteers so far. 1) They have, for the most part, worked hard and got along well with others; and 2) A large number of them have gone on to graduate school. Over the last 4 fieldseasons, we have had 18 volunteers who were currently in school, either as an undergraduate or graduate. Out of the 10 who have graduated so far, 9 have gone on to grad school. I realize that this is not a huge number compared to other projects, but I still feel that participating in PKAP has helped our student volunteers in many different ways.

There are also drawbacks, because when students work closely with faculty members, much of the mystique (if there is any) about being a professor goes away since you see them at their best and worst. After 3 or 4 weeks of sharing close quarters, you learn a lot about people - probably more than you ever wanted to. For example, on PKAP you learn that if you have a question that might be stupid, you go ask David - he is the nice one of the three co-directors. You also learn that if you ride in the car with me, you better be prepared to play the Movie Game and that I am a poor loser - not that I lose very often.

Hopefully this field season will go as well as past fieldseasons, volunteer wise. We are expecting 3 IUP undergraduates, 1 IUP grad student, 4 Messiah undergraduates, 1 Penn State graduate student, and 1 UND graduate student. We plan to continue the PKAP blogging we started last summer so you will learn how things go for this group of students.

RSM

Dreary Tuesday

Today was a dreary Tuesday in Indiana, PA - wet, slushy, and a cold rain falling for most of the day that has now turned into snow. This week my Digital History class is talking more about information literacy. I asked them to define information literacy in class and they really struggled trying to find words to describe a term that they all seemed to feel that they knew. It is interesting that while universities are always talking about improving their students' information literacy, at least at IUP it does not seem to be working. I then had the students look on the web for websites that felt helped them better understand the concept of information literacy. Almost all of them relied on the ACRL (Association of Colleges and Research Libraries) Information Literacy website. We had a pretty interesting class discussion and I felt good about what they learned.

Allow me to post a followup to my last posting on the PKAP Tshirts. When I finished the post yesterday, I closed Typepad and opened up Outlook and checked my email. I was stunned to find a comment already posted on my posting from an unnamed history department colleague. He offered to help me out with the Tshirt design by putting me in touch with a friend that is good at designing Tshirts - an offer I intend to take him up on. He also finished his comment with "I don't know much about art, but they [the tshirt design] suck. Ouch.

RSM

Random Thoughts

As we get closer to the summer fieldseason, we are trying to 1) create lists of needed equipment; 2) buy, beg or borrow said equipment; and 3) find a way to get the equipment from the US to Cyprus. For a change, we actually have access to lots of equipment. The departments of history, anthropology, and geography have been writing collaborative grants for a few years and finally have been fortunate to win several grants (both internal and external) to purchase equipment. As I talked to David Pettegrew, I realized how far PKAP has come in the last few years. We now have access to laptops, digital cameras, GPS handhelds, GPS survey units, GPR units, and 3D scanners. Our bigger problem is getting it all to Cyprus. I have tried to contact British Air via email to see if they have any suggestions on how to ferry this equipment to Cyprus, but have not heard from them. It would not be so bad if the equipment was only going one-way, but it all has to come back since we share the equipment with other departments at IUP.

My other project is to design a project T-shirt. It falls to me to do it since nobody else will. The problem is that while nobody else volunteers to design it, they all have criticisms of the finished project. So if you have any suggestions......

RSM

Feeling Good about Digital History

I asked the students in my Digital History class to help me evaluate what I have covered in class so far. I was worried that it was too much of a review, especially the website evaluation class. In class the students all seemed to indicate that I wasn't covering any new material and this really concerned me that the class was too boring, or perhaps too remedial. It felt pretty good to receive the following email from a student today:

• I don't know if it's because I've had you for two classes prior to this one, but rating websites is a review to me.  As far as I know, you are the only professor (that I've had) that teaches us about good and bad sources...I do think it is a valuable lesson.  Even though I have heard the lecture (and have seen the website) three times now, I still learn something new that I didn't know before.  I would definitely keep it because it is nice to have a reminder of how to view websites.

Perhaps I am on the right track after all.

RSM

www.pkap.org - Up and Running, Sort of

It looks like the new address for PKAP (www.pkap.org) is up and running, sort of. It looks like most pages are working, a few are still not fixed completely, but I will get to them over the weekend. My biggest problem is that the navigation bar isn't working quite right in Internet Explorer. It works fine in Firefox, but not in IE 7. The drop-down menu works but the top bar links don't go anywhere. The cursor acts like a link is present, but that is all. I'll try again to fix it tomorrow.

PKAP also added another archaeological short, "An Artifact's Journey," to our Emerging Cypriot documentary web-page. This short film follows an artifact from its discovery in the in the field, through cleaning, analysis, and cataloguing stages. This is my favorite short from last summer. I really think it does a good job of showing how artifacts are moved through the various stages and how many people are involved in the process.

RSM

PKAP Website Migration

I got an email from my college technical support staff late this afternoon letting me know that they had moved the PKAP website from its old location (www.chss.iup.edu/pkap/) to its new home at www.pkap.org. On one hand, this is good news and I have been wondering when this would happen. On the other hand, when they moved the site this broke a lot of the links, including the navigation bar. This is a minor problem in that I just need to login to the site and fix some of the pages. Well, I hope it is minor, the navigation bar took a lot of time to get it to work at the old site, so we will see what happens. The problem is that they did not give me the information I need to login to the new site and so I can't make any changes until they answer my email, which they will hopefully do tomorrow when they get in to work. I hope to be able to fix the website by Monday, but we will see how much I can get done. I also need to put in a redirect at the old site and update Google Analytics. In addition, Sam Fee has offered to help us upgrade the website and make it more visually appealing.

RSM

Digital History and Website Evaluation

This week in my digital history class we are discussing web site evaluation. In previous classes we talked about html editors, briefly played around in Microsoft FrontPage, and talked about basic wesite creation. This week we are discussing how to evaluate a website from an information literacy viewpoint. I had them look at several websites that discussed how to evaluate websites, from a historian's point of view. These sites included:

• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Thinking Critically about WWW Resources
• Reference Shelf: Evaluating Online Resources
• Historians and the Web: A Beginner's Guide (AHA)
• Evaluating Websites (Public History Resource Center)

As we talked (it is a pretty informal class since each section is only 8 people) it became clear that the students were aware of most of the points I wanted to make. One area that they have problems with though, is evaluating the accuracy of websites. As one student asked me, "But if we are looking for information - how can we possibly know what is wrong or inaccurate?" I think this is an important problem in most students' research efforts, not just on the web but also in the library. It looks to me like they find one, or at most two sources, and then write their research paper from it. If the assignment calls for a minimum number of sources, I suspect the students rely on one source and then sprinkle in the other sources only in an effort to meet the requirements of the assignment. The related problem to this is that students still believe everything they read on the web, or in a book or article. I tried stressing to them that an important part of information literacy is evaluating your sources to determine their value, based on the criteria we discussed today.

Their homework assignment this week is to read through the websites above and then take the 10 websites they found for me a couple of weeks ago and evaluate them by giving the websites some sort of score, based on any scale the students want to create. Then they need to visit the Public History Resource Center Rating System webpage and use this criteria for evaluating the 10 sites and see how the 2 scores compare. I asked them to make sure to do their personal scoring system first to ensure that they were not influenced by the Public History Resource Center System.

RSM

Frustrating Day

After reading Bill Caraher's blog "Monday Metadata" on tracking his hits, I decided I should do the same (And yes, I realize that it looks like I rely quite a bit on Bill's blog for ideas for mine). I emailed him and found out that he is using Google Analytics for acquiring most of his information. I did a little surfing and it seemed that everyone agreed that this was a pretty good service - and free, can't beat that. In my surfing I found several sites that explained what to do to set up Google Analytics on a Typepad blog, for example Ed Batista's blog. I also found an interesting blog by Seth Godin on "How to Misuse Google Analytics." After this research, I decided to take 5 minutes and set up Google Analytics. That's when things went horribly wrong. No matter what I did, I could not get it to work and when I searched the Internet all I found was web page after web page saying how easy it was to set up. I tried inserting the code and even played around with a widget designed for Google Analytics (Notice the two widgets on the right sidebar). After an hour and a half I gave up and went to teach. To show you how desperate I was, I even resorted to asking my honors core class if anyone there knew about Google Analytics. The first response I got was "Is that some sort of program you losers use in Second Life." Anyway, after class I immediately went back to working on it, and I know you sensible people are asking, Why didn't you just give up? The only answer I can give is that I refuse to let a computer or a computer program win. Yes, I know that this is stupid and childish, but that's me. Anyway, over the next hour I tried all of my tried and true computer tricks: cursing at the computer, beating the desk, threatening it, etc. Suddenly it worked and I have absolutely no idea why - maybe the threats worked. Once I got it to work I also added it to the PKAP website. So that's how I spent most of my day, instead of grading, scanning, writing, or any other productive task.

RSM