The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Teaching with Twitter: An Interim Report

I've just completed my first large scale experiments with integrating Twitter into my classroom. For those who don't regularly follow this blog, I used Twitter in my 100 level Western Civilization at the University of North Dakota. The class met once a week, at night, for two hours and twenty minutes. Most of the students are freshmen and sophomores, with a spattering of juniors and seniors typically in the hard sciences or engineering. The two biggest problems in the class are poor attendance (I am competing with Lost and, to be blunt, the class has a vigorous in-class writing component and perhaps not the most interesting lectures) and a tendency among students to disengage sometime over the course of the semester. Because the class meets only once a week and attendance is a struggle, students tend to disengage from the class and vanish into the night until the midterm or final forces them to re-engage, but at that point it is sometimes too late to get back into the swing of things, make up myriad missed assignment, and get a decent grade in what is otherwise a fairly easy class.

Twitter seemed one way to try to engage the students on the days when my one-day-a-week, 100 level class is probably the furthest thing from their minds. So, I created a Twitter page and began to Tweet regularly. Over the course of the semester, this account acquired 111 followers, all students in my class, or over 75% of all the students in the class. Signing up for Twitter was voluntary, although I motivated the students with a vague promise to make it work the 3 minutes necessary to sign up. Over the course of the semester, I posted 152 Tweets (approximately 10 per week) which represent both public tweets and responses to student tweets. I posted several scheduled tweets each week. Generally, I'd post a quick recap to the class on Wednesday, I'd post weekly announcements on Thursday, and on Friday I would post some kind of trivia questions on my world famous "Trivia Friday". 90% of the Tweets were directly concerning the class. The other 10% of the Tweets concerned campus activities or current events (e.g. the death of Guru, et c.) that touched loosely on classroom conversations.

I also experimented with using Twitter to provide a back channel in class. Using weekly hashtags (#H101W3 = History 101 Week 3), I encouraged students in the lecture style class to post questions or comments during class. I then had an active version of Tweetdeck on the classroom computer on which I could check students tweets or project them on the screen during my lecture. Most, if not all, of the students in the class have cell phones and many (perhaps 30%) had laptops in class.

While I was not disappointed with the Twitter experiment -- after all it involved only a modest time commitment on my part (in general, a tweet took me less than 2 minutes to write so less than 20 minutes per week on average) -- only a tiny fraction of my students embraced it and it did not appear to have any positive (or negative!) impact on the class. Here are some observations:

1. UND Students are not on Twitter. While I did not sample the entire class, my random sample of 25 students show that only 5 of this group use Twitter in a regular way and I suspect that the number of regular Twitter users in my class is even lower. So, Twitter is not built into these students' information ecosystem. My morning routine involves starting Tweetdeck and scrolling quickly through my Tweets, but this seems unlikely to be the case for our students. As a result, Twitter appeared to the students as "something extra" and, as a result, an inconvenience rather than a helpful supplement to their already existing information network. As I have discussed elsewhere on this blog, students resist anything that they see as a work increase, even if we make clear how these additional "burdens" advance learning objectives.

2. Shared Commitment. Twitter works best within a community of people with a shared commitment to engaging one another and the topics at hand. In other words, Twitter is not a particularly efficient tool for one-to-one communication between faculty and a student or it is at least no better than email. Twitter facilitates community interaction in which students can respond to one another or interact with each other in a public way. Because my class only met once a week in a lecture hall setting, had an prevalent lecture component, was rather large (100+), and encompassed a wide range of students of different academic years and standings, there was little existing community for Twitter to facilitate. As a result, students did not, in general, respond to each other, but penned tweets generally directed toward me and usually in response to a specific query. A parallel trend appears in my efforts to encourage the use of Blackboard's wiki tool to produce study guides and class notes. A few students work hard to create a nice set of notes, and the rest of the class become passive consumers. Despite the bribe of points, there is no shared commitment to the class that would support the collective effort to create a body of notes. Neither Twitter nor the Wiki is enough to create community.

3. Techniques. Despite my efforts to give the students plenty of instruction on how to use Twitter, my students still struggled with things like hashtags (used to mark posts as belonging to a particular week or lecture), and we never used retweets or replies. This contributed to the one-way nature of the Twitter conversations especially as I was the only one responding to anyone in the class.

4. Technology. Finally, students compartmentalize technology. Most of the tweets in my class come from "the web" which I assume means through either their desktop or laptop computer as opposed to a mobile device like a phone or smartphone. In other words, despite the recent concerted interest to integrate social media with mobile devices, very few tweets and almost none from first time Twitter users came from phones (either as text message or Android/WinMo based apps -- we do not have iPhones here in North Dakota). This was disappointing because I thought Twitter would be widely accessible from mobile phones and, as a result, sufficient democratized not to leave less technophilic students at a disadvantage. Another technological issue that arose was the slow speed of Twitter searches made it hard to capture Tweets on specific lectures during class time. As a result, students were not able to create a realtime back channel, but only one delayed by 10 to 15 minutes which over the course of a 2 hour class is significant.

So, while my first experiments with Twitter in the class did not produce the social media plus education utopia that I had hoped, it did highlight certain weaknesses in the class as I now teach it. I need to work to create more of a community in the large lecture class if I want to tap into this community with tools like Twitter or wikis. These tools do not create the sense of community, but only serve to manage it. At the same time, I need to find ways to communicate the technical aspects of Twitter more effectively so that students can maximize the effectiveness of the medium.

I am excited about the prospect of integrating Twitter into the online version of my Western Civilization I courses this fall and spring. Since the students already expect to interact with me and their fellow students through an online medium, there might be a greater sense of value assigned to the simple Twitter interface (as compared to the more cumbersome blackboard interface).

Blogging and Being Local

This past week, a public records request went out on campus for all of our syllabi for the Spring and Fall 2010. My first thought was: if they really want my syllabi or to have an idea what I am teaching in my classes they should just go to my blog or web site. Putting aside the inefficiency of doing that for every faculty member across campus, it made me think a bit about how blogging made our work at the university more transparent and how important this could be in a day-in-age when the university, and public education more broadly, is under the duel threat of declining resources and elevated (and perhaps unrealistic) expectations.

I was asked some months ago by a person in our admissions office here, what is was, exactly, that I did. After recovering briefly from the shock that this person would not be intimately familiar with my brilliant academic career (cough, cough), I tried to explain why it was that I needed to be in my office over the weekend and what it meant when I said that I was swamped by data.

More recently, I've encouraged my public history students to write a blog, and they have, more or less, here. One of the blog posts considers the difficulty in understanding community in the age of internet and easy travel. We tend to imagine communities that revolve around shared values or even experiences rather than any physical proximity. As a result, it is not only possible, but likely that someone in the admissions office here would not know what people at the university did even though they worked less than 200 m from their offices. On the other hand, it is likely that this individual knows well what folks in the admission offices at other universities around the country or the world do.

Finally, there is a recent initiative on campus to engage more fully with the local community. This is partially a response to the flap over the name and logo here, but it may also be a genuine effort to bridge the gap between the "town and gown" and to recognize our common ground and our shared resources

These conversations got me thinking about how my blogs function within our spatially local community and whether they serve as a point of contact between people here in Grand Forks, in North Dakota or even just at my home university. A blog authored by a class offered by Kostis Kourelis, for example, has succeeded in helping bridge the gap between his home university (Franklin and Marshall College) and the community in Lancaster. My blog -- with its tendency to focus on Mediterranean archaeology -- has not captured the public attention as effectively.

Teaching Thursday, on the other hand, was explicitly designed for the University of North Dakota community tends to be read as much by folks elsewhere as by folks here on campus. While this accomplishes the goal of improving the transparency of university level teaching methods, it does not necessarily present what is happening here on campus in a way that is of interest to the local community or in a way that attracts to community's attention.

Recent interest in geolocating and enhanced reality as major additions to the social media arsenal will certainly improve our ability to local our blogs spatially. Services like Foursquare already leverage the social network of Twitter and GPS receivers built into new mobile phones to establish spatially local connections on the internet. Enhanced reality applications like Layar enables an individual to view a very simple "enhanced reality" and a GIS interface updated in real time to view the social media, local businesses, and even tags left by other users embedded in space. In the near future, people will be able to locate our blogs spatially and use space to mark out a relationship to a community. In fact, our ability to localize our blogs will make it easier (it is, of course, possible now) to demonstrate (or even produce) relationships between the specific place where the blog is located (or composed, hosted, or even "anchored") and places discussed by the blogger.

The advantage of our ability to embed our blogs within real, lived space is that we will be better able to recognize the place of the new media in relation to our local selves. Our work will continue to be available and of interest to anyone with access to the World Wide Interwebs, but we'll better be able to localize ourselves spatially and demonstrate the global links present in to our local, lived, communities.

Metadata Monday: 700 posts

This is my 700th blog post and so it seemed like a good time to aggregate and reflect on some metadata.

The blogs received on average 79 page views a day and over its three year life I've had 87,657 page views. Over the past 120 days, however, I've had well over 100 page views a day. I set as a goal (and I am not really sure why I have goals for things like this) to have 100 page views a day; now that I have that, I think I'll aim for 1000 page views a week. I've had 373 comments over the lifetime of the blog. My bounce rate is a respectable 75.8%. The average time on site is 1 minute 13 seconds and visitors look at 1.50 pages.

65% of my visitors are first time visitors and this has held pretty steady over the past couple of years. That means that 35% of you like what you read enough to come back! What's pretty cool is that over 20% of my visitors return more than 9 times.

Since my first post, I've had visitors from 149 countries with the US, Greece, the UK, Canada, Italy, Australia, France, Germany, Cyprus and Denmark as the top 10.

I also have had visitors from all 50 states with California, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey as the top 10.

The top referring blogs are the usual suspects with some new additions:

1. Objects-Buildings-Situations

2. Archaeology Magazine

3. Iconoclasm

4. Grand Forks Life

5. Surprised by Time

6. Electric Archaeologist

7. Research News in Late Antiquity

8. Rogue Classicism

9. Antiquated Vagaries

10. Ancient World Bloggers Group

Thanks to everyone who links to my blog. I love that this list of blog reflects so many of my research interests. I've also seen a pronounced uptick in referrals from both Twitter and Facebook. It seems that the social network is beginning to exert some influence on who reads my blog.

I haven't posted any browser and viewer data since October 2009, here's an update on that kind of thing since that post.

Operating Systems:

Windows: 74.11%

Macintosh: 23.20%

Linux: 1.78%

iPhone: 0.46%

iPod: 0.08%

iPad: 0.05%

Android: 0.03%

Windows continues to decline among the readers of my blog and Macintosh continues to grow. It's remarkable to think that from 2007-2008 Windows accounted for 82% of my readers and Macintosh only 16.5%!

Browser:

Firefox: 52.95%

IE: 27.97%

Safari: 9.51%

Chrome: 6.14%

Opera: 1.78%

Firefox continues to be the most popular browser and by increasingly margins over Internet Explorer. It's remarkable that from 2007-2008, Internet Explorer accounted for 45.05% of traffic to my blog; now it accounts for less than 30%. Chrome continues to become more popular and, it would seem, that Opera has steadily become less popular. This is a shame since the newest Opera browser for Mac is a sound alternative to Safari and far better than Chrome for OS X.

As I noted last October, I do think that my statistics speak to the particular niche in academic culture that my blog occupies. Computer savvy archaeologists and historians probably gravitate toward Macs and use Firefox.

Thanks for taking the time to visit this blog. I'm looking forward to the next 700 posts.

Filmmaking and Archaeology: Some Summary Thoughts

I’ve been lucky enough over the past 5 years to work with two fantastic young documentary filmmakers, Joe Patrow and Ian Ragsdale, in shooting documentary films based on our fieldwork at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus. Recently Ian has been pressing me (in a good way) to think about what we want to get out of his documentary work and to offer some general insights into how I understand what we have done. This has caused me to begin the process of marshaling 5 years of on and off discussions with Ian and Joe regarding issues related to making an archaeological documentary. Over this time, we’ve talked vaguely about co-writing an article that provides some practical tips for producing a “research film” designed to explore, communicate, and promote a research project. I’d like to think that this informal and spontaneous list will be the first step to writing up something more formal.

As someone with very little technical knowledge of the filmmaking process, I’ve relied on the project’s independent filmmakers to tell our project’s story. Being a part of these activities, however, has convinced me that these films are not only valuable communication (and teaching) tools, but also useful reflective activities in their own right. My comments below are based on three seasons of working with a documentary filmmaker. Joe Patrow worked with us in 2005 and 2007 and produced two films: Survey on Cyprus and Emerging Cypriot. Ian Ragsdale worked with us in 2009 and is editing his film: Voices from Cyprus. Both Ian and Joe provided short interviews here and here.

As a final note, these comments are not meant to be proscriptive, but rather descriptive of my thinking as we discussed the making a film that communicated our project to a wider audience.

1. Consider various audiences. We’ve used our films for such a wide variety of events that we have reaped the benefits of pitching our films to as broad an audience as possible.

2. Modular Movies. When Joe Patrow returned to Cyprus to shoot another video in 2007, he quickly realized that to do something creative with similar material, he had to change the way that he would approach editing his work. As a result, he produced a series of shorts titled Emerging Cypriot. These shorts were mostly under 5 minutes in length and captured various aspect of our work. To be fair, this approach clearly emerged from his first film, Survey on Cyprus, which told our story in a linear way, but also divided the story into a series of well-defined chapters. The benefit of a modular film is that it allows us to use the film for multiple purposes including embedding it in Powerpoint presentations, disseminating it over the web, and using in a classroom setting in a flexible way. With the advent of YouTube, Ian was able to take this concept even further by uploading a series of interviews edited in the field to a PKAP YouTube channel.

3. Process over product. One thing that we emphasized on our discussions with both Joe and Ian was the importance to show process rather than just product. In part, our emphasis on process was a necessity for an archaeological project that focused on the gradual accumulation of data rather than the search for a spectacular single find. The emphasis on process, however, ensured that whatever happened over the course of the season, we could tell the story of the project as an event in-and-of itself and not be dependent on a spectacular find or even the elusive answer to a research question during the time when the camera was rolling.

4. Personalities. One thing that both Joe and Ian have managed to do is capture the unique mix of personalities present on our project each season. From the passionate to the silly, the personalities drive the story of the project forward and captures the human aspect of field research. In other words, Ian and Joe balanced the technical aspects of archaeological research against the individuals involved in the project. The result of this balancing act was a more engaging film which captured the human dimension of decision making in the field.

5. Embed the filmmaker. Both Ian and Joe were effectively embedded in our project. This was perhaps largely a consequence of there only being just single person rather than a film crew, but it also speaks to the good match between the filmmaker and our team. Ian was trained as an archaeologist and Joe had an M.A. in history; so, both understood our project’s goals and methods and offered independent, critical interpretation of our work.

6. Trust. Closely related to our ability to embed the filmmaker was our willingness to trust both Ian and Joe to tell the story of our project in a responsible and accurate way. In other words, we knew that these two guys would not go out of their way to make us look bad or to distort our methods and goals. What we have discovered is that the best results come from letting our filmmakes tell our story in their own voice.

7. Time. One thing that we perhaps underestimated when we first started these projects in the time that they would take. Almost every member of the project had to be willing to take time out of their day to engage the camera and talk about what they were doing. When everyone is harried, tired, and busy, this was a significant commitment. And this says nothing of the commitment that both Joe and Ian have made to take our harried and tired comments and cobble them together into a cohesive story. Filmmaking takes time.

8. Landscapes and Place. Video captures a different view of landscape than still photography or maps and plans. Both Joe and Ian were very effective in placing the project in its physical and natural environment. In particular video provides a sense of time to travel through the landscape that still photography often struggles to capture.

9. Humor. Both Ian and Joe captured the humorous moments that are inevitable in any collaborative research project. Not only has this made their work more watchable (and less preachy), but also more human and more authentic.

10. Technology. One of the great things that we’ve witnessed over the past 5 years is how much easier it is to distribute the results of our filmmakers labors. With the advent of YouTube, more robust broadband connections, and more larger and faster online storage it is now possible to distribute high-quality video over the internet with almost no specialized technological infra-structure.

While it remains popular to complain about how academics and particularly archaeologists are portrayed in the media, it is also increasingly easy to push back by producing professional quality films to depict archaeological work on a way that is both entertaining and academically responsible. Technology makes it simple to distribute the film around the world, high-quality HD video cameras are relatively inexpensive, and it is now possible to edit and add special effects on a desktop computer. So, if you want to shoot a film, team up with a filmmaker and do it.

The iPad and My Computer Ecosystem

Enough people have asked that I feel either mocked or obligated to report on my first two days with my Apple iPad. (And for the record, I think that they're mostly mocking me.)

As I have said before, I am not necessarily an early adopter, but I also understand that the next generation of any device will almost always be better than the device that I decide to eventually purchase. Also, despite one of my former student's suggestions, I am not an Apple fanboy or "the high priest of the Apple cult" (although the latter seems sorta cool). I use four computers regularly. I do most of my writing on a MacBook Pro which is now a couple of years old. I do GIS, database, and basic statistical work on the Big Diesel -- a 17-inch Dell XPS laptop -- and I also increasingly use this computer for editing podcasts and various things involved in developing my online classes. At home, we use a Mac Mini as a media server for our stereo and it runs through our TV for movies and the like and surf the web on a three year old Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu. I don't game, but I do have an iPod Touch that I use regularly to do light web-surfing, check emails, and listen to music.

So, that's my computer ecosystem right now. The one thing missing was a ebook reader. I travel pretty regularly and I also read all the time. I read books, articles, student papers, drafts of my own writing, blogs, newspapers, and even, more and more rarely, fiction. Most of the academic articles that I read are now disseminated in PDF format and I do at least part of my own editing work in front of a computer. In other words, I wanted a device that allowed my to consume media in a more efficient and comfortable way. I had plenty of computers that enabled me to produce media in a flexible environment.

I was romanced by the Kindle and found it charming and functional enough to get one for my mother for Christmas a few years back, but I was worried that its web-surfing abilities seemed pretty limited for a $300 device. I thought maybe the Nook would be the answer or even one of Sony's elegant ebook readers, but the reviews on these devices were never quite enough to push me to order one. In particular, I wanted a device that would let me do a bit more than basic web-surfing since online classes had increasingly come to play a part in my teaching load. I wanted to be able to read and critique discussion board posts, for example, in my classes' threaded-discussions. This can be a time consuming process, and I wanted to be able to do it with more physical flexibility than I currently had with my laptops. I also wanted to be able to manage the various blogs that I write or administer. While I write sitting at the computer, I wanted to be able to administer comments, spam, and other basic maintenance aspects of blogging without having to boot up a computer and without being at my desk.

With these needs in mind, the iPad is doing fine so far. I spent time on Easter reading a little gaggle of articles that I had downloaded over the course of the previous week. I uploaded them to my Mediafire account and downloaded them easily onto a PDF reader on my iPad. I suspect that I'll continue to do most of my research on my laps tops since I am completely dependent on Firefox based Zotero to keep track of citations, but I could imagine doing some light research on it in a pinch.

I read my Sunday New York Times on it and even contemplated spending $80 on Anthony Kaldellis's Hellenism in Byzantium, before opting for the free, Project Gutenburg-produced, version of Conrad's Secret Agent. I also read some discussion board posts, a couple of blogs, and even watched part of a TV show on it. So, from what I can tell it does everything that it advertised it could do. The only frustration that I've encountered is figuring out how to organize files that I've uploaded to the device. I have the 32 GB version, so I could imagine having quite a bit of articles, photographs, and even scanned books on it, but I would need a more clear way of keeping these various documents organized before I make the device my research companion for trips to museum storerooms and the like.

Aside from that, it's aesthetically appealing, fast, stable, and seemingly bug free (although time will surely tell).

The Personal Archive

I'll admit that I am currently obsessed with Omeka (and particularly excited about their new foray into cloud hosting).  As any reader of this blog knows, it's a free, open-source web-publishing platform.  And I have begun to use it extensively to publish images from my archaeological work in the Mediterranean.  The software is powerful and relatively easy to use. I've managed to build three archives so far.  The first included the works of Ryan Stander who was the artist in residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project this past summer.  The second, which I featured in this blog yesterday, included images taken of the site of Lakka Skoutara over the course of 9 years showing archaeological formation processes playing out in the Greek countryside.  Yesterday, I uploaded a series of maps documenting the distribution of material across our study area in Cyprus.  The maps show the distribution of artifacts by chronotype across the coastal zone of Pyla Village, and these maps will be linked to places within a working draft of a chapter for the upcoming PKAP monograph on the distributional analysis of material at the site. 

Distribution of Hellenistic to Early Roman period artifacts

Distribution of Early Roman period artifacts

Eventually, a working draft of this chapter (part of which have appeared, albeit in very fragmentary forms in this blog in Thinking Out Loud One, Two, Three, Four) will appear on my Scribd page or, better still, in my Omeka archive alongside the other maps and images using their clever Google powered document viewer plug-in.

None of these applications took me more than a few hours to find my comfort zone and I can uses these applications to continue to expand the personal-professional archive that began with the blog.  Each archive is designed to accommodate different types of material, operates with slightly different principles of organization, and has a different aesthetic of display (or user-interface as the kids call it).

The scholarly process becomes more transparent and de-mystified.

Three Things From the Writers Conference

This past week's writers conference was a pretty spectacular event.  I managed to attend several of the lunchtime sessions and a few other events.  I wish I could have done more.  Even with that somewhat limited exposure, I came away with innumerable impressions and ideas that I hope can somehow influence my thinking and work over the next year.

1. Writing as Performance.  Saul Williams, whose poetry is as much about performance on stage as it is about language, made the point that he regarded the page itself as a performance space.  I am not sure why I was surprised by this.  In the previous days panel entitled "beyond the screen", a number of the participants described the creative process in performative terms.  One work discussed in this panel was a collective called Collaborative Furtures created a single book over a week period.  The act of writing was as much the final product as the book itself.  It got me thinking about blogging as a kind of performative writing.  The time-based aspect of the blog -- with the date of publication forming the primary organizing principle -- represents writing in a way that centers more on the way that ideas develop through time and careen off one another than any one central theme, argument, plot, or even space.  The time based component of the blog draws inspiration from the practice of writing journals which seek to capture the immediacy of experience.  I think this relates to our somewhat erratic efforts on the Punk Archaeology blog where we have (I think tacitly) abandoned any plan or argument or even rhythm to our posts and introduce ideas as they come to us. In effect, blogging (even my rhythmic, daily, inscription) performs the act of writing by insisting on the temporal dimension of its practice. Like working papers, blog posts are showing the work that final drafts of academic and professional writing obscures behind a find layer of polish.  Blogs represent ideas as events in the process of development.

2. There is no New Media.  One of the themes of the writers conference was the New Media and one of the really obvious outcomes of all the panels that I attended is that the very notion of the New Media has outlived its purpose.  First off, we probably can't call many of the things that are traditionally associated with the New Media "new" any more.  After all, the internet as we know it is 20 years old and computer based media actually predates widespread access to net.  Like any once-new medium for communicating ideas, any effort to produce a common definition is bound to be inadequate to describe the work of artists and writers across such varied platforms as interactive fiction, web-based video, digital music, installation art, and multimedia arguments.  In fact, if there is any complaint that I have about the writers conference is how little common ground there was between the people on the largest and (to my mind) potentially most dynamic panel -- Beyond the Screen -- which featured new media pioneers and masters across mutiple fields: Cecelia Condit (film), Mark Amerika (film and literature), Nick Montfort (literature), Stuart Moulthrop (art and literature), Scott Miller (music).  While we can all accept that a lack of easy definition can suggest the existence of something profound, in the case of the New Media it may indicate, instead, that whatever moment in time the newness sought to capture and define has passed.  The New Media no longer has a center around which ideas are coalescing.  In other words, whatever middle ground once existed which allowed authors and artists to share ideas has now once again dispersed and we must find new paradigms to understand how former "New" media works relate.

3. Anxiety and the Book.  The first panel I attended was provocatively titled: "Are Books Obsolete?".  The title alone suggests the anxiety surrounding the coming of the ebook reader, the speed and fluidity of the web, and the end of the page as a basic unit for measuring writing, reading, and certain basic intellectual accomplishments.  While there were plenty of opportunities to celebrate the "new" opportunities made available through the hypertextual medium of the electronic "page", the underlying anxiety persisted. In this context, all of the sometimes incredible power of books came to the fore: their ability to capture attention, to stimulate pleasure through their weight, forms, and even scent, to structure narrative through conditioning interaction, to create better, more thoughtful readers, and to sustain the creative arts by protecting the intellectual property of the author.  Anyone who has read this blog knows that I appreciate the role that objects play in creating relationships between individuals, but all of the anxiety about the end of the book seems strangely overwrought.  There is no denying there importance of books to the Western intellectual tradition, there is also no denying that most people in history did not read books.  And more than that, even most people who could read did not necessary read books.  I'd even argue that today, most of us spend more time reading newspapers, magazines, loose papers, and letters than books.  It's not that books aren't important (and I suspect that they will continue to be), but that their impact has always been focused on a particular groups and particular circumstances.  Perhaps it's just the historian in me who noticed the lack of historical context for the significance of the book.  This is not to suggest that a dose of "historical reality" will alleviate fears that the end of books as we know it will swiftly bring about the end of Western civilization, but it certainly would make the extent and significance of the book as an object and technology easier to understand.

Any event that causes me to think is a good event (even if the only thing that I think is "who is that guy and why is he doing that?") and, with this broad definition, the Writers Conference qualifies as a good event. It was exciting to hear people talk so freely and to speculate so widely about the life of the mind on a campus and in a community where such talk is not always readily accepted. I'm already looking forward to next year, and if you have a few bucks, give something to help the Writers Conference continue to stimulate the minds of the northern plains.

Teaching Thursday: A Year in Review

Crossposted to Teaching Thursday

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Teaching Thursday, for a brief effort to summarize its first year in existence. Teaching Thursday emerged from a conversation between me and Anne Kelsch. The idea of Teaching Thursday began on my blog as an online extension of his regular teaching journal.  The idea was to take time each week to reflect on some issue either in the media or in practice that influences the way in which he taught. As with blogging in general, the reflective writing soon became addictive and this addiction (as they often do) led to changes in behavior.  I found that I became more aware (and, indeed, interested) in how changing approaches to my classroom practice produced different results, created different environments, and reflected changing attitudes toward teaching more broadly.  I thought it would be a great idea to supplement the regular discussions organized by the Office of Instructional Development with a weekly teaching blog where folks across campus (and perhaps even outside of campus) could reflect on the things that they do that influence how they teach.

SInce those first conversations, Teaching Thursday has seen 63 posts and 66 comments.  The most common categories (and we divided the post into many, probably too many categories) and those related to online teaching (5), technology (7), cheating (4), student expectations (6), graduate instruction (6), and the future of teaching (6), and summer teaching (4).  These posts were written by over 20 authors representing 15 departments or divisions on campus and several off-campus bloggers to add some diversity to our perspective here.  The posts featured the full range of faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track, from full professors to assistant professors), staff, and administrators who are all committed to teaching in some way on the University of North Dakota campus.

Below is a list of the 25 most popular posts from the past year.  One of the great things about blogs is that you can track, to some extent, the number of times your pages were viewed.  Of course, any kind of web statistic must be taken with a grain of salt, but the ability to say something about what your audience found interesting, compelling, or timely.  The list below ranks the most popular posts based on the number of page views per day. The diversity among these popular posts is remarkable to me.  They range from very traditional blog posts which merely point toward an article of interest on the web, to inspirational essays, to thoughtful critiques and practice teaching advice. 

1. 2.4. Howard Zinn and Teaching, R. Kahn
2. 1.80. The Recruiting Paradox: Recruiting and Teaching a New Generation of Graduate Students, E. Nelson
3. 1.75. Online Teaching, the Panopticon, and the unequal gaze, M. Beltz
4. 1.59. On the habit of cheating, M. Beltz
5. 1.39. How to spot a bad professor, W. Caraher
6. 1.38. The Cost of Cheap Education, A. Kelsch
7. 1.28. The English Department and Beyond: the UND Writers Conference, C. Alberts
8. 0.95. Technology and Pedagogy. W. Caraher
9. 0.87. Teaching Thursday: Critiquing the Three Year Solution, J. Hawthorne
10. 0.70. The New Future of Teaching: Graduate Student Mentoring/Deconstructing Framework J. Benoit
11. 0.67. Teaching Thursdays: Boundaries and Manners, C. Prescott
12. 0.63. The New Future of Teaching: Social Networking, Changing Expectations, and the Perils of Access, W. Caraher. B. Weber
13. 0.57. Teaching Thursday: Some Thoughtful Tips , M. Beltz,W. Caraher, T. Prescott, B. Weber
14. 0.57. The Panopticon and Online Teaching, W. Caraher
15. 0.47. Mentoring Graduate Students, C. Prescott
16. 0.42. The Cost of Cheap Education: Another Perspective , M. Beltz
17. 0.41. Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis , D. Perkins
18. 0.40. Reflecting on Teaching: An All-Campus Colloquium on Teaching and Learning, W. Caraher
19. 0.39. Call me Edupunk, C. Alberts
20. 0.38. Using Models to Teach, C. Barkdull, B. Weber
21. 0.37. Cheating, W. Caraher
22. 0.31. Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium: On Spurring Self-Reflection in Decision Making, D. Sauerwein
23. 0.30. Online Cheating, C. Prescott
24. 0.26. Another View on Teaching Graduate Students, A. Kitzes
25. 0.24. Making the Most of a Month in China: The Role of a Direct Journal, C. Berry

Over the first year, the blog has enjoyed over 7500 page views (and this does not count views via its RSS feed in Google Reader and the like).  The chart below shows that the trend over the past 12 months is clearly a positive one especially when you consider that December and January are typically slow blog months (both in terms of posts and visits) and March still has a week left and is showing exceptional traffic. In short, I am optimistic that the upward trend will continue.

While we do not collect a full set of analytics data, we can say a few things about how people got to our blog.  The biggest referrer is und.edu, followed by und.edu/dept/oid (the home page of the office of instructional development). My personal blog -- The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World provided some traffic as did the Official Blog of the Graduate School , but more important perhaps are various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter which drove a considerable quantity of traffic to the site.  Finally, several other sites picked up our blog and linked to it.  The most exciting link came from the the New York Times, but we also attracted links from India, South America, and several blogs in the US.  The most exciting thing is that every day, every week, and every month we see more and more traffic coming to Teaching Thursday to discover what our faculty and friend have to say about teaching.

Without sounding sappy, I've been very pleased to discover so many people on campus willing to write critical, reflective, and practical posts on aspects of their teaching.  As we look ahead to our 10,000 visit and 100th post, I am excited to continue to work to develop content and participation on the blog. In particular, I'd like to get more participation from across campus, and extend invitations to my colleagues in the College of Engineering, Nursing, the Law School, and Medical School (I'm already working on ways to draw in colleagues in Aerospace!) to contribute what you do that is inspirational, practical, and exciting to the conversation.  With the recent emphasis on the STEM disciplines, I think that this forum can become a useful place for teachers both within and outside of the STEM fields to  exchange ideas that will enrich all of our classroom experiences.

I'd like to thank all the contributors over the past year -- especially those who wrote multiple posts or took the time to write about teaching during busiest parts of the semester -- and thank Anne Kelsch's for all her hard work to keep the blog in the campus eye.

Tweets and Writers Conference on a Digital Day

Today is going to be dominated by digital affairs. First, I plan to attend the University of North Dakota CIO (Chief Information Officers) Core Technology Research Forum. The plan, from what I understand, is to focus on the future of research technology here on campus.

That's probably the least interesting meeting of the day. Immediately after that meeting, I'll scurry off to the first major panel of the UND Writers Conference. The theme of this years conference is "Mind the Gap: Print, New Media, Art" and here's the exciting schedule. At noon in the lecture bowl, the first panel will discuss "Are Books Obsolete?" and feature graphic artist, Art Spiegelman, e-literature author (and Teaching Thursday contributor!) Deena Larsen, filmmaker Cecelia Condit. This is not the first panel to consider this topic in recent years and the slightly negative tone to the question (as opposed to the more optimistic "What is the future of the book"? The fear with a panel focused on a question like this is that the answer could be a simple "no" and that doesn't leave us anywhere really to go.

One of my little pet projects has been to encourage a Twitter back channel for the Writers Conference using the hashtag #UNDWC. Let's just say that North Dakota is not quite ready for Twitter hashtags yet and it's been a bit of an uphill battle. In any event, the Writers Conference does have an official Twitter Feed, which awkwardly has two followers. So, anyone attending, thinking about, or curious about the Writers Conference, follow their feed. Or, better still, contribute to the conversation by using the #UNDWC. Then follow the chat (or just me tweeting merrily away) here.

Then, at 2 pm, I'm off to my History 240 Class to talk about research using the library. As per usual this involves introducing them to digital tools - namely the library catalogue, J-Stor, World Cat, Google Scholar, and Zotero -- as well as old fashioned analog ones. One of the greatest challenges that I have each year is explaining to students exactly what a monograph is or how to distinguish between an academic and popular work. It's always surprising how little the students understand about the relationship between form and authority in publishing. In other words, a book that has all of the basic attributes of an academically authoritative text (footnotes, bibliography, index, acknowledgements, thesis, academic publisher) is more likely to be the basis for further research than a book lacking this attributes. Students simply do not come to University with the skills needed to discern academic authority. The thing that worries me more, is that these basic skills are very difficult to communicate and instill in students. In other words, students will continue to ask me -- sometimes for semesters after the class is over -- whether a book is a monograph or not. I am not trying to suggest that students only read monographs or anything like that, but it strikes me as odd how hard it is for them to distinguish between an academic book and a non-academic book. And, to return to the theme of this post, it worries me that in a digital environment it is even more confusing to them. At least academic publishing adheres to some basic standards whereas the signs of authority on the web are far more obscure.

Finally, on a digital day, I am slightly embarrassed to announce that I (well, actually my wife) ordered my iPad over the weekend. While I have, like any good academic, scurried off to find negative reviews of it (just to keep myself from being disappointed), I am pretty excited to have a flexible, flawed, and nicely designed ebook reader. I expect it to substantially improve my life.

Metablogging Monday

I usually find it useful to step back every now and then and consider the enterprise of blogging. Most people who've read this blog for any significant length of time, know that I make (over and over) certain arguments for how blogging helps me as a scholar to work better. Three things have led me to return to my thoughts on academic blogging this lovely Monday:

1. I was asked recently by a blogging colleague whether I knew of any good literature that would help a new academic blogger. I've read some of the recent and "standard" works on blogging: Rettberg's Blogging (Polity 2009), and Rosenberg's Say Everything (Crown 2009), some of the old faithfuls on e-literature like Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (MIT 1998) and some works on participatory culture like Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (NYU 2008) and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (NYU 2006). All these works tend to locate blogging the realm of popular culture. This is not particularly helpful to an aspiring academic blogger. In fact, academic blogging has been almost complete ignored. In fact, in the 2004 Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (a nicely expansive and representatively volume) there are no references to blogs or blogging. In general, the popular press tends to ignore academic blogging as well. Technorati's annual "State of the Blogosphere" has never (in my knowledge) referred to academic blogging. The academic trade press, namely the Chronicle of Higher Education, hosts blogs, but, in general, the attitude toward blogging is cautious with a dose of pessimism. This all being said, the best place to start thinking about blogging is probably this post at Millinerd.com. In particular, I liked the idea (from Matt Mullenweeg via Andrew Keen) that blogs are aggregation points for the content that defines (in whatever context) one's identity. As most of us celebrate multiple personalities (appropriate for multiple contexts) academic blogs tend to represent one facet of my identity, namely my research interests. My blog is the home of my book notes, my rough drafts, my academic (and almost intellectual) musings, and, in many cases, my naivete and curiosity. If someone wants to know about me as an academic and my work, read my blog.

2. This past week saw the publication of a review essay on three anthropological blogs in the Public Archaeology section of the American Anthropologist 112 (2010), 140-141 (via the Ancient World Bloggers Group). The review focused on three blogs: a group blog, Savage Minds, a personal blog, Zero Anthopology, and the American Anthropological Associations official blog. The pros and cons of each approach were weighed, in a fairly uninteresting way, the usual caveats appeared -- blogs aren't peer reviewed, they can be hastily written, and they might include logical fallacies or half-baked ideas (as if the peer-review processes and these problems were mutually exclusive categories) -- and the typical critique of the assessable value of academic blogging:

"Like any other writing project, the time required for effective blogging can be enormous and with some of the high scholarship shown in detailed and thoughtful postings and exchanges by scholars at blog sites like Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology (formerly Open Anthropology), or Culture Matters, there are reasons to wonder about the unrewarded disciplinary usefulness of establishing and maintaining such valuable public commons. The political economy of academia is not structured to reward individuals building things for a common good outside of the peer-review process. It has long been true that many of the most useful academic resource tools (annotated bibliographies, reference books, and the like) are undervalued or unrecognized by formal academic assessments. For now at least, academic blogs seem to be an electronic extension of this troubling phenomenon."

It's good to realize and recognize this. In most cases a blogger blogs on their own time and for personal benefit more than academic recognition (although the value of blogs for the construction and maintenance of the informal networks that play such a key role in nourishing the academic discourse should not be underestimated). The greatest disappointment that I had with this review is that it made almost not comment on the content of these blogs. It did not, as one would expect an academic review to do, comment on the strength of particular arguments, the value of the contributions in the blog, or even the extent to which the posts in a blog represent a useful companion to the more scholarly discourse manifest in its perfected form in peer-reviewed journals. In effect, the review critiqued blogging as phenomenon. From my perspective, this is the equivalent of reviewing a book that appeared in 2002. What would have been of particular value for a reading public, perhaps tentatively recognizing blogs for the first time as a complement to the traditional academic press, would be a month review of blogs for content, argument, scope, and significance. If blogs move at the speed of our keyboards and the internet (which peer reviewed journals move at the more leisurely pace of institutions, publishers, and collegial good will), a quarterly round up of blogs as sources for information would not only be useful, but also recognize the ability of blogs to shape conversations from the academic margins.

3. I'm contemplating going up for tenure next year. I've received assurance from the involved parties, compiled good reviews of my scholarly output, teaching, and service, and have the supportive of my colleagues. I feel confident that my traditional scholarly credentials will live up to the expectations of our department, college, and university. Now, what to do about the blog? None of my colleagues are bloggers and few, if any read blogs. And I don't feel like I need my blog in order to gain promotion and tenure. On the other hand, over the past month I've scrawled more the 13,000 words here. That's almost 50% more than the 9,685 words that I have written for various other research projects, book reviews, public lectures, correspondence, and grant proposals. Surely that output represents something, if only the misguided folly of a junior scholar who values prematurely exposing his half-formed ideas to a reading audience. Again, I am not going to insist that the blog count the same as 13,000 peer reviewed words or that I get special recognition for this effort (which as I note in point 2, is mostly done on my own time for my own academic disciplina), but on the other hand, blogging is not as removed from my academic identity as, say, gardening (which I don't do) or religiously watching every lap of every NASCAR race on the weekend (no comment). How does blogging fit into a modern academic curriculum vitae?

UPDATE: Do check out Shawn Graham's response to this post.  He's an iconic archaeologist blogger whose Electric Archaeologist has long set the standard for high-quality academic blogging.  When he chimes in, it does us all good to listen!