The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It finally feels like fall here.  Cold.  So some various varia and quick hits for a cool and cloudy Friday:

• A cool GigaPan of the Cave Art of Niaux.  While you're GigaPaning, be sure to check out Scott "The GigaPanda" Moore's GigaPans from the Pyla-Koutsopetria.
• The good folks at the Center for History and the New Media rolled out the beta test of Omeka.net yesterday.  Here's the page.  Sebastian Heath already has a page.  We await his review!
• From the November 2010 issue of the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: How is New Media Reshaping the Work of Historians?.  And more on a similar theme with the list of Digital History panels at the AHA Meeting in 2012.
• Some pretty clever posts on a brand new blog called The Aporetic: Googling Peer Review and Peer Review and the Public Sphere.
• The Geohistorian is a really cool place based history project.  Their really straight forward presentation "Using QR codes and mobile phones for learning" is the best of its kind that I've seen (here's a link to their powerpointer (.ppt))
• This little video has gone viral (in certain circles).  It's not my favorite thing ever, but its a pretty clever take on the challenges facing anyone interested in getting a PhD in the humanities (although the people who seem to find it funniest, mostly have jobs).
• This is a pretty cool little article-like thing on early telecommunications in Australia.
• Jay-Z in the Wall Street Journal: the very fine line between "blowing up" and selling out.
• The Awl in the New York Times.  See previous bullet point.
• More and more on student's use of eBooks and Apps.
• This is pretty cool: Arne G. Breke Bygdebok Collection (if you don't know what that means, it's not for you!)
• The American School of Classical Studies is (1) videocasting their lecture series this year and (2) inviting cartoonists to speak.  When I recorded a couple of presentations at the School for podcasting, there was interest, but some skepticism.  Now they have embraced the technology.  Imagine how much better a world we'll live in if scholars can't just give the same lecture over and over again, because they'll know it will be recorded and available for the public.
• What I'm listening to: The Clinic, Internal Wrangler and, in memory of Ari Up, The Slits, Cut. (both via my music consultant, Kostis Kourelis)
• What I'm reading: David Forgacs ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader. (New York 2000).

A Defense of Asynchronous Teaching

x-posted to Teaching Thursday.

Recently, I've been talking a good deal with one of my favorite interlocutors on teaching matters, Bret Weber.  He and I approach online teaching in different ways.  While I hesitate to speak for him, it seems to me that his online teaching emphasizes more cohort building, realtime interaction, and incremental assignments with set due dates.  This approach has suited his students, his teaching goals, and his program (Social Work) well.

My approach to online teaching is almost the complete opposite.  When I first developed my idea for online teaching I wanted it be as experientially different from the classroom as possible.  I was probably overly strident in my efforts to establish this difference and romanced by change for the sake of change. Whatever the cause, I developed a radically asynchronous model for teaching my History 101: Western Civilization class.

The class has 2 deadlines, and one of those deadlines is optional.  All work must be done by a date toward the end of the class so that I have some some time left to grade the inevitable onslaught of papers and assignments.  All the course material is available from the start of the class.  The only optional deadline is an optional midterm paper that, if the student decides to write it, is due at the mid point of the semester.  If a student opts out of this midterm paper, he or she must write a final exam paper that brings together all the content of the class.

The lessons in the class are organized into 15 folders numbered for each week.  So students are guided to engage a body of material and assignments each week.  Each weekly folder includes readings, a quiz, a discussion board post, and, in many cases, one or two potential paper topics.  Along with the cumulative paper, students must write two other 3-5 page papers analyzing historical documents from the class. All the work from the all the weeks is due at the end of the semester.  In general, I grade two or three weeks at a time as assignments come in.  Assignments that come much later than two or three weeks behind the weekly folder inevitably get less attention, but the students know that I grade on schedule and give greater attention to work submitted in a regular and consistent way.  I use a Twitter feed and announcements to remind the students to keep up with the course and to let them know where I am in terms of grading material.

This system has certain risks.  For example, I regularly write off the last two weeks of the semester to grade the papers from all the students who leave the work in the class to the last minute. These assignments tend to be, generally, of a lower quality, but the average grades for all assignments are not significantly lower than in my classroom classes where I tend to have more regimented deadlines.  It appears to be the case that this system probably leads some students to do more poorly on their papers which they leave to the last minute. On the other hand, it also appears that some some students do better than they would in a traditional synchronous course, and the students with better outcomes tend of offset the students who perform less consistently.

Aside from the assessed results of the class, his system does offers some additional benefits as well:

1. Flexibility for Students.  Teachers have always bemoaned the absence of face-to-face contact with students in an online environment.  My online classes have attracted students from around the world and across the country.  Face-to-face time would be impossible with these students even leveraging all the technology available to maximize realtime communication in an online environment.  Moreover, many of my online students have lives that make regular schedules difficult.  Online teaching gives a student who works on oil pipelines and needs to be far from civilization for weeks on end, a way to begin a university education. To me this is a good thing, and an asynchronous course, particularly at the introductory level cultivates diversity in our classes and expands the democratizing aspects so close to the heart of higher-education.

2. Flexible Engagement. One of the most challenging parts of creating a class schedule is attempting to address how different students will engage course material over the course of the semester.  For every assignment that some students master easily, other students, particularly in an introductory level course, will find challenging.  An asynchronous course allows students to engage material at their own pace and, moreover, allows different paces to exist in the class at the same time. It is interesting to see the natural divisions among students as small cohorts of students form and engage course materials at similar paces over the course of the semester. In a course of 70, about 10 students stay precisely on the weekly schedule, another 10 or so may fall the occasional week behind, and a third cohort of 10-15 students are never more than 2 weeks behind over the course of the semester.

2. Flexible Assessment. One of the best things from a faculty standpoint of asynchronous teaching is that it restricts the bulk grading experience to one occasion at the end of the semester.  During the semester there is a constant trickle of two or three assignments a day.  I tend to assess assignments on a weekly basis and contribute to the online discussion board slightly more often. I find that grading the slow trickle of assignments over the course of the semester gives me far more time to make substantial comments on student work.  Moreover, it gives an advantage to students who can make reasonably consistent progress through the course.  I've found that even students with the most complex schedules rarely fall more than a couple weeks behind if they attend to the course in a serious way.  The half of the class that maintains a good schedule of engagement over the course of the semester tends to get the kind of substantial comments that allow their work to improve over the course of the semester.  Students who turn in all their work at the end of the semester do not get the same benefits as students who approach the course in a regular way.  They not only tend to get less sustained comments on their work, but also have less time to develop skills and improve on the skills introduced over the course of class.

Asynchronous teaching is not a perfect system for all classes.  I might suggest that that it works best in larger, introductory level courses. It does little to accommodate  unmotivated or undisciplined student who can easily leave their work to the end of the semester or to set deadlines. My experiences has been, however, that these students tend to struggle in any learning environment and  the asynchronous system only exacerbates these issues.

Working Group in Digital and New Media Annual Report and Open House

On Thursday, the Working Group in Digital and New Media at the University of North Dakota will host its first open house and release to its various stake holders its first Annual Report.  The open house will run from 12-1 pm in the Working Group Lab 203 O'Kelly Hall. The open house and report seek to highlight the activities of the Working Group over their first year.  There is still a bunch of work to maximize the potential of this group, but there is momentum and opportunities for collaboration abound!

Since readers of this blog participated in some way in the development of the Working Group (loyal readers probably remember these posts: Potential for Digital Humanities at UND, A Digital Humanities White Paper, and Selling the Working Group in Digital and New Media), I thought it was fair to leak a version of our Annual Report on my blog.  The various members of the Working Group contributed to the Annual Report, I edited it, and Joel Jonientz designed it.

Here's the executive summary from the Annual Report:

The Working Group in Digital and New Media emerged as the result of funding awarded from the President’s call for collaborative and transdisciplinary white papers in his New Initiative funding program. The Working Group is dedicated to the support and development of digital and new media projects across the disciplines on campus. Beginning in the spring of 2009, the Working Group has created a laboratory space uniquely suited to collaborative digital and new projects developed across campus. To date these projects have brought together contributors from the departments of Art and Design, Music, History, English, and Computer Science, as well as the Chester Fritz Library and the ITSS High Performance Computing Cluster. Faculty and students have produced a dynamic and diverse group of projects ranging from video shorts, musical compositions, to online and gallery museum exhibitions and collections, and blogs. Statistically, the Working Group projects accounted for over 2500 person/hours of work, over 15 faculty and student collaborators, and close to 20 major creative and research projects. The Working Group created the intellectual and technological infrastructure necessary for over $35,000 of internal and external grants in its first year alone. In the hyper-competitive realm of non-STEM funding, the collaborative infrastructure Working Group in Digital and New Media gives faculty in the arts and humanities a significant edge. The transdisciplinary research, creative activities, and teaching of the Working Group’s members will continue to leverage the common space of the Working Group Laboratory to expand collaborative research and creative activities on campus.

And here is the Annual Report:

WGDNM Annual Report

Hesperia, Offprints, and the American School

Yesterday I had one of those little thought-provoking coincidences that make you wonder about how things could be done better.

At 11:44 am I got an email from the American School of Classical Studies publication office concerning our soon-to-be-published article on fortification around Ano Vayia.  Our article will appear in the next issue of the American School's journal, Hesperia. The email asked us where we would like our 50 complimentary offprints sent and whether we wanted to purchase 50 more for $150. Hesperia offprints are really lovely things. They are stapled, on high quality paper, impeccably edited, stylish in design, and include a nice, glossy cover.  In short, the $150 price for 50 does not seem unreasonable.

At 1:45 pm that same day I received a form-email from Jack Davis, the Director of the American School of Classical Studies. It was their annual fund-raising email.  The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is one of my favorite things in the world.  The institution played a key role in anything that is good about my professional development and no matter how long I am away, still has the feeling of a home-away-from-home. I have benefited three times over from their generous fellowships and these fellowships have led to my dissertation and numerous publications. I have come to appreciation the American School for its awkward and paradoxical blend of things traditional and things contemporary and "modern". By not shying away from some of the most traditional aspects of a classical education (e.g. the flavor of the Grand Tour that pervades the Regular Program), the School encourages students to reflect on the practices and institutions that have created the disciplines of Classics, Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, et c.  Because of these things, I am in the habit of giving money to the American School.  I can't give much as an Assistant Professor at a state school in North Dakota, but I give my proverbial widow's mite.

Back to the coincidence: In the same day, within hours, the same institution that was asking for money also offered me that very day something for free.  This got me to think: what if we as contributors to Hesperia just turned down our offprints?  Now, I recognize that the circulation of offprints continues to play a small role in the "academic gift economy".  But, as I began to try to make a mental list of people to whom I'd like to send offprints, I was counting far fewer than 50 individuals.  Moreover, many of the people on that list would probably just as soon have a digital offprint (a handsomely formatted .pdf file) suitably disgraced with some personal note of thanks. The digital offprints of Hesperia are every bit as high quality as the print offprints with good resolution on photographs and searchable text.  Moreover, of the handful of people to whom I'd send offprints, almost all of them have access to Hesperia.  Less than a month ago I had a conversation with a resolutely "olde skool" American School type and offered to send him an offprint of my forthcoming article. He smiled, thanked me, and said, that he subscribes to Hesperia. (I knew this, of course, but apparently even among the "olde skool" the ritual component of offprint exchange had fallen into disuse.)

All the same, I can anticipate some people saying that some individuals still keep paper offprint files and some of our European colleagues take the circulation of paper offprints quite seriously and some offprints serve as valuable contributions to small, highly specialized and underfunded libraries (say at the local office of the archaeological service).  The high quality of a Hesperia offprint makes them almost something of intrinsic value.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure (although I won't admit to doing this) that we can still print out a copy of a Hesperia article, scrawl some heartfelt note of thanks of the first page, and present it to a colleague as a token of thanks.  Maybe this violates copyright?  I'm really not sure, but I can hardly imagine this to be the kind of practice that the International Copyright Police would enforce, and it would guess that it would be possible for Hesperia to give authors permission to reproduce a certain number of copies of their own articles. (Although it would be awesome to be approached by a neatly dressed Nigerian man outside the Agora in Athens with a stack of slightly blurry photocopied Hesperia offprints...).

One more thing, Hesperia offers to let us purchase another 50 offprints for $150. Since Hesperia articles tend toward the long side, I assume that this price represents the average cost of printing 50 offprints, perhaps with some small compensation of watering down the copyright (in other words, perhaps they factor in that some people will receive an offprint and will decide not to purchase the journal, but I can't imagine that this represents a very large group).  Last year, Hesperia published 17 articles and if $150 is the average cost of a run of offprints, then they spent about $2550 on offprints.

If every contributor over a year just said, politely, no thank you to offprints from Hesperia, we could, in effect, give the American School Publication Office a gift of $2500. I suspect that each of us would have to turn down all of our offprints because printing enjoys really significant economies of scale, and it seems fair to assume that these economies are realized at 50 copies of each article. I know some contributors will still want to "kick it olde skool" and will want to have their shinny Hesperia offprints, but I also suspect that, if given the option explicitly, a percentage of hipper, new skool contributors would turn ours down.  And I'd like to think that Hesperia and the American School would appreciate this little gift.

David Pettegrew's Setting Stage for St. Paul's Corinth Available as Podcast or Streaming Video

For those of you who could not make it to the David Pettegrew's 2nd Annual Cyprus Research Fund Lecture, fear not!  We have made David's lecture available as both a downloadable podcast and as a streaming video.

Here's the podcast.

Here's the video.

David's two days on campus were really exciting.  Not only did he speak to over 50 faculty,undergraduates, graduate students, and members of the community on the Thursday afternoon talk, but he also contributed to the history department's "brown bag" lecture series on Friday.  At his Friday talk, he presented a great primer to intensive survey archaeology and discussed the ideas of "source criticism" as applied to ancient material culture.  Finally, David took a couple of hours and read Latin with some of our graduate students and undergraduates at our weekly "Latin Friday Morning" reading group.

It is always gratifying to see how much interest there is in the Ancient Mediterranean at the University of North Dakota.  So, if you enjoyed the lecture with here at UND, thanks for coming out! And if you enjoy the lecture via the streaming video or podcast, thanks for listening!  I also should thank Chad Bushy and Caleb Holthusen from UND's Center for Instructional and Learning Technologies office for not only preparing the video and podcasts, but trouble shooting during the live webcast.

And, finally, thanks to David Pettegrew for agreeing to spend his fall break with us at the University of North Dakota. For more on his research and the Roman and Late Roman Corinthia, check out his blog Corinthian Matters.

Local Wildlife

A cute little woodpecker feasting on whatever he was finding in the trees in our windbreak.  My wife took the photos.

 

Some Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Just a quick gaggle of quick hits and varia on a sunny Friday morning:

• Yesterday's Cyprus Research Fund talk was well attended.  Over 50 interested students, colleagues, and members of the community showed up for David Pettegrew's talk: Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth: How an Isthmus determined the maritime character of an ancient landscape.  If you missed it, you can watch the presentation here.  And before too long we'll have the lecture up as an mp3 podcast.
• David directed to me his colleague, John Fea's blog: The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
• Dimitri Nakassis got some blog-press a while back venting his wrath while modifying the function of a plastic chair.
• I know this poem has made the rounds for years, but it's worth linking to again.
• Some interesting thoughts on Digital Humanities.
• The Council on Library and Information Resources and Tufts has produced an impressive report on the state of Digital classics:  Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists.  I haven't processed it, but it looks like an amazing compendium of digital humanities projects and initiatives.  They are looking for comments apparently.
• Some different views of the research library of the future.
• And some more thoughts on E-readers.
• Another interesting archaeology blog from the University of Sydney's Excavations at the Paphos Theatre, Cyprus.
• There is something profound about the Rent is Too Damn High Party.
• What I'm reading: George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. (New York 1970).

David Pettegrew on Corinth! Live on the Interwebs!

Join us today for the 2010 Cyprus Research Fund Lecture: David Pettegrew's "Setting the Stage for St. Paul's Corinth: How the Isthmus Determined the Character of a Roman City."  The talk is at 4 pm today in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.

If you're not from Grand Forks, FEAR NOT!  We'll also stream David's talk for free on the interwebs!  Here's the link.  Just log in a guest.  If you're watching remotely and have a question for David, just Tweet it to me.  Here's my Twitter account (@billcaraher) and use the hashtag: #CRF2010 at the end of your post.

North Dakota's Joseph Kennedy and Psychical Research

Yesterday my History 240 class spent the afternoon at the Elywn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections.  This is always a good time for me because not only do I get to enjoy the University Archivist, Curt Hanson's, sense of humor, but I also get to root around in special collections.  Yesterday, I decided to read a Merrifield Award Winning Essay by a former Department of History Doctor of the Arts student, Ken Smith who now teaches at Trinity Bible College in Ellendale, ND.  I had a chance to meet Ken at the Northern Great Plains History Conference last week, and our brief chat reminded me to check out his essay.

The essay is entitled: "UND's Joseph Kennedy and the Allure of Psychical Research", and it provides a fascinating (and creepy!) insight into the early 20th century interest in psychic and paranormal research. Kennedy was a member of the "second Merrifield Faculty" who was hired during Webster Merrifield's term as university president in 1892. He followed Horace B. Woodworth as the main faculty member responsible for teaching philosophy and education and in 1901 he became the Dean of the Normal College. He remained in this position until his retirement in 1928.  While his primary area of expertise was education - particularly secondary and rural education, he was influenced heavily by the psychological and philosophical works of William James.

According to Smith's work, Kennedy's interest in James paved the way for his critical interest in psychical research.  This interest culminated with a visit to Dr. James H. Hyslop in Boston.  Hyslop was the director of the American Society of Psychical Research which was a group founded by Richard Hodgson who was a colleague and correspondent of William James.  During Kennedy's visit to Boston, Hyslop arranged for him to meet with a medium named "Mrs. Chenowith" who apparently sought to contact Kennedy's family and friends who had passed to the other side. Unlike many mediums of her day, Mrs. Chenowith wrote out the messages that she received from the other side.

Apparently the messages that Mrs. Chenowith communicated to Kennedy exist in the UND archives, although I have not yet had a chance to find them.  Kennedy struggled to understand and interpret the messages and initiated an almost two decade correspondence with Hyslop in the process.  As Smith points out, the correspondence, while always cordial, were not without tension.  Kennedy found the work of the medium unconvincing and Hyslop was not necessary amendable to that interpretation.

Kennedy remained critically agnostic about the possibilities of parapsychological and spiritual phenomena his entire life.  He was open to the ideas enough to conduct his own research, but critical enough to probe ideas and occurrences quite deeply. Smith, for example, recounts an episode when Raymond Hitchcock, a professor of Mathematics, sought Kennedy out to analyze a lucid dream.  In the dream, Hitchcock saw a home that he then encountered in real life some time later. Kennedy resisted the temptation to attribute the dream to psychical phenomena attributing it instead to the power of the unconscious mind (although he stopped short of seeing the dream as an expression of an unfulfilled wish in a Freudian sense).

St. Augustine and Dreams

Long-time readers of this blog know that I have an interest in dreams and their role in archaeology, although that interest might not be very evident lately.  So after spending the better part of two weeks pouring over survey data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, I took about an hour to follow up on a citation that I culled from Ann Marie Yasin's recent book to St. Augustine's De cura pro mortuis gerenda (On the Care of the Dead).  The text is a letter that St. Augustine wrote to St. Paulinus of Nola about whether there was any benefit to be buried near the body or memorial of a saint.  Augustine takes this opportunity to articulate a criticism of ad sanctus burials (burials near the graves of holy people, particularly martyrs) which he then expands to a general critique of claims that the dead influence the world of the living.

This is where dreams come in.  Augustine shows some concern for the stories in which dead people appear to the living particularly when their bodies are not buried properly.  Augustine, of course, knows that by challenging the authority of these kinds of visions, he runs the risk of criticizing widely held beliefs promulgated in the "writings of certain faithful men" (12).  Augustine makes clear later in the text that, among many possible episodes in Early Christian writing, he is referring here to St. Ambrose's claim (Epist. 20.1-2) that visions (or dreams) prompted him to discover the bodies of Sts. Gervasius and Protasius in Milan (21).

The crux of St. Augustine's argument is not whether saints or the dead appear to people, but whether they are aware that they are appearing to people or appear to people in their sleep voluntarily. He argues that the dead do not have any knowledge of this in the same way that the living are unaware when they appear in someone's dream.  Augustine further proves his point by arguing that pious men sometimes appear in dreams and do bad things.  At the same time, pious people, like his own late mother, would certainly appear to the living when they were troubled or upset, if they could, indeed, influence the world of the living.

It seems that this text dates to the early 420s and continues a North African inclination against the authority of visions and dreams directing the faithful to the locations of buried saints.  As early as the Council of Carthage in 401 the church rejected the practice of inventio per somnia (discovery through sleep).

For more on this text, see:

A. M. Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean. (Cambridge 2009), 212-222.
D. Trout, Paulinus of Nola. (Berkeley 1999), 244-247.
H. Kotila, Memoria Mortuorum: Commemoration of the Departed in Augustine. (Rome 1992).
Y. Duval, Auprès des saints corps et âme. L'inhumation « ad sanctos » dans la chrétienté d'Orient et d'Occident du IIIe siècle au VIIe siècle. (Paris 1988).

For more on Dream Archaeology without leaving the comfortable informality of the blog, see below:

Another, Better Attempt at Dream Archaeology
Dreams in Ravenna
Dream Archaeology in the Early Christian West
Blindness, Dreams, and Relics
More Dreams, Religion, and Archaeology
More Byzantine Dreams...
Dreams, Pausanias, and Archaeology
Dreams, Inventio, and Archaeology
Kozani