Ancient History Ramblings

PKAP SL Conference Again?

Well, my panic attacks over PKAP matters (rooms, costs, supplies, etc.) have not subsided (in fact they are getting worse), so I emailed my co-directors Bill Caraher and David Pettegrew and asked them to meet me for another PKAP meeting in Second Life. It really has been quite helpful for us to meet in SL and discuss project matters. Bill set up a wiki for the project and we have been using that quite a bit and it was a great idea to set it up. However, since I am fairly concerned over a number of different issues, I want immediate feedback from Bill and David, as well as some give and take, and a wiki doesn't really allow for that - but SL does. The hardest part was finding a time that worked for all 3 of us, but we are shooting for tomorrow afternoon. Before the meeting I need to make out an agenda of the issues I want us to discuss. I also need to rerun the budget and see how it has changed, fortunately the Euro has remained fairly steady and hasn't climbed past $1.60.....yet.

RSM

PKAP Panic Mode

I sat down last night and made a list of everything I needed to do before I leave for Cyprus on May 13th - a mere 45 days away. After making the list I had to lie down and try to relax, because making the list helped me get a better idea of what I needed to do, but at the same time made me realize that I am probably not going to get everything done. And this list did not include the standard things like grading, teaching, committees, etc. I really need to find something to help me organize everything. I have using my PDA an Outlook as a way to schedule things, but since I use 3 different computers it doesn't work well. It will only get worse next year when I add another office and another computer. I have tried to find software to help me get better organized, but haven't seen anything I like that is affordable. My goal today and tomorrow is to create an itemized list that I can rank in importance and attach some dates to. I also think we need another PKAP meeting to make sure the senior staff is all on the same page.

RSM

Thoughts on Technology

This has been a very busy week, committee meeting wise. (I realize that I seem to be complaining about this a lot lately - sorry).  In particular, my meetings this week have focused on technology issues. For example, in one meeting yesterday we discussed the implementation of "clicker technology." Clicker technology refers to the use of audience response systems, such as the system distributed by TurningPoint Technology. Today my meeting was about Second Life and our growing collection of SL islands. So after all this focus on technology over the last 2 days, it was interesting to run across the article "Colleges Bought Classroom Technology, But Are Enough Professors Using It?" in The Chronicle's Wired Campus Newsletter. The short article referred to an earlier commentary by Judith Tabron entitled "How to Find What Clicks in the Classroom." The commentary raises several good points, such as:

"The trouble is that it's going to take a long time for academe to figure out what to do with all the technology it already has — and we need time and money to do that. Teaching is a complex activity, an odd combination of creativity and planning. And not only are the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts different from one another, but every course has its own personality."

The adoption of new technology is always very slow at a university since it requires training and resources if a university wants to commit to it in any significant way. Too often, universities administrators rely on faculty to pave the way in implementing new technologies. While it is good to see faculty lead the way, it unfortunately requires the faculty member to do this without any university support. While I understand that many public universities are facing budget crises (and mine is facing a fairly severe one that will result in decreased faculty lines and increased class size - always a disheartening situation), administrators need to find a way to support these new initiatives with money and other resources. I know that this isn't happening because I see colleagues renting server space to practice with blogging services, content management systems, and other new technologies. Hopefully this change, it just doesn't appear that it will change in the near future.

RSM

Episode 8 now online

Episode 8 of Emerging Cypriot, "Wall on Vigla," is now available on-line. This episode deals with what I felt was one of the most exciting discoveries we made last summer. The area had suffered torrential rains about 6 weeks before we arrived. These downpours had stripped away a layer of soil, exposing the remains of a Late Roman wall encircling the heights of Vigla. One of our senior staff members convinced the British RAF

to fly over the site and take low level digital photos of the area and this wall showed up quite clearly in the photos. To me, this was a great discovery, until we stopped and tried to reconcile this Late Roman wall with the scads of Classical and Hellenistic pottery on Vigla. To further complicate matters, our resistivity survey on Vigla seemed to reveal the outlines of a Late Roman Basilica which fit in nicely with the wall. But the pottery?

There is no doubt about the pottery, and I am not saying that just because I was the ceramcist, but because the forms present are ones that are readily identified by anyone who has seen only a little Hellenistic and/or Classical pottery. To settle this problem, we asked for and received permission to conduct limited soundings to "ground-truth" the resistivity results. It promises to be an interesting summer.

RSM

Scanning

This week in Digital History we are discussing scanning and putting texts on-line. We have a couple of different scanners in the lab and hopefully have a few more on the way. So far, very few of my students have scanned anything and those that have, have only scanned photos. We talked about OCR and looked at a few sites who have put historical texts on-line. I also gave them time to work as a group on their class project. Each of the three sections of students is going to create a section of a wiki devoted to digital history and technology at IUP. They are still deciding on their topics, but are leaning towards:

• Information Literacy
• Technology at IUP (email, library, computer labs)
• Instructional Tools (WebCT, Second Life)

They have to let me know their final decision this week and I will let you know what they decide. Monday's class spent a lot of time arguing about it and did not seem to come to any consensus.

RSM

Sorry for the break

Sorry for my sudden silence. The combination of the Easter weekend, college basketball, and falling behind in grading resulted in my forgetting to write my blog for a couple of days. So to catch up, let's see..

On the PKAP front, the 7th short from our work last summer (Wall on Kokkinokremos) is now available for viewing on-line. In this episode, our two Bronze Age experts (Dimitri Nakassis and Michael Brown) are working on the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos, an area we started working on last summer.

I also decided that if I am to properly use the Trimble R8 this summer that I need to practice with it on a regular basis to ensure that I don't forget something important. So today, after class I got the R8 out and practiced setting it up. This time, I also wrote down each step of the process (actually my dad did that)and also took screen shots of the software. My goal is to create a manual for operating the R8 that will help other PKAP project members learn to use it.

On Friday, I started to panic about the upcoming PKAP season, in particular the fact that I am not sure if we have all the equipment we need, how are we going to get it to Cyprus, etc. Fortunately I was able to talk to Bill and David and feel better about the situation. But we will see of that changes over the next week since I want to have everything we need for the summer ordered by the end of the 1st week of April.

RSM

Information Literacy

I had a college technology committee meeting today and the talk at the end of the meeting turned to information literacy. It became clear that information literacy has become discipline specific and that there were wide variations in opinion on the subject even among departments housed in the same college. For example, one departmental rep wanted to know what the consensus was on Wikipedia since his department felt that it should never be consulted while another department felt that it was a good starting point for students starting their research. As we talked about this, we came to the realization that there really was no body or group at IUP designed to address the issue of information literacy and that it has now been delegated or relegated to departments. This would not be a problem, but while I feel that my departmental colleagues are very good at traditional information literacy, there are many that are unfamiliar with the newer, digital aspects of information literacy. What does this discussion lead to? That I do not know, but it really has me thinking that (in an ideal world) all of our history majors would have to take an information literacy course taught by a historian in the department. Since we are short on faculty, however, I do not see this happening any time soon.

RSM

3D Scanner arrives

Today was a big day, it actually felt like Christmas - this morning I got a call from IUP's Shipping and Receiving complaining that they had a box from NextEngine for me, but were missing some paperwork on it. By afternoon however, everything was cleared up and I was able to pick it up. I had some grading to catch up on so I waited until this evening to set it up and that process went very smoothly, perhaps too smoothly since it gave me some false confidence. Then I tried to scan an object and things ground to a halt, the scans were not coming out right. I finally gave up after about an hour and decided that I will need to do 2 things: 1) Read the online support pages, and 2) ask the guys in IUP's Applied Media and  Simulation Games Center for a crash course on scanning objects. If I drag this scanner to Cyprus (as I intend to) and can't get it to work correctly, I'll never hear the end of it from Bill about my "gadgets." Maybe I'll give it one more shot before bed.....

RSM

Varia

Not too much on any one thought today - my mind has been schizophrenic lately.

• Interest continues to grow about Twitter, which I blogged about back in February. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus had another short piece on it in their article - "More on Academic Twittering: Breaking Down the Classroom Walls."
• Omeka continues to confound my college tech guys, they have not been able to solve the password issue. It is an IUP server problem, but one that needs to be fixed if PKAP is going to push forward with experimenting with it. I really wanted to get a first exhibit up in it before I left for Cyprus in May.
• In looking for equipment for the summer I stumbled across the Past Horizons - Archaeological Equipment Store and Worldwide Fieldwork Opportunities web page, looks interesting. I haven't had much of a chance to explore it yet, but will tomorrow.

RSM

PKAP Planning

Today turned unexpectedly into a PKAP planning day. I had a few minutes after dinner and so I started working on the lodging situation. I still do not have a good way to do this other than using Excel to mark off the days people will be in Cyprus and then color code the entries based on the different rooms. As I was doing this I realized that my budget sheet was off in certain areas, such as lengths of stay, how many people are actually participating, etc. The biggest problem though is the exchange rate. Cyprus went to the Euro on January 1st and so when I made the budget out a few months ago, since the Euro was worth US $1.38, I built the budget using an exchange rate of $1.48. Clearly I was overly optimistic since the Euro was worth $1.57 today. I even saw an economist on TV who was predicting the Euro would make it to $3.00, hopefully he is wrong. If this keeps up, we will have to find a cheaper place to work. To depress myself I added a currency converter on my sidebar and on the blog.

RSM