Ancient History Ramblings

Back from Break

Sorry for the lack of blogging, but I took a break for Christmas. It was a hectic semester, and I needed some time to recover, at least mentally. Now that I am back at IUP, I have a few things I need to work on. On one hand, I have some work I need to do for the department, such as scheduling, writing letters, etc. More pressing, the (AIA) Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting will be held next week in Philadelphia, and I am planning on attending.  As usual, this means I need to finish up a poster for the meeting. PKAP will also hold several meetings as we plan for the summer. This means that the PKAP season is truly underway, at least the planning part. I have to admit that each year I feel better about our planning process as we learn from our mistakes.

RSM

Email Etiquette

One of the nice things about the semester break is the way my email inbox stops filling up, I go from about 100 messages a day down to less than 10. On one hand, it is nice since fewer emails means less work. On the other hand it is disconcerting to check my email after a few hours and not have nay new messages, it seems strange. This means that the emails I receive get a closer scrutiny and I realize that many students know next to nothing about email etiquette. I looked on the IUP website and found only a few pages that offered any advice on email etiquette and it was often outdated or brief. I started looking on the web and realized some schools do a decent job, such as Purdue, but that many do not. So I started wandering, is this a skill we expect students to learn before entering college? Or should it be one we work on when they arrive? I have colleagues I know who could use a refresher in email etiquette, so perhaps it is a skill that needs brushing off occasionally which means we should incorporate it into our classes.

RSM

FERPA Updated

The U.S. Department of Education recently released new regulations that updated FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) due to changes in legislation and new technology trends. The governmental guidebook is a bit confusing and long, but a summary can be found at The Wired Campus, and Inside Higher ED. I am always surprised to meet academics who are not familiar with FERPA, or only have the most basic understanding of it. Students and their parents also seem to have very little knowledge of FERPA, and this is too bad since FERPA was set up to protect student privacy. I always think about FERPA at this time of the year when I receive emails and phone calls from parents who would like to know what grades their kids received in my classes. I have noticed that this year, when I explain to them that I cannot legally give them that information, they seem to be more insistent that since they pay the bills they deserve this information. Is this due to the economy or a change in our culture?

RSM 

A Few Items of Interest

Well the semester is almost over - I have one more grading meeting tomorrow and then I am done, except for departmental items. Anyway, a couple of things I noticed since my last post:

• The World Wide Web Consortium recently released a new version of guidelines (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0) for making web sites more accessible for people with disabilities.
• IUP has been investigating the use of audience response systems, such as TurningPoint, and debating over its value for a couple of years. Abilene Christian University, which gave out iPhones and IPod Touch devices to its incoming freshmen, has developed an application for the iPhone that allows the phones to be used as audience response systems. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

RSM

Semester Winding Down

It has been hard to get much time to write a blog lately. Exams started today at IUP, and written assignments are being turned in for my classes over the next 2 days. In addition to the grading, it seems that all of my committees are determined to meet at least at the same time. I have had 7 meetings over the last week, with 1 more to go tomorrow after my Medieval History exam. I also need to start working on my poster for the upcoming AIA meeting in January - hopefully that will go more smoothly than last year's.

RSM

Facebook/MySpace Danger?

I hate to sound like an old man wary of change, but I usually try to warn each of my classes about the danger that the Internet could pose to them if they aren't careful. There have been numerous accounts of how postings on the web, particularly on Facebook/MySpace, have caused people problems with employers, schools, and even the law. A case in point was the Millersville University student who was denied a degree in education because of a photo and text on her MySpace page. I try to point out to my students that you have to be careful when you post things since they can come back to haunt you in many different ways. There is also the concern that just because you delete a page, post, or email doesn't mean that it is truly gone. One of my classes argued with me about this claiming that what they did on their own time was their business and should have no impact on them. I pointed out to them that while that should be true, that they needed to be able to separate the theoretical from the practical. I also suggested they read the article "Unrepentant on Facebook? Expect Jail Time" on CNN.com.

RSM

West Point Oral History Project

The history department of the US Military Academy at West Point is in the process of creating a video oral history project. The West Point Center for Oral History was created to provide a video oral history repository that aims to document the military experience using video clips to document the stories of soldiers from different eras.The web page for the project states that:

• The West Point Center for Oral History will be the premier oral history archive of the story of the American soldier, in both war and peace. It will serve as a powerful learning tool for West Point cadets and as an important research center for historians and the general public. Interview subjects will range from veterans of World War II through soldiers returning from the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

RSM

CMS Wars Heating Up

The fight over course-management software (CMS) is certainly becoming quite heated. Blackboard, who is unhappy with the United States Patent and Trademark Office over its decision to reexamine Blackboard's patent, is now suing the US Patent Office over its decision. My interest in this is due to IUP's exploration of various CMS systems as we are forced to look for a replacement to WebCT, which was bought by Blackboard and eventually phased out. We have been testing out Sakai and Moodle, two open source systems, but have not made a choice yet.

RSM

Interesting Approach to Teaching

Dr. David Wiley, an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, is taking an interesting approach to teaching one of his upcoming classes "Introduction to Open Education." He is turning his online course into a role-playing game and is opening it to all interested participants. On his syllabus he presents an compelling argument for the class:

• "Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures - for talking the talk but failing to walking the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field to do. There are two ways to describe the design of this course, and both are equally valid. On the one hand, this course is a mix of direct skills instruction combined with project-based learning and collaborative problem solving. The course employs a progression of increasingly complex problems with supportive information, and requires students to synthesize hundreds of pages of literature, interview data, and their own design intuition to produce meaningful artifacts both individually and as part of highly inter-dependent teams. The idea of teach-reteach (characterized so well in Gong's description of the Three Person Problem) is at the heart of the students' day-to-day learning experiences. On the other hand, the course is a massively multiplayer role-playing game in which students select a character class, develop specialized expertise, complete a series of individual quests, join a Guild, and work with members of their Guild to accomplish quests requiring a greater breadth of skills than any one student possesses. One need not look very far to find indications that the genre is extremely effective in promoting informal learning - see the work of Constance Steinkuehler and John Seely Brown as examples. Despite the impressive work of Constance, JSB, and others, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever designed and implemented a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. In addition to helping students gain a working knowledge of the field of open education (i.e., knowledge they can actually put to work), this course is a design experiment exploring the effectiveness of running a university course as a massively multiplayer role-playing game."

As I usually say, it will be interesting to see what the final results for this experiment are.

RSM