The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Twittering to Byzantium

Tim Gregory sent me a link to this curious Twitter feed Cry for Byzantium.  The feed reports sequentially on events in Byzantine history as if they were being twittered by the Byzantine Emperor (currently Anastasius I).  The entire scheme is explained in the feed's companion blog.  To create the feed, the author of the Twitter feed draws upon the work of Julius Norwich and Warren Treadgold to create his first person narrative.  According to the blog, it is basically a labor of love.

This is not the first instance of Byzantium in the new media.  The most famous example was Lars Brownworth's 12 Byzantine Rulers series of podcasts.  The popularity of these podcasts resulted in an article in the New York Times and eventually a book deal (he also maintains a blog). 

Cry for Byzantium and other new media experiments in Byzantine history got me thinking about the relationship between scholarship and the new media.  At the same time, my graduate historiography seminar is reading Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra this week.  While these two scholars have not said anything in particular about history and the new media per se, they have both written about the largely uncritical acceptance of traditional forms of historical writing.  They have singled out the uncritical assumptions that undergird most historian's adherence to traditional forms of narrative pointing out that the basic structure of most historical narratives remains rooted in early 19th century forms which drew heavily on the conventions of "realist" fiction.  Since that time, of course, attitudes toward the fictional narrative have changed, but history has not.  Our approach to narrating a "realistic" past continues to look to a 19th century style for validation.

As styles and practices of narration have changed to accommodate and capture the dynamism of a changing world more successfully, the book as the medium to communicate, narrate, and critique has come under increasing criticism (e.g. for a very recent one).  No one would deny that recent efforts to create a paperless book (or eBook) are not at least a little absurd.  New forms of writing, technics of constructing narrative, and communicating information such as those most obviously visible in the internet (and new media) run the risk of making historian's long standing commitment to the book as quaint as the 19th century narrative practices that White and LaCapra have critiqued.  While historians are trying to embrace the new media and the potential of a "bookless future", it still seems that practicing, academic historians are a step behind the interested public in our willingness to experiment. 

On my walk home last night, I thought about what it would mean to use Twitter to write an article, for example.  I regularly serialize my research here on my blog (in most cases writing blog posts as I am doing the scholarship as sort of proto-working papers).  Blog posts are much shorter than the finished articles, but nevertheless contain at least some basic scholarly apparatus (hyperlinks rather than footnotes in many cases) and often help me formulate an idea before having to compose it in its full academic form.  A tweeted article could look the same way except limited to 140 character expressions.  Cry for Byzantium approaches this by narrating an "emperor's eye" view of Byzantine history in such short passages, but the author admits to composing his tweets before hand and preloading them into an application that posts them regularly.  Tweeting an article, as I imagine it, would require the author to be more spontaneous and actually compose the article in twitter over the course of a stretch of time (perhaps a month?).  The intervals between tweets, like the moves in a game of correspondence chess, would allow an author to think carefully about his next move.  At the same time, the audience for the article could respond and critique, or not, to the various ideas and arguments that emerge before their eyes.  (One downside of Cry for Byzantium is that it does not do much with the social media aspects of Twitter.  For example, neither the Ostrogothic King Theodoric nor Pope Symmachus respond to Anastasius tweets.)  This would put some pressure on the author to articulate arguments concisely and clearly.  This focus on language is a good thing for any writer and the limit of 140 characters is not much more arbitrary than word limits imposed on various other forms of academic writing (or works of literature in general, particularly poetry).

While it's unlike that I will run out and start Twittering an academic article, the thought of it and the potential of such new media experiments as Cry for Byzantium is intriguing.  It serves us well to keep an eye on these kinds of things (and that means following the Cry for Byzantium Twitter feed!) and consider the potential of these experiments as real critiques of our tradition-bound scholarship.

Selling the Working Group in Digital and New Media

Over the last month or so a bunch of university development, marketing, and external relation types have asked me to describe what the Working Group in Digital and New Media is. I go through my usual boilerplate on the importance of digital and new media in our world and how the convergent space carved out by digital technologies is not only making it easier for academic to collaborate, but it is making it absolutely necessary. I usually go into detail about how the new currency is information and access to information provides certain important structures for new community oriented most obviously around social media applications, but implicit in many of the basic interaction that we have in digital space (for a brief and nice meditation on this same idea see here). In response to my impassioned plea for our new digital utopia, I usually get a response like "so, this is really about building better webpages." This is not a good sign that my university is prepared to embrace its digital future. Or, alternately and perhaps more optimistically, this response reflects my inability to articulate that digital future in a compelling way!

So, out of frustration I volunteered to write up for "the public" an overview of the Digital and New Media Working Group.

Here it is:

The Working Group
in Digital and New Media

We live in a world saturated with digital media. It forms a medium through which we engage in all sorts of basic interactions. We communicate with friends and family via email, text-messaging, and social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. At the same time, we find common cause with strangers by following blogs, listening to podcasts, and celebrating the bizarre world created by user-generated YouTube video. The digital and new media has arrived and is shaping our world daily and producing new kinds of communities that transcend traditional barriers of space and social identity. Web pioneers have become cult heroes and digital entrepreneurs have become a new kind of intellectual and economic elite.

As recently as 10 years ago, most of would rank as mere consumers of the web content, and the communities organized around content on the web were mainly passive consumers of pre-packaged commodities. Today, however, things have changed. More and more people have become producers of digital and new media by writing their own blogs, uploading YouTube videos, recording podcasts, and producing new works of fiction, music, and art.   The most ambitious and creative members of so-called Generation X and Y have found ways to “mash-up” or combine date, text, music, and video from different sources to create unique experiences. This ability to create art, literature, music, scholarship, or any other of the myriad of novel and bizarre experiences on the web has enabled a new generation of digital natives to crash through the barriers that traditionally separated the consumers and producers of media content. In the process, this expanding group has created new communities whose identities and space for interaction extends across a whole range of new digital devices that have become common in our everyday life. Over the past decade, digital media has gone from being the basis for a whole range of new information, to the foundation for new forms of community, social and intellectual interaction, and, of course, economic life.

Academia has not been spared from this digital media revolution. The flexibility, dynamism, and ever-changing capabilities of our digital world has made it a potent platform for cross disciplinary collaboration and communication. At the University of North Dakota, the Working Group in Digital and New Media is at the forefront of using digital technologies to break down the traditional barriers that have separated art from science, the humanities from the social sciences, and research from teaching. In this effort, they deploy many of the same tools that the high-tech industry, new media moguls, and internet entrepreneurs use to create new and digital media experiences that regularly influence our everyday experiences. Drawing on the power of cloud and cluster computing, powerful multi-media desktops machines, social networking, a wide range of digital and new media theory, and rapidly developing software infrastructure, the Working Group is committed to the production of innovative digital media which both produces and stands at the core of new forms of community and social space. The media truly becomes the message as the group collaborates and shares technological expertise, digital aesthetics, and high-tech infrastructure on campus. This groups efforts, in turn, hope to produce a space for collaboration for other scholars, students, and colleagues both on campus and around the world.

The overall goal of this Working Group is to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of the dot.com generation and funnel these creative energies to a new integrative, transmedia scholarship. The Working group laboratory is the place where disciplinary walls collapse and digital and new media becomes the space for innovation and collaboration. This is not just the kind of collaborative efforts that results in scholarly articles or learned conference papers, but a kind of public collaboration where the results of faculty and student discussions become visible, almost instantly, in the internet to the entire world.

Digital Video

Anyone who has watched a movie in the past five years has noticed the amazing development of digital animation both to enhance live action films as special effects as well as to carry the entire visual experience and plot. When filmmakers first introduced these effects they took hours and hours to produce and render on high-powered mainframe type computers. At the intersection of science, technological expertise, and art, Prof. Joel Jonientz, of the Department of Art and Design is using the high power desktop computers in the Digital and New Media lab to create the basic imagery for the next generation of animate films.

These images are converted into moving images using the computer power of the high performance computing cluster here on campus in a technical alliance with the Digital and New Media lab.   The high performance cluster is one of the newest generation of super computers that marshals the power of a series of linked processors working together to execute complex functions at remarkable speed. The alliance between arts, science and technology at the lab allows faculty and students to produce new creative projects and refine the processes that allow these projects to become reality. What was once the realm of multi-million dollar studios is now within reach of students and scholars here at UND.

Digital Texts

Whenever we search the web, we are familiar with the all too common experience of bringing up masses of irrelevant information for even the simplest and most straightforward search. Even as search engines become better able to sort the wheat from the chaff, researchers have become increasingly determined to make the text themselves more easy to search not only by standard search engines like Google, but by the next generation of faceted search engines that will allow you to conduct more focused searches directed toward specific bodies of text. Faceted search engines depend upon various kind of mark-up languages, like XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) which are largely invisible to the general public, but organize information behind the scenes. Prof. Crystal Alberts of the English Department, another scholar in the Working Group, is working to encode historical texts with XML mark-up. This time consuming and technical task opens important texts are searchable by researchers and students. For example, Crystal is working with a team who is encoding the both video and transcriptions of the famous University of North Dakota’s Writers Conference. She is also encoding the “Norwegian Transcript Collection” which documents the Nazi occupation of Norway. Alberts is opening the remarkable archival collections here at UND to a wider world of scholars and students and playing an even more important role in a wide rang of global conversations on topics from fascism to literature.

Digital Archaeology

For the past decade Prof. Bill Caraher, a professor in the Department of History, has been collecting digital data from his archaeological work in Greece and Cyprus. This data comes in many forms ranging from databases to digital photos and maps in Geographic Information Systems databases. The Working Group lab has become the place where a team of undergraduate and graduate interns work to publish this wide range of archaeological media both on the web and in print form.

The real novelty, however, is their efforts to combine the science and art of archaeology by integrating digital descriptions of stratigraphy, artifact typology, and surface densities to an array of video, audio, and fine art photographs collected from his site in Cyprus. This combinations provides creates an archaeological experience that has something to offer empirical scholars, artists, beginning students, and the general public without compromising the rigor of the field research. A web interface introduces students and scholars to the experience of Mediterranean archaeological without specialized knowledge, expensive airfares, and costly stays away from home.

Digital Music

Digital Music has become a mainstay in American culture. As digital music has become more sophisticated and complex, it has required additional levels of technical expertise and computing power. Composition of music in a digital environment goes far beyond drum machines and keyboards to involve complex software suites and high-powered computers. UND’s Award Winning Composer, Prof. Michael Wittgraf participates in the Working group and uses the laboratories facilities as a base for his research and teaching in music composition. By combining the art of music composition with his background in mathematics and the technologies available at the lab, Wittgraf’s work is the embodiment of the shared space made available by digital media.

The Future of Digital and New Media

The Working Group in Digital and New Media leverages digital media to break down barriers and form new communities across campus, across the state, and around the world. A strong commitment to cultivating both the intellectual and technological infrastructure ensures a place for the University of North Dakota to the forefront of ongoing and rapidly expanding digital revolution.

Metadata and Macintosh

Last week, a few high-volume blogs made note of the operating systems and browsers that their visitors used.  Of particular interest was the significant increase in number of users using Macs over a two year time span.  While my blog does not even receive a fraction of the traffic of kottke.org (for example), I thought that I'd run the same analysis on my data.

This is the overall distribution of operating systems:

1. Windows: 79.99%
2. Macintosh: 18.28%
3. Linux : 1.17%
4. iPhone:  0.24%
5. Sony: 0.01%

Obviously, Archaeology of the Mediterranean World readers are overwhelmingly PC users.

One Year Ago:

1. Windows: 82.08%
2. Macintosh: 16.50%
3. Linx: 1.05%
4. iPhone: 0.13%
5. FreeBSD: 0.01%

This year:

1. Windows: 78.06%
2. Macintosh: 19.90%
3. Linux: 1.28%
4. iPhone: 0.46%
5. Sony: 0.03%

Last three months:

1. Windows: 76.83%
2. Macintosh: 19.93%
3. Lixux: 1.77%
4. iPhone: 0.62%
5. Sony: 0.10%

As for browsers, this is the overall distribution:

1. Firefox: 45.65%
2. IE: 39.32%
3. Safari: 8.16%
4. Opera: 2.89%
5. Crome: 2.50%

One year ago:

1. IE: 45.05%
2. Firefox: 42.52%
3. Safari: 7.65%
4. Opera: 3.08
5. Monzilla: 0.66%

This year:

1. Firefox: 48.60%
2. IE: 33.92%
3. Safari: 8.65%
4. Chrome: 4.47%
5. Opera: 7.71%

Last three months:

1. Firefox: 51.24%
2. IE: 31.86%
3. Safari: 8.59%
4. Chrome: 4.16%
5. Opera: 2.14%

But what does this all mean?

Compared to kottke.org and other high-volume blogs, my blog is behind in visits by Macs.  I'll offer a few mundane observations:

1. Over 45% of my visitors are not from the U.S.  Macintosh may have gained popularity in the US particularly over the last year or so, but overseas, the world is still overwhelmingly PC oriented.  So some of the strong Windows showing probably derives from the international visitors to this blog.  I suspect that archaeologists slightly prefer PCs (my friends at the University of Cincinnati aside) especially those who run Microsoft Access databases and ESRI GIS programs.

2. More Macs than ever.  From totally anecdotal evidence, I have seen more Macs on campus this year than ever before.  In fact, in my class that is an introduction to the history major (History 240, for those of you who read this blog regularly), I'd guess that 20% of the class are Mac users. So the upsurge in the number of Mac users in the last three months (when people tend to buy their shinny new back-to-school computers) is not completely surprising (nor is the uptick in Safari users).

3. Where are the netbooks?  I've also seen a huge increase in the number of netbooks on campus.  Most of those run Windows, but apparently these folks don't visit my blog. Perhaps enough of these new netbooks run Linux that they account for the increase in number of Lixus OS visitors (and most likely account for some of the increase in number of Firefox users).

4.  People are using Chrome, apparently at the expense of Internet Explorer (since there is still no Chrome for Mac).  It's remarkable to see how precipitously the number of IE users have fallen over the past two years

Bloggers seems to love Macs.  I admit to using a Mac to post on this blog probably 60% of the time, but for the record, I prefer my Windows computer for blogging.  As far as I can tell, there is no Mac rival to Windows Live Writer, which is the best blogging software around.  It lets me compose and lay-out my post in a word processor-like interface, decent spell checking, allows me to produce a glossery of links and to drag-and-drop pictures and data produced by other Microsoft programs.  I can post to my various blogs by a simple menu making it easy to cross-post (without cutting and pasting) and even saves drafts of my blog posts making it easy for me to update a post.  And best of all, it was free!

The only inconvenience is that I tend to write on my Mac, so I'd love to find a decent blogging program for that OS... any advice on one?

The SBL, Affiliation, and Bibliobloggers

It's been pretty interesting (in a bit of a train-wreck kind of way) to watch the tense fall as a group of bloggers sought to get their blogging group, Bibliobloggers, associated formally with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).  The upshot of this was that their group did become affiliated with the SBL, but not before some serious ruffled feathers, tense comments, and at least one blogger quitting blogging entirely.  I don't know any of the participants in this dispute and detect a certain amount of personal animosity among them.  Putting aside the interpersonal tensions that are likely to be the part of any social network, it is interesting to see some of the standard issues of the blogging discourse emerge once again. I am not going to link to specific posts in my observations here -- out of only laziness and the fact that I read the various perspectives in an unsystematic way (or until I decided that most folks were making arguments that I had heard before in other contexts).  For a general recap, check out this post on Daniel O. McClellan's blog (via Chuck Jones at the Ancient World Bloggers Group), and if you can only read one post be sure to read Chris Heard's "Blogging, SBL affiliation, and academic respectability", it's hilarious:

1. Bloggers like to think of themselves as voices calling out in the desert (or at least mildly subversive).  I must admit that much of the initial appeal of blogging to me was to find a medium that allowed me to work around the traditional barriers of the academic world.  That is to meld (such as I can) the intellectual with the academic.  I can explore my interests here in a public forum, offer up working papers, comment on various academic and intellectual issues, and watch the world go by without the limitations imposed by peer review (and, of course, without the benefits of peer review either).  The formal association with a group and then the formal association with a professional academic organization (like the SBL or the AIA or even for that matter a university) would certain undermine any subversive street cred that I imagine myself possessing, not to mention run the risk of imposing some standards or limits external to my blog.  While this wouldn't be a bad thing (a copy editor would be great, in fact), it's not why I blog and would hate to have to worry about my ties with a professional body when I begin to compose a post.

2. Blogging and professional credit. Of course, there has long been a group of bloggers who have sought to make blogging a more recognized form of academic discourse and it is easy to see how earning an official professional association would not help   Invariably this group is attacked by folks who seem to think that tenure credit should only be given for peer reviewed achievements.  This is a silly position to hold, of course, since most of us earn tenure credit for a wide range of activities from community and university service to teaching that are not subjected to the standard strictures of peer review.  Moreover, we all know that the notion of peer review varies greatly across a wide range of academic publications which, in all but the most research focused departments, earn something toward tenure (e.g. book reviews, encyclopedia articles, invited contributions, et c.).  While I can completely understand how professional pressures can lead us to reading academic activity as a zero-sum enterprise (i.e. if I am blogging then I am not working on a peer reviewed article, a monograph, et c.), I also like to think that blogging evokes some of now-extinct forms of scholarly communication such as the learned communication or the academic correspondence (a public statement regarding a particular issue that would be circulated among a group or published in a journal).  These forms of communication circulated in intellectual and academic communities and served to inform like-minded individuals and stimulate debate.  The benefit to one's professional status, then, doesn't come from the overly bureaucratized tenure process, but from working to enrich the academic discourse more broadly.  In other words, you are benefiting the field of which you are a part.  (And for the record, I include my blog in my c.v. under the heading "other publications" where I include non-peer reviewed articles, multimedia projects, and the like).

3. Blogs and Incomplete Truths.  There are still folks out there who worry that blogging is just another way to fill the internet with incomplete ideas, flights of fancy, and just plain rubbish. Typically, these people are concerned that the general public or students will struggle to separate the good, high-quality stuff, from the low quality trash.  The interest in getting the SBL or any formal affiliation is that it will mark a blog out as a legitimate contributor to conversation and not just another source of dubious quality internet drivel.  While I appreciate the concern that blogs have often become the medium for cranks or conduits for misinformation, there is no reason to confuse the medium with the message.  I am tiring of folks who do not seems to expect our colleagues, students. and the general public to be able to read critically on the web. 

4. Are we still talking about blogging? It's funny to think that blogging as a medium is almost 15 years old at this point. Let's shift the conversation the conversation to more dynamic places within the new media-sphere.  How does YouTube, Twitter, and other highly social media outlets contribute or subvert the core missions of our professional organizations?

Oh, and do we need an AIA group dedicated to Archaeobloggers?

Michael Fronda's "Anarchy, Rivalry, and the Beginnings of the Roman Empire"

For all of you who were unable to attend Michael Fronda's lecture on Thursday, I have made a podcast of the lecture available.  Click here to download the Fronda Lecture.

Three things really stand out about Fronda's lecture:

1. Modern Models and Ancient Evidence. The model that he used to understand the expansion of the Early and Middle Roman Republic called for the identification of so-called "enduring rivalries" between states that Rome exploited to enforce her hegemony over the Italian peninsula.  This model derived from international relations theory and had clear roots in the Cold War efforts to not only understand but also the justify the binary world of Soviet - US relations.  Despite the very clear historical context for the model's development, it suited the ancient evidence admirably.  This was a remarkable example of how history draws upon the present to understand the past.  While this may seem like an obvious observation, it will be an excellent point of departure for our undergraduate methods students who often struggle to understand how the present molds the past without slipping into a kind of simplistic presentism.

2. Text and Landscape. Mike's talk on Thursday (as well as his less formal talk on Friday afternoon in the Department of History) emphasized the role of texts in revealing the political landscape of Italy.  While Mike did not explicit use the word "landscape" in his talk and certainly did not employ the various models that scholars of the ancient landscape have recently come to favor, he nevertheless read the political topography of Italy in a way that linked very local relationships to regional (or even global) regimes of power.  He gave several examples of how the Romans became involved in adjudicating very local territorial disputes and highlighted how the looming threat of Roman political and military power could exacerbated or even produced local rivalries. The projection of Roman power on the local level and typically mediated through local concerns is surely a topic which would reward post-colonial theorizing.  More importantly, it showed how local landscapes could be shaped and "distorted" by the regional powers in ways that might not necessarily be apparent on the ground.

3. The crowd!  As I noted on Friday, Mike's lecture attracted over 70 people and it is clear that others turned away at the prospect of standing throughout.  While we did what we could to promote the talk on campus, it was great to see folks in attendance who I would not have thought to be interested in Ancient Rome. 

Enjoy the lecture and thanks to everyone who helped make the talk a success.

Meta-data Monday

I haven't run a meta-data Monday for some time now in large part because my blog hasn't hit any notable landmarks.  As a blog lives longer, those landmarks became fewer and farther between, I guess.  The reason I am posting a meta-data Monday post now, is that I have heard several times over the past weeks someone quip that no one really reads academic blogs or, more agnostically, that there is no way to know whether anyone reads academic blogs or the like.  Of course, on some level there is no way to know whether anyone reads anything, but putting aside that relatively extreme position, I thought that making a post that includes some of my blog's data would at least put my mind to rest.

My blog has been in existence for about 2 1/2 years and over this time, I've had about 62,000 page views.  While this pales in comparison to high volume, professional blogs which might see page view numbers like this for a single day, these numbers nevertheless make it hard to deny that someone reads or at least looks at my blog.  The 62,000 + page views are over the blogs 549 posts (I guess I could have waited a day and posted this in celebration of my blog's 550th post!).  Lamentably, there are only 265 comments on these 549th posts. 

Using Google Analytics, I can show that I have had visitors from 141 countries.  My blog has received the most hits from:

1. United States
2. Greece
3. U.K.
4. Canada
5. Italy
6. Australia
7. France
8. Germany
9. Cyprus
10. Turkey

I've had visits from every U.S. state with the most popular states being:

1. California
2. North Dakota
3. Pennsylvania
4. Minnesota
5. New York
6. Ohio
7. Illinois
8. Florida
9. Texas
10. New Jersey

Google Analytics allows us to mine all sorts of interesting data.  For example, the ever popular browser profile of my readers:

1. Firefox (45%)
2. I.E. (39.57% with 27.73% on I.E. 6.x for those of you who get upset about that kind of thing!)
3. Safari (8.13%)
4. Opera (2.93%)
5. Chrome (2.47%)
6. Camino (<1)
7. Monzilla (<1)
8. Netscape (<1)
9. Konqueror (<1)
10. NetFront (<1)

Windows users account for 80% of my traffic with Macintosh representing 18% and Linux 1%.

The top referring domains (i.e. how do folks find my site):

1. Google
2. Typepad.com
3. und.edu
4. pkap.org
5. yahoo.com
6. Kourelis.blogspot.com (Objects, Buildings, Situations)
7. archaeology.org  (the web-domain of the Archaeological Institute of America)
8. Iconoclasm.dk (Troels Myrup's excellent blog)
9. grandforkslife.blogspot.com (the Grand Forks Guy's local blog)
10. twitter.com (largely via my Twitter feed, which you should follow, by the way!)

To round out this list, here are the top referring blogs:

4. Thoughts from West Melrose
5. Rogue Classicism
6. Electric Archaeologist
7. Ancient World Bloggers Group
8. Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean
9. Research News in Late Antiquity
10.  Antiquated Vagaries

The top ten posts based on page views:

1. Early Christian Architecture and Hybrid Space
2. Real Snow in Athens
3. A Walk through Byzantine Athens
4. The Byzantine and Christian Museum
5. Blogging Archaeology or the Archaeology of Blogging: Metablogging the Ancient World
6. The Early Christian Ecclesiastical Architecture of Cyprus: First Impressions
7. Punk Archaeology: Some Preliminary Thoughts
8. Suburban Archaeology A (Detroit) Jewel in the Attic
9. Survey Archaeology, Pottery, and the Chronotype System
10. Emerging Cypriot: An Archaeological Documentary

And just for fun, here's my Wordle Cluster:

So, thanks to all my readers and referrers!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

A late Friday post on a sunny Friday morning (in my new office):

• I can't help but wonder how long we're going to see articles on the role of Facebook (and other social networking sites) in the construction of academic careers.  Here's another.
• Ok, I know that I am rather late on this, but Kickstarter is a really cool idea.  I wonder if it's worth the effort to try to get an invitation.
• Credit where it is due.  The ISP wall is still standing in O'Kelly hall in all it's glory.  Perhaps the dean has reconsidered?
• I am now in my spacious and spectacular new office.  More on that next week!
• Opera 10 is great.  Recently Firefox 3.5 and Blackboard 8 have not played well together on my Mac.  So, I've adopted Opera 10 as my new browser for Blackboard.  Not only does it speed up our sluggish Blackboard interface, but so far, it has eliminated all the problems that I had on Firefox.
• When the Dean of The Graduate School, Joey Benoit blogs, people listen (and read!).  Yesterday, Dean Benoit's post on Teaching Thursday blew up with close to 70 page visits to read our weekly post.  I hope some of this momentum carries forward and readers come back every Thursday!
• University of North Dakota versus Texas Tech.  Welcome to Division I.  (Let's put it this way: it won't even be on TV here in Grand Forks).  If you want, you can listen to it LIVE on the internet radiophone.
• If you haven't celebrated the 50th Anniversary of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue by listening to it rendered in 8-bit electronic tones as Kind of Bloop, then you are really missing something special.
• Follow one of our Ph.D. students in History here at UND through his blog Doctoral Bliss.
• If you aren't following me on Twitter, you really should.

Teaching Online: A Report on History 101 after One Week

There have been quite a few reports on online teaching in the last month, the most significant of which is probably this massive 2 volume study produced by the American Association of Land-grant Universities (here's an article about it in the Chronicle).  And, no, I haven't read it all, but I thought that I should still chime in on the subject as I am teaching my very first online class this fall and have a week of experience under my belt.  (That should provided a different perspective to the extensive and sophisticated study by the AALU).

First things, first.  Here's a link to my syllabus.  I'd offer you a link to the entire class (and I will make much of the content available as soon as I get the time).

Five points:

1. The prep time was enormous.  I have talked on this blog and over at Teaching Thursday about the time involved in preparing lecture style podcasts.  The 17 podcasts that make up the core of my class took at least 70 hours to prepare.  The smaller, quick hit, podcasts took about 15-30 minutes each to account for an additional 4 or 5 hours.  Lecturing to a notional audience is bizarre and every pregnant pause or misspeak appears more glaring when converted to an MP3.  From the lectures, I also compiled a set of 15 indexes.  Each index was composed of key terms that the student would encounter during the podcast.  These ranged from places (e.g. France or the Levant) to people (e.g. Julius Caesar, Hammurabi) and concepts (primogenitor, subinfeudaton).  Each index took about 3 hours to produce and link.  So that was another 50 hours or so.  Then came the quizzes.  I include weekly objective (i.e. multiple guess) quizzes designed primarily to keep the students honest.  I had prepared a substantial test bank over the previous few years of teaching, but converting them into the proper format to be integrated into Blackboard (our online teaching interface -- more on that below) and adding questions to weeks where I did not have an extensive quiz bank took, on average, about 2 hours a quiz.  That's another 30 hours.  Various other formatting issues and the like took probably another 10 hours.  So at the end of this all I estimate that preparing an online class took around 170 hours.  And that's for a class that I had already prepped for lecture.  In other words that's a 170 hours ontop of the basic course construction.  But I'll admit that I am fussy and to be fair, I was paid extra by my University to prep the class.

2. Lecturing to the void.  One of the key aspects of my lecture style is constant interaction with the class. This is crucial to how I produce and deliver my lectures.  In general, I lecture from an outline rather than a prepared text.  I then adjust my presentation in response to the class.  I suppose I have a rather approachable style, in that students feel quite comfortable interrupting me and asking questions.  So if there are lots of questions, I slow down.  If there aren't many questions, I ask: "Does this make sense to everybody?"  If there is convincing silence (i.e. no non-verbal cues like looking down or restless fidgeting), then I move on along to my next point or argument.  In my online lecture, there are no cues, no questions, no hints as to how much what I am saying is making sense.  Sure, at the end of a particular week, I might notice that the class discussion board is filled with queries, but by then, the lecture is over.  And, of course, I realize that I can prepare my lectures in ways that allow students to respond in real-time, but these all defeat some of the benefits of online teaching.

3. In the real world, I am on time.  I don't mind due dates (and, in fact, I often set them for myself and then keep them!).  And whatever I lack in creativity or intellect, I desperately attempt to make up for in discipline (e.g. this blog).  My students on the other hand, seem to be almost resistant to due dates.  Providing a due date almost ensures that grandparents die, best friends get sick, cars break down, computers crash, et c.  Considering the economically and emotionally devastating consequences of due dates, I have generally phased them out of my larger classes.  Or set up a series of due dates to spread the disaster out (and prevent a run on laptops or the horrendous stories that you read in Thucydides about the Plague in Athens where the bodies of deceased relatives piled up the streets because of a universal due date).  In any event, my online class is completely asynchronous; all of the course material is visible and accessible from the first day.  There are two due dates.  A due date for an optional midterm and a due date for the final.  If you take the midterm, you don't need to take the final and vice versa.  Students can engage the class at whatever rate they want.  It's not only more humane, but I think (kidding aside) better for the students.  It gives them a better chance to take the class on its own terms.  If you have three exams on one day, it is fair to think that none of the tests reflect accurately how much a student could know about a given body of material.  What that kind of environment tests is how well a student can juggle responsibilities.  An important skill, to be sure, but not as important as learning the material that I present in my class.

4. Less time in the classroom, more time evaluating work.  When I teach three classes a semester, I generally research 10 hours a week per class.  That typically involves 3 hours in the classroom, an hour or so (on email or in person) dealing with students, a couple of hours preparing material, and a couple of hours grading (more when there are major assignments).  Teaching online has allowed my to reclaim about 5 of these hours.  I don't lecture in real time and I have all my course material prepared and deployed (see point 3).  As a result, I have twice as much time to deal with particular student problems (and with an online class there are many) and to evaluate written work.  Evaluating written work is the most time consuming part of any class that I teach.  Having more time to comment on writing, is a great benefit to me as an instructor.  More importantly, I pass that on to my students by spending more time evaluating their work.  In effect, I lose some of the classroom teaching experiences, but make up for this through having more time to comment and evaluate written work.

5. Finally, (and you knew this was coming), there is Blackboard.  On some levels, it's very, very good.  The automated grade book and quizzes are wonderful.  It's ability to handle almost any kind of material from podcasts, to text, to images, to webpages, and video is great.  And, it's seemingly bug free interface (except on a Mac with Firefox 3.5) is remarkable.  But it's super ugly.  The interface is inflexible from a design stand point.  As you can tell by this blog, design might not necessarily be my highest priority, but it is important nevertheless.  For example, my class is divided into 15 weeks.  Each week is a folder.  I wanted to arrange these folders into a nice grid so that they'd all be visible at once on the screen.  This is hardly a revolutionary design.  But the clunky, frames-based, interface of Blackboard forbade it.  Or made is sufficiently difficult that I could not work out how to do it.  I would love a Wordpress style "template" collection for Blackboard. 

A more significant criticism is that Blackboard is so self-contained that it makes it difficult to make even parts of a class publicly accessible.  Of course, you can do what I do, which is put large parts of my class on an external server and just link them into Blackboard (and since Blackboard is fugly, you might ask why would I want to make my class visible to the public... yes, not only was the food bad but the portions were so damn tiny!).  As the web is becoming more and more concerned with access, mashups, and convergence, Blackboard remains firmly entrenched in its frame-driven, un-mash-up-able web 1.0 interface (with a host of Web 2.0-like options that are basically what Velveeta is to cheese).  Maybe Blackboard 9 will be better.

Ok.  I promise that I won't provide weekly updates on my History 101 Online course, but do stay tuned for how it turns out.

Teaching Thursday: Social Networks and Student Expectations

As is becoming my habit (and I promise it won't continue for too long), I'll redirect you to Teaching Thursday for today's blog post.  The number of visits to Teaching Thursday have consistently increased, so please, take a minute to check it our and show my latest collaborative blog project some love!  And, if you are UND faculty think about joining the conversation.

Today, Bret Weber and I bantered back and forth about the 24/7 professor and the role of social networks in changing student expectations regarding access to information and individuals.  I argue that the ubiquity of social networking applications makes constant contact with people and information a reasonable expectation.  And it only goes to reason that faculty, who constantly demand greater commitments from students to their academic pursuits, would exist to some extent within the the web of networking applications.

Check out our banter.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A little klatch of quick hits on an overcast Friday morning:

• Beloit College's Mindset list for the Class of 2013 is a great read.  And it makes you think carefully about any common ground that you imagine will exist between students and and faculty.
• The Personas Project at MIT is pretty cool.  From what I can tell, Bill is much more interesting than William. Here are my results:

• If you haven't checked out my other new media experiment, you could by clicking here.  You should probably follow me on Twitter.
• This is something to think about, I mean, if you are into that kind of thing:

 

• Fortunately, our University president has a blog, at just about the time when other university presidents have twitter feeds (Gordon Gee (OSU), Kirk H. Schulz (K-State), John Maeda (RISD)). Someone might want to point out: if you're in most of the photographs posted on your blog, it sorta undermines the illusion that you are generating the content.  Just sayin'.
• Go read Teaching Thursday and join the conversation
• And some love for the only PR Machine at the University more powerful than the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project: The Institute for Philosophy in the Public Life.  They're showing Casablanca at the Empire Theater on Wednesday.
• Word is that I'll be in my new office sometime next week.  That's the first week of classes. Yikes.
• Rain at the Oval just as the Australian side got their feet under them.  My new opinion is, if you live in a country where it rains all the time, you should not be allowed to host a Test series.