Ancient History Ramblings

More on cheating or prevention of it

I noticed another article on cheating, or its prevention - "Keeping an Eye on Online Students." This is a very interesting article, at least I thought so. I am on several committees at IUP where the issue of monitoring online testing always arises and usually leads to a .....shall we say, spirited debate between opponents of Distance Education and its supporters. The articles talks about:

• "The technologies include Web cameras that watch students taking tests and scanners that capture students’ fingerprints."

It also references how the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is driving some of this. Having to more closely monitor distance education would drive up the cost and perhaps force universities to offer fewer classes or perhaps change the way they offered them or charged for them.

RSM

Distance Ed Gets Boost

The Wired Campus had an interesting article about how higher gas prices are leading to an increase in enrollments for distance education - "Have Gas Prices Pushed Distance-Education Popularity Past a Tipping Point?" For a longer article on the subject check out a related article in the Chronicle - "Gas Prices Drive Students to Online Course." It will be interesting to see how administrators react to this trend and how faculty will react to an increase in pressure from both students and administrators to offer distance education classes. I certainly appreciate the value of distance education courses and believe that when done right they can be as effective as a traditional class. The problem I have with many distance education classes is that many instructors believe that all they have to do to create an online version of their "traditional" class is to post their PowerPoint lectures in WebCT or Blackboard. There is more to a good online course than this.

RSM

More thoughts on Public History

I am still musing over my recent sightseeing in London. My thoughts today centered on why people go to see certain sights and not others. What draws people to one sight over another? Is it publicity? Personal interest? Pre-packaged itineraries? For me, it was the historical interest in seeing places I teach about. I have also been wondering about the importance of websites in attracting visitors to sights. I really noticed more people carrying laptops around and pulling them out to look up stuff, check email, etc. I guess I really noticed this in London when I was at a cafe right outside the National Gallery. A young lady, who I had seen inside the gallery, came into the cafe and sat down. She reached into her purse and pulled out a laptop that she fired up and started surfing the web. When I walked behind her I noticed that she was surfing the National Gallery's website. A few minutes later she was on the British Museum's site, and after a few minutes she closed up the laptop and headed off, I presume to the British Museum. This certainly makes me wonder how many people channel surf, so to speak, websites before choosing their sightseeing itinerary. I am not sure where I am going with this yet. We'll see.

RSM

Monday and Tuesday

Trying to catch up here. Let's see, on Monday I was part of a survey team that worked on the northern part of the Vigla region. We explored twenty 40 by 40 meter grid squares. We were able to do this quite quickly since these units had little or no vegetation and very few artifacts. In looking at the artifacts we collected, very few will be helpful since most are this orange coarseware that you see in our area over many different periods. There were only 2 pieces that holf the promise of being sometyhing nicer than a coarseware storage vessel, but they need to be washed before we can be sure.

On Tuesday we started up the 3D scanner at the museum and it looks like it could be quite useful. We did learn one lesson, temperature affects the color of the scan in a pretty drastic fashion - somebody opened the door to the storeroom we wree working in and you could feel this draft of warm air blow through the room and that particular pass on the 3D scanner came out discolored, a dark purple. I will try to post some of the scans in the next day or so, I need to figure out how to do that.

RSM

A Lazy Sunday

Sunday was a day off for everyone. We had several different staff meetings to establish the teams for the upcoming week, etc. - but it was mainly a day for people to catch up on paperwork and other projects. I had several different projects I worked on, but the fun one was testing out our 3D scanner. I brought over a NextEngine desktop 3D Scanner to test out. I hooked it up and played with it a bit, to limited success. Fortunately, Jessie Freas (an IUP anthropology student) came by and took over. She worked with it before it left IUP and seems to have a flair for using it that eludes me. It is funny how everyone that came by my room commented on how cool the lasers looked - so at least it looks good. Hopefully, it will produce results that people think look cool, not just the laser show. It will get its first test at the museum on Tuesday.

RSM 

T-Minus 6 Days

Sorry for missing yesterday, but the days are getting more and more packed between graduation upcoming and gathering up my supplies for Cyprus. I am always paranoid that I will forget something crucial. Today I practiced with the 3D scanner and finally decided to bring it to Cyprus for a tryout. I came to this decision because I have an undergraduate anthropology student who agreed to haul it to Cyprus for me, and I am going to bring an extra laptop for running it so that we can have a separate GIS  laptop. I also talked to a former PKAP student who is now working on her MA in Geography at IUP. She has a project that she would like us to gather data for this summer, so we spent some time talking about where she wanted the data collected from. She is interested in line of sight and from how far away structures on Vigla would have been visible.

As a non-Twitter user, I keep finding lots of mentions of Twitter in the news. The Chronicle of Higher Education's The Wired Campus has another article about it - "Twittering During a Campus Lockdown." I guess I ought to join. So.....I actually just took a minute and joined. Now I need to find some friends on Twitter and that may be the hard thing for me, due to a lack of friends and technologically savvy ones at that.

RSM

Monday...just Monday

Well, my departure for Cyprus is now only 8 days away. I managed to finish up the PKAP supply list today by buying plumb bobs at Lowes. This turned out to be harder than I thought since the first 3 employees I talked to did not know what a plumb bob was. My next step is to divide up the supplies I have among the 4 IUP students going to Cyprus with me so that I only have to worry about the GIS equipment which is bulky and unwieldy.

I read a very interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education's The Wired Campus about a paper which takes the position that using current leisure activities, such as iPods and online discussions, actually corrupts the learning process. The article, "Learning to Leisure? Failure, Flame, Blame, Shame, Homophobia and Other Everyday Practices in Online Education" by Juliet Eve and Tara Brabazon, appeared in the Journal of Literacy and Technology's April 2008 volume. It was interesting to read since so many people are eagerly adopting new technologies as soon as they appear. The article, I believe, goes a bit too far in its conclusions.

• "We have gone too far in valuing the student “experience” over scholarly responsibilities to knowledge. We have “facilitated” an unproductive confusion between valuing student views and validating ignorance, discrimination and oppression." (p.58)

RSM

Harry Potter Internet Trial

For a change of pace (and because today was very busy), I thought I would suggest that if you get a chance, you should read the CNN article  by Sunny Hostin entitled "Harry Potter case brings the law into the Internet Age." I have to admit that I have never read a Harry Potter novel, which makes me a member of a very small group of people. Anyway, this case revolves around the creation of a Harry Potter website which was then published as a lexicon. Harry Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, is suing to stop the publication. Lawyers are split over the legal issues of the case and many analysts feel that this will be an important case for setting precedent. As the article states:

• "Most likely, the law simply hasn't caught up with the Internet. The Copyright Act of 1976, enacted way before the advent of the Internet and the fan-based Web sites, bestows copyright owners with control of their creative work. A copyright is supposed to protect its owner, and thus, only the author can authorize others to reproduce the work. But that right is not unfettered, as many think. One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "'fair use'."

RSM

Odds and Ends, Part II

A couple of quick hits:

• A student arrested in Egypt sent out a twitter message to his friends who were able to get him out of jail after contacting the US Embassy. (the article is on Wired). I was pleased that some of my students from my digital history class emailed me about this story.
• Our new Macintosh for the history department's computer lab arrived this week and is being set up. I haven't used a Mac since the mid 80s when my computer classes used them for programming classes in PASCAL - and yes I realize that shows how old I am and how bright I am for switching from Computer Science in the 80s to classics.
• I realize the PKAP season must be close since I noticed my PKAP email volume is increasing, as well as the fact that I have called David on the phone every day for the last week - I'd call Bill but he's in Greece and I'm cheap.
• The other thing that makes me realize that the PKAP season is approaching is the fact that colleagues at IUP (not in my department) are asking me if I am headed back to my archaeology project this summer. The humorous thing is that some think it is in Crete, others in Greece, and even one thinks it is in Syria. I know one faculty member who for the last 3 years has asked me about my work in Crete. I used to correct him, but I eventually gave up and now pretend to work in Crete when I meet him, and boy have I made some fabulous discoveries there.

RSM

Blogging

Since Bill Caraher has been blogging about blogging [check out his article "Blogging Archaeology and the Archaeology of Blogging" on the Archaeology website], an article by Hurley Goodall in the Chronicle's Wired Campus Newsletter I receive by email caught my attention - "Blogs May Be Rendered Obsolete by New Technology." The article talks about recent developments like Shyftr, which allows its users to read all their sites in one place and discuss these posts with other members at this site, not on the original blog. Some people are concerned that this will negatively impact the blogs since comments and discussions posted to the blog engender further discussion and if this discussion moves off-site it both eliminates the author from the discussion and removes it from his or her control.

RSM