Ancient History Ramblings

Europeana

Europeana, the new digital library that is the result of collaboration between 27 European countries debuted on November 20 and had tremendous initial success. The website soon crashed due to the interest it had generated,averaging more than 10 million hits per hour. It will supposedly return in mid-December. The project has been characterized as a "pan-European digital library, archive, and museum." While the digital collection is not available, there are several web pages that do work and provide basic information about the project. including the following blurb:

• "Europeana – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media."

RSM

Minnesota Going Online

The governor of Minnesota announced last week that the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (32 state supported technical colleges, community colleges, and state universities) will offer 25% of all their courses online by 2015, an increase of 16%. Governor Pawlenty said that:

• “We live in an iPod world but much of our education system is dominated by whiteboards and lecture halls,” Governor Pawlenty said. “We have students with different learning styles, different backgrounds, different capabilities, and exploding interest in online opportunities and services. We need to modernize the way college courses are delivered and put Minnesota on the cutting edge of online education.”

In addition, every high school student would be required either to take an one online course or participate in an online experience of some sort to graduate. It will be interesting to see how this will be implemented.

RSM

Google not so "Lively" anymore

Google recently announced that it plans to shut down its virtual world, Lively, by the end of 2008. Google only introduced the virtual world a few months ago. Google says on its blog that it has decided to focus its attention on its "...core search, ads and apps business." Despite Google's success in other ventures, Lively never received much public acclaim and in fact was criticized by many people who saw it as a flop and felt that it did not offer much to the virtual world competition. Its membership saw a steady decline, including a 30% drop in the number of visitors from September to October. It will be interesting to see if the tightening economy affects people's interest in participating in virtual worlds, either positively or negatively. 

RSM

Time Flying and A Case of Blow Out

It dawned on me today that I had missed a few days of blogging. I wish I had a good excuse, but I don't. I do have, however, 2 bad excuses. One is that the semester is drawing to a close and things are getting hectic with papers, meetings, honors theses, etc. My second excuse is that I am just blown out. Blowout is a PKAP term for a mental state senior staff sometimes get into due to a combination of overwork, lots of sun, and high heat. For me, it is characterized by me lying around and reading or sleeping, instead of doing work. I did not think I could get blown out in the US and that the condition was limited to archaeological projects in the Mediterranean, but I noticed my symptoms yesterday, plus I was using more PKAP jargon than ever - I assume that this is a side effect of blow out in the US.

One news item I noticed today was "Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts." It seems that officials at BC felt that many students came to school with established email addresses that they preferred to use and did not use their BC email address. So they will offer email forwarding instead. I found this to be interesting since IUP has gone in the opposite direction and stopped forwarding student email in an effort to force students to use their IUP email address. This is an important issue since ensuring communication between faculty and students, and the university and students is very important. It is amazing how many students come in and say they never heard about something important we were trying to publicize (a deadline, a grant, etc.).  It will be interesting to see which solution works best.

RSM

Thinking about Online Teaching some more

I am on several committees school where the subject of online teaching or distance education comes up. Usually in these committees, which are mainly composed of faculty members, the issue that concerns most people is academic integrity. Are the students on the other end of the computer connection who they say they are? And are they cheating in some fashion (group work, plagiarism, etc)? A recent article in The Wired Campus ("Is That Online Student Who He Says He is?") introduces some new technology, such as the Securexam Remote Proctor or Kryterion's Webassessor,  that is under development to help universities deal with this issue. The issue is a pressing one since the Higher Education Act now requires universities and colleges to verify the identities of their online students in some fashion. It will be quite interesting to see how this develops in the future as colleges compete for online students.

RSM

Google Earth and Rome

I read an article in the Guardian about a virtual recreation of ancient Rome that is the result of a collaboration between Google Earth and the Roman Reborn project. It can be seen at http://earth.google.com/intl/en/rome/ and is certainly worth looking at. You will need to download Google Earth 4.3 if you do not have it. It took me a little while to figure it out, and understand what I needed to do to download the 3D terrain, but it was certainly worth the effort.

RSM

New Pyramid Discovery in Egypt

It was announced recently that a new pyramid has been discovered in Egypt at the site of Saqqara. The pyramid might have been the tomb for Queen Sesheshet, mother of the Pharaoh Teti - a pharaoh of the 6th dynasty. There have been a few stories on the web, most of them saying the same thing - MSNBC, BBC, USA Today, Fox, etc. - but it is worth checking out.

RSM

A Better Search Engine

A new project is underway to create a better search engine. The project's webpage says that it:

• "Reference Extract is envisioned as a web search engine, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, unlike other search engines, Reference Extracts will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe. Users will enter a search term and get results weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State of Maryland, and over 1,400 libraries worldwide. This grant will support planning for Reference Extract and building the foundation necessary to implement it as a large-scale, general user service."

The project is a joint project of the University of Washington, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), and Syracuse University. While this is an intriguing idea, I have to believe that it will be hard to dislodge Google from its perch at the top of search engines.

RSM

About Time for Another Rant

Well, it has been a while since I expressed my, shall we say, anger about an issue. Today's topic deals with SW Pennsylvania. People living here have the curious habit of when they are trying to order food in a fast food restaurant, they try to form one single line about 10 feet from the registers and then go to the next available register. This is especially apparent in the local McDonalds near campus. At lunch recently, about 30 people were waiting to order and they were all bunched in front of the door with this 10 foot gap between them and the 4 working registers. People literally could not get into the restaurant because of this bizarre desire to be waited upon in the exact order people entered the register. Why can they not form 4 lines like in almost every other McDonalds world-wide? There are other fast food restaurants that cordon off a single line that then goes to multiple registers - Wendy's springs to mind. But there is no effort at the McDonalds to help form an organized line, it is left to be an unruly mob. What really bothers me is that this behavior is not consistent. People do not do this at the grocery store, instead they choose a line. Or at the gas station, when the pumps are all occupied, they pull their car into a specific line instead of forming a single waiting line. Or at the car wash....I could go on, but better stop since it is making me angry just thinking about it.

RSM

A few Quick Thoughts

Just a few quick thoughts or items:

• George Mason University has announced that they have no plans to change their FireFox plugin despite a lawsuit by the makers of EndNote alleging that George Mason reverse engineered Zotero from their product.
• Sarah Robbins-Bell, a leader in Second Life teaching, spoke at Educause 2008 on how professors need to adapt to teaching with new technologies in the classroom or risk driving students away from traditional universities. If you have a moment, her keynote address is online and is worth watching.

RSM