Teaching with Social Media

Alun Digital Academia, Science No Comments , ,

Road building in Nepal

Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal, surely a path to enlight­en­ment? Photo by rpb1001.

I think I took my PhD at Leicester at almost exactly the right time — if you ignore the cata­strophic down­turn in edu­ca­tion fund­ing. The reason is I’ve had the oppor­tun­ity to work with a few people who have been inspir­ingly innov­at­ive in their teach­ing. Derek Raine intro­duced me to Problem-Based Learn­ing, when he built a new degree in Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Sci­ence around it. +A.J. Cann also help by let­ting me help out on some of his numer­acy / study skills courses for Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences and that’s what he’s blog­ging about today at Of Schemes and Memes and on his own blog at Sci­ence of the Invis­ible.

I’m sure I’ve had plenty of study skills train­ing but I don’t remem­ber much of it. At its worst it was a part of the first year course teach­ing how to use vari­ous sys­tems I might want to use in the third year. By which time the sys­tem might well have changed or else I would have for­got­ten it through lack of use. I don’t do well if I have do some­thing in order to learn how to use a sys­tem. I work bet­ter if I learn how to use a sys­tem in order to do some­thing else.

Alan Cann has a focus on how and why stu­dents want to learn some­thing. To explain the dif­fer­ence, when I was taught I might be shown how to use PubMed. Fill in all the boxes and that’s a pass. In con­trast Alan sets tasks that have a pur­pose and explains PubMed or Web of Know­ledge are the easi­est ways to get the inform­a­tion stu­dents need. The cleverest part is that this is wrapped up with social media icing.

Get­ting cohorts onto Google+ gets them think­ing about pri­vacy, but also makes com­mu­nic­a­tion online a more nat­ural act. Stu­dents can build their own sup­port struc­tures. These become more import­ant as the stu­dents move toward inde­pend­ent study later in their degree. Another clever thing work­ing through social media does is it helps dis­solve bar­ri­ers between modules.

In my first degree what I learned in mod­ule A applied to mod­ule A. What I learned in Mod­ule B applied to Mod­ule B. I wasn’t mak­ing con­nec­tions between the two. On Google+ the work their is for Alan’s mod­ule, but stu­dents dis­cuss more than that. They’ll talk about other mod­ules and make con­nec­tions about why some­thing puzz­ling is hap­pen­ing because we know from this mod­ule that this occurs so when you apply it to that lab exper­i­ment you should expect that and so on.

Another fea­ture is that Alan doesn’t give the same course twice. He’ll drop what thinks doesn’t work and come up with some­thing bet­ter. This shouldn’t be rad­ical. I’ve been on count­less courses as a post-grad that talk about the import­ance of reflec­tion in teach­ing. Usu­ally this reflec­tion in the sense of “how can you bet­ter guide stu­dents along the path to enlight­en­ment?” Alan and Derek have both taken the approach that ques­tions if the path is right in the first place. Even if it’s basic­ally sound, do we need all these wig­gly detours to des­tin­a­tions no one vis­its anymore?

This post is a good entry point to some of what Alan is doing with teach­ing. Sci­ence of the Invis­ible is the place to go if you want to read more.

Photo: Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal by rpb1001. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC licence.

This post also appears on Google+.

Snapseed review

Alun Digital Academia No Comments ,

I’ve had a quick play with Snap­seed for Mac. Below is a neut­ral photo of a green­house at Kew expor­ted from Aper­ture, and one after a couple of minutes of editing.

Greenhouse at Kew, neutral version

Green­house at Kew, neut­ral version.

Snap­seed works with a mod­i­fied form of Nik’s UPoint inter­face. You can make global changes, but on some fea­tures you can make masked adjust­ments. Here I put a point on the left of the sky in a blue part. I pulled the size to make it a big area, but when I did the clouds were auto­mat­ic­ally masked off, so it was only going to be the blue parts of the area that were affected. There’s handy red high­light­ing as you do this to show where your effect will apply. I reduced bright­ness and increased sat­ur­a­tion, then duplic­ated the point and moved the duplic­ate to the other side if the blue sky so that all the area was covered.

Snapseed at work

Snap­seed at work.

There are other ways of doing the same thing in other photo apps, but this is usu­ally a pain­less way of select­ing an area. It works well for com­plex shapes, like if you want to select flower­heads in a shot. My ver­sion of Pho­toShop Ele­ments is out-of-date so I don’t know how good the smart select­ors are in that now, but the ver­sions I have used have been much harder to do the same thing with.

It’d be great if you could do that with all the effects, but you can’t. The range of point options is lim­ited to bright­ness, con­trast and sat­ur­a­tion. If you want a lot of con­trol then it’s $99 for Viveza or Color Efex. The rest of Snapseed’s effects are global. I applied the Struc­ture+ effect to bring out details in the stones and clouds. That’s a scal­able effect, so if you think I’ve gone over the top you could pull a slider down to ease off.

That’s all I did because then it looks like a bug kicked in and I couldn’t apply any more effects like Vign­ette or Drama. In this case it might be a bless­ing but it’ll annoy me if that’s per­sist­ent. Look­ing at the res­ult I think I’d want to push it back in to Aper­ture to blur the sky a little. I could do some­thing sim­ilar to remove struc­ture in Snap­seed by adding a point and turn­ing down the con­trast a little. If there hadn’t been the bug.

The same Greenhouse at Kew after Snapseed

The same Green­house at Kew after Snapseed.

I keep think­ing about buy­ing Viveza, HDR Efex or Color Efex, or the bulk suite, but I keep get­ting put off because whenever I look the price in Europe is much higher than from the US store, even after allow­ing for VAT. The only excep­tion was a recent sale where things were up to 50% off. A $10 instruc­tion video was indeed 50% off, but the sav­ings on the soft­ware were bring­ing down the prices to US levels, which doesn’t feel like a sav­ing. This adds an extra span­ner to Nik mar­ket­ing machine, because this does a lot of what I want from Viveza or Color Efex. Ok, I don’t get the Sun­rise Glow fil­ter, but how often would I use it? I like to sleep in. The last thing I want to do is make people think I’m will­ing to get up at the crack of dawn to pho­to­graph some­thing. I’d get even less use out of the “Cross-processed on a rainy Tues­day” fil­ter and so on. Have Nik lost a sale, or have they worked out that tools, excel­lent as they are, are aimed at the pro mar­ket and they need some­thing dif­fer­ent to prise money out of the hobby market?

It is expens­ive to com­pared to a lot of the photo fil­ter apps in the Mac­Store, but if you don’t have any app and you don’t need fine con­trol like Color Efex or Viveza then it’s a good buy. If you’re happy shuff­ling pho­tos between an iPad and a Mac and you already have Snap­seed, then it’s not worth the pur­chase. Alter­ing your pho­tos by touch feels nicer.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

HDR and Reality

Alun Digital Academia, The Past No Comments ,

A com­ment on this link HDR: Love it or or Leave it? pos­ted by +Matt Shal­vatis.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank

The Lov­ell Tele­scope at Jodrell Bank

This has been on my ‘to-blog-about’ list for years. On the one side there’s the artistic effect, which you can debate. I get the impres­sion HDR is a per­sonal taste, so telling people it’s the right or wrong way seems point­less to me. In my view my early HDR stuff was poor. In par­tic­u­lar it was often over-saturated so I could see what was hap­pen­ing (I have odd col­our vis­ion). These days if I can can do some­thing I want without HDR I will, and I find adjust­ing the white and black points is often enough for what I want, but when it isn’t a light touch in Pho­to­matix can make a big and subtle difference

The other side is that it can have prac­tical uses in some­thing like archae­ology. I have seen too many pho­tos of pitch-black church interi­ors. HDR can provide a much bet­ter impres­sion of what the human eye sees than the lim­ited dynamic range of a cam­era because you can expose the shot for a wider range of light and shadow. The altern­at­ive is to bring a massive light­ing rig along with you, and that’s not practical.

I know some people think this is bad because it’s manip­u­lat­ing the pho­to­graph and there­fore not a ‘true record’. They’re right it isn’t ‘true’. But the auto func­tion on a cam­era isn’t neut­ral. It makes its own judge­ments on what the set­tings should be. The dif­fer­ence is that these set­tings are often hid­den from the user when they’re made, so it’s harder to see what assump­tions are being built in. Just because you can’t see the manip­u­la­tion of set­tings hap­pen­ing doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

I don’t ever see the same angst about real­ity in archae­olo­gical illus­tra­tion though. I think a lot of archae­olo­gists will laugh if you say the cam­era never lies, but I think there’s a bias to believ­ing that cam­eras can be neut­ral. Maybe with pho­tos look­ing so much closer to real­ity we sub­con­sciously insist devi­ations from real­ity are flaws not art.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

Teaching Apples and Oranges

Alun Digital Academia, Politics No Comments , , , ,

Introduction to Monstering

There’s an inter­est­ing story on the BBC News web­site: Teach­ing ‘bet­ter at school than uni­ver­sity’ — survey

When asked to com­pare teach­ing at school and uni­ver­sity, less than one-in-five privately edu­cated pupils favoured their uni­ver­sity tutor­ing. Almost two-thirds declared that the teach­ing they had at school had been better.

The res­ults are not a sur­prise. I took A-levels (pre-university exams) twice. The first time I was taught maths, chem­istry and phys­ics and I learned about chem­istry and physics.

The second time was a few years later for Eco­nom­ics and Law even­ing classes. Here I was taught what I needed to know to pass the exams. In the case of Law, there were always four ques­tions in Paper II, Hom­icide, Tort, Con­tract and Con­sti­tu­tional law. You needed to answer two of four, so the even­ing class only covered Hom­icide and Tort. I do not have a roun­ded legal edu­ca­tion, but the col­lege was not graded on my edu­ca­tion it was graded on the res­ults I got. Behind trained for the exam was a huge suc­cess and I scored more UCAS points on my one year even­ing class courses than in my two year stand­ard courses.

Every year for over twenty years the num­ber and qual­ity of A-level passes has gone up. The argu­ments are usu­ally over whether or not the exams are get­ting easier, or the pupils bet­ter. What is less often noted is that schools are graded and com­pared against their neigh­bours on their pass rate. Unsur­pris­ingly they’ve become more and more ruth­less about train pupils to pass an exam because that’s what mat­ters, not whether or not they under­stand why they’re doing what they’re doing.
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Plugins for an academic group blog: Referencing & Footnotes

Alun Digital Academia 2 Comments ,

For reas­ons that will hope­fully become obvi­ous this sum­mer I’ve been think­ing what plu­gins would be use­ful for an aca­demic group blog on WordPress.

Ref­er­en­cing & Footnotes

In terms of integ­rat­ing ref­er­ences the three big pro­grams are End­Note, Mendeley and Zotero. It would be easy to get lost in an argu­ment about which of these is the best sys­tem. I don’t think that mat­ters. What is best for me is not neces­sar­ily best for you. Also two of these sys­tems are on the web, so they could be very dif­fer­ent in six months. What is best now might not be best soon. So the best solu­tion for integ­rat­ing with Word­Press is to be able to handle as many sys­tems as possible.

That’s why I like Mar­tin Fenner’s plu­gins Bib­TeX Importer and Link to Link. Everything out­puts Bib­tex, so any selec­tion could be uploaded as Links in WordPress’s sys­tem with the importer. Then Link to Link makes it easy to pull out the links as you write. Mix in a good foot­note sys­tem and you and make good bib­li­o­graph­ies. The only draw­back is that WordPress’s sys­tem requires these links link to some­thing, like a DOI or URL. That’s not cer­tain for archae­olo­gical ref­er­ences so it’s not a per­fect solution.

Two other ways involve link­ing the bib­li­o­graphic sys­tem to Word­Press. That requires that the sys­tem is online, so no End­Note. Zot­press integ­rates with Zotero and with upgrades over time it does is bet­ter and bet­ter. The latest ver­sion sits as a wid­get by the side of the edit area for insert­ing short­codes. In fact simply tag­ging the rel­ev­ant entries in Zotero with a hashtag like #blogentry20110517 gives you a single tag to look for and then you can type in one Zot­press short­code to com­pile the whole bibliography.

A sim­ilar trick can be done with the Mendeley plu­gin, though the inter­face is a little less friendly, while the short­codes are much friend­lier. It is tempt­ing to thing the choice of which plu­gin in to use is one or the other. You can’t have two identical bib­li­o­graph­ies in a post so you only use one? The blog­ger will only type one short­code in the post, but can choose which on if both plu­gins are installed. I think the plu­gins only use the pro­cessor if they’re invoked by the short­code so there’s no trouble using them both. I think with Zotero becom­ing unhooked from Fire­fox, the choice between Mendeley and Zotero will mInly be social. You’ll use what your per­sonal net­work uses.

An addi­tional Mendeley fea­ture is that you can also add a related research plu­gin. This works, even if the blog­ger uses Zotero for the bib­li­o­graphy in the post, if you remem­ber to add tags, so it seems like another use­ful add-on.

This leaves just a mat­ter of how to insert foot­notes. I like WP-Footnotes because it degrades grace­fully. You insert a foot­note with double brack­ets some­thing sim­ilar to but not exactly {{like this}}. When you use plain brack­ets it becomes a foot­note. ((Like this. Actu­ally test­ing this shows that Apture will be a prob­lem if Foot­notes are used. The reason is the anchor for the foot­note will be hid­den by the Apture bar with search etc. So too will the back link. It’s prob­ably a choice between foot­notes and Apture. If an aca­demic blog uses foot­notes reg­u­larly I can see Apture being a miss.)) Apart from being simple, if you deac­tiv­ate it, then all your older posts don’t auto­mat­ic­ally look unread­able. It’s lim­ited in what it does, but what it does it does extremely well. But I won­der if my reluct­ance to use short­codes in the past means I might be over­look­ing Foot­notes for Word­Press. One ques­tion is why do you need foot­notes on a blog?

Foot­notes make sense in print by mov­ing dis­cre­tion­ary text out of the way. They make sense for ref­er­ences, though for plain text using foot­notes is often a sign you’ve writ­ten some­thing badly. End­notes make sense on paper in that they’re easier to type­set than foot­notes. But blogs are not on paper. Ref­er­ences could be dir­ectly hyper­linked. I think one reason this has never taken off in human­it­ies aca­demic blogs is partly the expect­a­tion of what text should look like and partly because if a source isn’t online it’s not obvi­ous what the link should link to. Even so, do we really need to scroll down for notes in elec­tronic texts? Foot­notes for Word­Press takes advant­age of blog­ging by includ­ing an option for hov­er­ing foot­notes. I used to think float­ing notes or tool­tips were gim­micks. If mak­ing them becomes as simple as typ­ing [ref]footnote here.[/ref] then maybe it’s time to rethink what it is you want foot­notes to do. I think there’s still a need for col­lated ref­er­ences at the end of an elec­tronic text, as it still serves a use­ful Fur­ther Read­ing func­tion after fin­ish­ing read­ing a text. Adding float­ing notes won’t remove that list, but it will make those same notes and ref­er­ences more accessible.

Blogging Archaeology Week 4, Part Two: What could a group Archaeology blog look like?

Alun Digital Academia 3 Comments ,

I’ve been think­ing over vari­ous prob­lems in set­ting up a group blog for archae­ology for a while. The thought pro­cess usu­ally fol­lows four steps.

  1. Hmm… here’s a tech­nical prob­lem that could need to be solved for a group blog.
  2. Aha! Here’s a solu­tion that would be nifty.
  3. Of course, you’d need someone to organ­ise people and enthuse them…
  4. That sounds far too much like hard work. I’ll leave it.

For example I think Terry Brock is right, a group archae­ology blog could be a good idea. But for reas­ons you really don’t need to know about I can’t com­mit to any­thing before mid-April at the earli­est. So my con­tri­bu­tion is lim­ited to say­ing “Great Idea!” without actu­ally doing any­thing that could be mis­taken for work. I have been in a group blog though, so I could flag some prob­lems that need to be solved.

I was a mem­ber of HNN’s Revise & Dis­sent. I don’t think it was a suc­cess­ful group blog. It had good blog­gers as well as me, but I think col­lect­ively the blog was less than the sum of its parts. One reason is that it wasn’t a coher­ent col­lect­ive. We had interests in dif­fer­ent peri­ods of his­tory and dif­fer­ent regions. I thought that was a good thing because it meant that we covered history’s diversity. Instead I get the impres­sion there was no com­mon thread to the blog other than ‘the past’. Terry Brock points out that archae­olo­gists aren’t that well con­nec­ted at the moment. I think he’s right, but cre­at­ing a group blog will not inher­ently make us con­nec­ted. I read Dirt. I like it, but I don’t com­ment as I don’t have any­thing of value to say there. I think if Terry and I were on the same group blog then I’d simply not com­ment on that blog instead of not com­ment­ing on Dirt.

In con­trast some­thing like Play the Past, isn’t just about his­tory. It’s about a shared approach to his­tory. Pos­sibly you could say that archae­ology is a spe­cific approach to his­tory, but some people think archae­ology is a branch of anthro­po­logy. I’m some­times a his­tor­ian and some­times an archae­olo­gist. I’m inter­ested in human action in the past and I’m not really con­scious of delib­er­ately switch­ing between two approaches. How­ever, I am not an anthro­po­lo­gist. Anthro­po­logy is rel­ev­ant to archae­ology, but they are not the same dis­cip­line. I don’t think archae­ology is inher­ently focussed enough for a group blog to gel.

A second prob­lem with Revise & Dis­sent is that we made it demand­ing. We already all had blogs that were our home. I don’t know if any of us felt at home at Revise & Dis­sent, which sat on HNN’s sys­tem. It meant that writ­ing posts for R&D was a con­scious effort because we wanted to put up some­thing ser­i­ous there. There was no pres­sure from HNN to do this, I was some­thing we inflic­ted on ourselves.

I think this con­trib­uted to a third prob­lem, which was when to con­trib­ute? I con­sciously held back some posts, and didn’t sub­mit oth­ers because I didn’t want the blog to be Me and Revise & Dis­sent. This could have been a mis­take. Cliopat­ria works per­fectly well with Ralph Luker doing much of the blog­ging. I don’t think we tackled this prob­lem of what to post and when. It’s not a com­plaint that oth­ers were not doing enough — I have long peri­ods I can­not blog. We simply didn’t organ­ise the work, in my case because I don’t want to try boss­ing people around when they’re doing some­thing in their free time.

xf8n An archae­o­b­log not com­ing to a screen near you any time soon.

So a suc­cess­ful group archae­ology blog should have entries from vari­ous people relat­ing to each other on a reg­u­lar basis and not feel too much like hard work.

One way to cre­ate rela­tion­ships between blog­gers is to get them talk­ing about the same thing. This is what Colleen has done with her Blog­ging Archae­ology car­ni­val. So a group blog could adopt a theme each month e.g. Ori­gins, Power, Food, Reli­gion… and release a series of posts by dif­fer­ent blog­gers through­out that month. Blog­gers would be dis­cuss­ing the regions and peri­ods they were inter­ested in, but by talk­ing about some com­mon human exper­i­ence you get to com­pare and con­trast actions in dif­fer­ent times and places. You get to see what’s spe­cial about what you’re work­ing on by see­ing what other people are doing elsewhere.

That sounds good, but as Mick Mor­ris­son can tell you get­ting people to respond to a theme isn’t so easy. For example I could see that some people could pro­pose Slavery as a topic. That’s some­thing rel­ev­ant to the ancient world, but it’s not some­thing I spend much time look­ing at. So do I ignore it when it comes round, or to I grind out some­thing to con­trib­ute in the hope that when I put for­ward some­thing I’d like to see oth­ers will do the same? As pos­sible solu­tion is that people pro­pose and pre­pare drafts on a theme in a back chan­nel. So I could write a gender piece and announce it on the back chan­nel. Someone else could pre­pare some­thing on Travel and I might see that and draft a post as well. When it comes round to choos­ing the next month’s topic instead of assign­ing the topic, you could see which topic has the most drafts ready to go and that becomes the next theme on the blog. Four or five posts mean that you’d have a top­ical post once a week. To get those four or five posts though you’ll need more than four or five blog­gers because people get busy and run into gluts of work. It’ll take some social wrangling.

A purely ‘theme of the month’ based group blog is rather nar­row in focus. There are some other things where a col­lect­ive blog could add value. One is blogged reviews. Michael E. Smith at Pub­lish­ing Archae­ology has lamen­ted the lack of a good out­let for reviews. I agree with him on this and on the fact that BMCR does an excel­lent job of pub­lish­ing reviews. I some­times get offered things for review, and it’s likely that a group blog would also get offers. Ini­tially you’d need to prove that the concept works by blog­gers review­ing things they’ve read in their own research, but a review stream would be a valu­able addi­tion to archae­ology that doesn’t seem to be act­ive elsewhere.

An assump­tion above is that blog­gers con­trib­ut­ing to both of these strands would get links back to their own blog. They would, but what about people who have some­thing to say, but don’t want to start a whole blog when they’d only have some­thing per­haps once every three or four months? A third cat­egory News & Com­ment could offer this. I don’t think this would work just as a col­la­tion of head­lines. David Mead­ows already does that, and bet­ter, with the Explor­ator. If there was com­ment­ary on a story, for example why beer and wine mat­ter like SciAm does here then you have some­thing more worth­while. You could also throw in com­ment­ary from occa­sional blog­gers. If you get a large audi­ence it would also make sense to add requests for help, like look­ing for people to answer ques­tion­naires on out­reach, here. Hope­fully the con­trast with the themed blog posts would make it less of a strain to blog inform­ally in this category.

The final cat­egory I’d sug­gest is just per­sonal axe-grinding. Pho­to­graphy. Partly because Colleen Mor­gan pro­duces some great pho­tos and there’s plenty of inter­est­ing images appear­ing on Flickr. Also it’s some­thing that formal pub­lic­a­tion doesn’t do so much. In some cases some dire pho­tos are pub­lished. Photo of the Day would be hard work, but a Photo Phri­day would be pos­sible with sub­mis­sions or CC-licenced images from Flickr.

I’ve been think­ing about this for a while and there are prob­lems that need to be tackled. The big one is social. You need a core who are will­ing to slog for six months blog­ging on your monthly themes. Also one post a week is not going to build up an audi­ence rap­idly, so you’d need that core to each be com­mit­ted to one post a week on aver­age. It doesn’t sound a lot, but keep­ing that up for a long period is a ser­i­ous commitment.

You also need people who can encour­age people out­side the core to con­trib­ute and also keep an eye on qual­ity con­trol. That’s going to need tact. You won’t want rub­bish on the site. At the same time you don’t want to block people simply because you don’t agree with them. It’s likely to be some very good mater­ial that isn’t a suit­able fit for the site. You need someone who can turn that down without giv­ing the impres­sion that it’s rub­bish. I’d find set­ting up a site and telling people to take part, then say­ing ‘No thanks’ to some stressful.

There are tech­nical issues. Some are trivial. You won’t get a theme that every­one will like, so it’ll just have some­thing that people can live with that does the job. Some are more dif­fi­cult. A big­ger blog is going to be more of a tar­get for hack­ers. I’m using Vault­Press with AoBBlog, and some­thing sim­ilar would make sense for a ser­i­ous group blog. There are plu­gins to man­age (Zot­press, Mendeley or both?) and they can clash in unfore­seen ways. New fea­tures in Word­Press can break themes in unex­pec­ted ways and the big­ger the site the more vis­ible a fault is. Ideally the tech­nical side should be done so that people who aren’t inter­ested in the nut ‘n’ bolts don’t notice what’s going on.

There’s also the mat­ter of fund­ing. I’d be will­ing to con­trib­ute, but I couldn’t guar­an­tee fund­ing in per­petu­ity and there’s very few people who could. It would make sense to try to make the site self-funding. I’m against Google Ads. I don’t think they’re suit­able for a site dis­cuss­ing arte­facts as it’s impossible to pre­vent ads for illi­cit antiquit­ies appear­ing on site. If you’re not inter­ested in mak­ing a profit then fund­ing by other means might be a sol­uble prob­lem, but it’s hard to raise exactly the right amount of money and no more. So what do you do with a sur­plus? One answer would be to donate it an archae­olo­gical fund, but it’ll make life so much easier if this you can clearly demon­strate it hap­pen­ing. This is even more import­ant when if the sur­plus is tiny or non-existent so you rarely see dona­tions being made. It’s nat­ural to ask where the money is going.

The above is just one model of what an archae­olo­gical group blog could look like. Digital Archae­ology might be enough of a niche that a group blog could work. There’s a few archae­ode­bunk sites, they too might work as group blog. A group blog does bring bene­fits, but I can see it being a long slog to keep it run­ning. If one was set up now it wouldn’t be live till May, when exam mark­ing starts in the UK so it’s a tough time to launch. June brings more mark­ing and towards the end it fades into field­work sea­son, which will also make July and August dif­fi­cult months. Septem­ber and Octo­ber will be bad because terms start… and so on.

It can be done, but would enough people want to?

Blogging Archaeology 4: What next? Part One

Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment , ,

For our last ques­tion, I would like to ask you to con­sider the act of pub­lic­a­tion for this blog car­ni­val. How could we best cap­ture the inter­play, the mul­ti­me­dia exper­i­ence of blog­ging as a more form­al­ized pub­lic­a­tion? What would be the best out­come for this col­lec­tion of insights from archae­olo­gical bloggers?

This week’s ques­tion is two ques­tions which makes it harder to answer. I’m not sure a form­al­ised pub­lic­a­tion is the best out­come. It’s not a bad idea though, so I’ll tackle that in this post.

My first reac­tion was like Shawn Gra­ham, a Kindle Single — but that’s because a Kindle is my new toy. A Kindle single could work, I liked this art­icle on hydro­frack­ing, which was free to down­load when I got it. It has some per­man­ence and it would col­late the vari­ous entries. The reason it might not be the best solu­tion is that first it helps to know why you’re col­lat­ing the entries.

If you want to give blog­ging a degree of cred­ib­il­ity among people who don’t value elec­tronic media then an elec­tronic out­put is a per­fect way to be ignored. You could try and self-publish via some­thing like Lulu. I’d be against try­ing to cover up the self-published nature of the book by adding a spuri­ous imprint — unless the pub­lic­a­tion were part of a long-term pro­ject involving sev­eral books. Still, I’m not sure to what extent this is a good idea. I can’t see a tech­no­phobe buy a book about archae­olo­gical blog­ging. This is why I think Colleen Morgan’s approach is clever. She’s put­ting the ses­sion into a main­stream con­fer­ence. Both John and Mat­thew Law raise the pos­sib­il­ity of pub­lic­a­tion via an SAA related pub­lic­a­tion. If that’s pos­sible then this is a sens­ible out­reach com­pon­ent of pub­lic­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally then, a Kindle Single would be the elec­tron­ic­ally per­man­ent ver­sion — the advant­age of the Kindle Single being that you can embed links in them. Add a CC licence and drop a big hint to Amazon that you’re mak­ing avail­able free on the web and Amazon could make it avail­able free on their site, like Hydro­fracked was.

In terms of how the con­tent of the book could look, a good model that comes to mind is Philo­sophy and Archae­olo­gical Prac­tice. Per­spect­ives for the 21st Cen­tury by Cor­nelius Holtorf and Håkan Karls­son. Each paper in the book comes with at least one response by another author. A com­mon obser­va­tion is that the com­ments have added value to the car­ni­val. I think Kand­in­sky adds some­thing to my post here, and I’m hop­ing this adds value to the pre­vi­ous posts I’ve linked back to. Jonathan Jar­rett is leav­ing some excel­lent com­ments in vari­ous places. I think adding these to the pub­lic­a­tion demon­strates that blog­ging can be part of a reflect­ive pro­cess and need not be a static out­put, even if by pin­ning it into a pub­lic­a­tion the posts become static on paper.

I think col­lat­ing the blog posts in some way is bet­ter than not col­lat­ing them, so I don’t want to run down the idea. I do won­der if it’s going to be ter­minal. Freez­ing the posts marks an end. It could be pos­sible to start a new pro­ject in a few months, but it would be start­ing from scratch again. Colleen has put in a huge amount of work get­ting the SAA ses­sion to work. She’s been e-mailing people for sev­eral months organ­ising this, and the vis­ible part is really just a frac­tion of the effort. It would be a shame if someone else look­ing to start a group pro­ject had to rep­lic­ate all that work again. Terry Brock has raised the pos­sib­il­ity of using this as a spur to some­thing more ongo­ing, like a group blog. Mick Mor­ris­son has also been ask­ing what people think about the future of Four Stone Hearth, an anthro­po­lo­gical car­ni­val with a large archae­olo­gical com­pon­ent — with little suc­cess by the looks of it.

An ongo­ing event is not exclus­ive to also form­al­ising this cur­rent car­ni­val, but it is a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, so I’ll tackle that in another post. For now my response for Colleen is “form­al­ise the car­ni­val how­ever you like”, but in a cheery and enthu­si­astic tone of voice.

Blogging Archaeology Week 3: If I were after more comments here’s what I’d do.

Alun Digital Academia 5 Comments ,

And now Blog­ging Archae­ology Week 3.

A final down­side to the short form is the appear­ance of dia­log. Not­ing this vir­tual round table and other blogs (like MS) as excep­tions, most archae­olo­gical blogs that I read have very little in the way of dia­log through com­ments. Often on this blog, I feel like I am talk­ing to myself, which in a way is cath­arsis, but if an archae­ology blog­ger writes and no one reacts, are we really chan­ging opin­ions or mov­ing the field for­ward?” I would add to this, how do you attract read­er­ship? Without too much in the way of SEO chat­ter, who is your audi­ence and how to you inter­act with this audi­ence? What do you want out of inter­activ­ity by means of blog­ging about archaeology?

I’m not sure if I’m the right per­son to answer this for archae­olo­gists. For a while I set up a sep­ar­ate site and barred Google from it, so I could blog thoughts without large num­bers of people vis­it­ing. I’m not hos­tile to read­ers, but the read­ers I want are the one who come here any­way, not simply a large num­ber count. It’s partly down to why you blog.

At the same time I can say this worked depress­ingly well in terms of view­ers. I also changed the name of the site to “The Brit­ney Spears Site of, like, Really Old Stuff” and changed the theme to a Brit­ney theme (it was 2005). But I don’t know if it changed anything.

I think I can come up with three reas­ons why com­ments might not happen.

  1. Sub­ject Mat­ter.
    If your blog repeats the news, then I won’t com­ment. It’ll be some­thing that I’ve already seen before or else will see repeated sev­eral times over. What about the oppos­ite? Add ori­ginal com­ment­ary and that will encour­age com­ments yes? I’m not sure it will. There’s plenty of people writ­ing good ori­ginal posts. I won’t always com­ment though because these will be inter­est­ing art­icles out­side my imme­di­ate field. What I need to do is read round the sub­ject before I can add any­thing more than “Nice one”. That takes time. It’s some­thing you don’t get on some sci­ence blogs, because a lot of sci­ence is the same round the world, but archae­ology is very localised.

    I think for most archae­o­b­log­gers one way to more com­ments is to dumb down massively, or go over the top and aim for a purely aca­demic audi­ence. In the lat­ter case I think you’d still need the social con­nec­tions to pull com­ments in. To get com­ments you will need people read­ing who feel happy talk­ing about the sub­ject of your posts. Which takes us to…

  2. Audi­ence Size.
    Of your audi­ence only a small frac­tion will par­ti­cip­ate by com­ment­ing. This is gen­er­ally known as the 90–9-1 rule. For blogs Neilsen, writ­ing in 2006, said that the ratios were skewed fur­ther to 95–5-0.1. These num­bers describe how people inter­act with your site. The first num­ber are pass­ive con­sumers. The second are occa­sional con­trib­ut­ors. The final num­ber is the heavy con­trib­ut­ors. Using these fig­ures if you have 1000 people read­ing your posts you can expect around five or six com­ments, with one from a reg­u­lar reader. Most archae­o­b­logs aren’t get­ting that kind of read­er­ship. There are ways to lower the bar to com­ment­ing, but even so it’s not likely many blogs will get the read­er­ship levels to get reg­u­lar com­ments. Because of their size though, they’ll be much more vis­ible and you’ll have a skewed idea of how suc­cess­ful you blog is or isn’t.

  3. People don’t com­ment on blogs.
    This is from AJ Cann, who does have com­ments on his blogs. He also runs Micro­bi­o­logy­Bytes. Com­pare the num­ber of com­ments on the blog with the num­ber of com­ments on Face­book. On the blog there are acres of No com­ments, while the Face­book page picks up com­ments and likes.* This is part of a shift in where we com­ment on blogs. For the last post within a quarter of an hour I saw this tweet from the light­ning fast Åsa M Larsson. Com­ment­ing has moved from blogs to Twit­ter and Face­book. Often the com­ment is purely asso­ci­at­ive, as a like or retweet. Com­ments on blogs aren’t dead, but usage has changed. It isn’t 2006 anymore.

So what do you do? One is to pull the com­munity to you. Ning built their busi­ness on this and every so often I’ll get someone telling me I should sign up to their Ning site. I’ll do it for work, but not if I don’t have to. The oppos­ite way is the answer. If you want to use a blog as out­reach and com­munity engage­ment then you go where the com­munity is. There are plenty of good reas­ons to be Face­book­phobic, but that’s where the audi­ence is. If I had an out­reach blog then I would have to have a Face­book page for the blog, and AoB Blog does. If you ‘like’ it for a few days you’ll see there’s a con­stant drip drip of botan­ical good­ness into your Face­book stream. The reason AoB Blog does this is that we wanted to put the blog where the audi­ence was, and in a place where they’re already com­ment­ing on stuff.

That’s not enough for most archae­o­b­log­gers. A small audi­ence on your blog is still going to be a small audi­ence on Face­book. I think what Face­book could offer blog­gers is easy net­work­ing to increase the poten­tial audi­ence. A col­lect­ive could set up a Face­book page and choose a few admins. The next thing you add is RSS Graf­fiti. This takes an RSS feed and adds a post to a Face­book page wall for each RSS entry. It’s what we’re using for the Annals of Bot­any page. The clever thing is that RSS Graf­fiti can poll mul­tiple RSS feeds. So mul­tiple blog­gers could auto-post to the same page with RSS Graf­fiti. For any­one who’s post­ing less once a day, the tick­ing over of posts from other blog­gers helps keep the site act­ive so that when your post appears it’s in front of the col­lect­ive audi­ence of all par­ti­cip­at­ing blogs and not just your own. The Face­book wid­get also acts as a way to advert­ise your posts other blogs in the col­lect­ive (wordpress.com users might need a spe­cific RSS feed). And because it’s Face­book you still keep you blog on your own site with your own design, etc. Blog­ger users aren’t com­pelled to move to Word­Press and vice-versa.

It sounds simple but there is a prob­lem. Some blogs you like some you don’t, so who do you include and who do you exclude? Can you exclude people in an inclus­ive way that doesn’t erect a big “Sod off” sign to read­ers? That’s a head­ache that I wouldn’t want, but it does emphas­ise that the answers to social media prob­lems are social.

*Though the inverse is true for Civil War Memory blog and Face­book page, so it’s not a hard and fast rule.

Blogging Archaeology Week 2 — The unexpected consequences of blogging

Alun Digital Academia 5 Comments ,

I’m not quite keep­ing up with Colleen Morgan’s ques­tions:

In our last ques­tion, many emphas­ized the pub­lic access that blog­ging brings to archae­ology, the option to “phone a friend,” as Kristin Sewell stated. Blog­ging gives new schol­ars a chance to speak out, to debunk 2012 fool­ish­ness and to give a little bit back to the pub­lic that usu­ally signs our paychecks in one way or another. Though it is gen­er­ally embraced (says she of the Berke­ley bubble!), pub­lic out­reach can be incred­ibly dif­fi­cult, tricky, and prone to hid­den down­sides. Blog­ging archae­ology is often fraught with ten­sions that are some­times not imme­di­ately appar­ent. Bey­ond the gen­eral prob­lems that come with per­form­ing as a pub­lic intel­lec­tual, what risks do archae­olo­gists take when they make them­selves avail­able to the pub­lic via blog­ging? What (if any) are the unex­pec­ted con­sequences of blog­ging? How do you choose what to share?

This is a belated reply to the ques­tion for reas­ons too tedi­ous to be worth writ­ing about. It means I’ve changed my mind a few times, but one seems to have stuck.

Per­man­ence.

Blogs tend to be used for ideas in pro­gress, eph­em­eral thoughts and off-the-cuff obser­va­tions. If you miss a few weeks or months of archae­o­b­logs, it makes more sense to jump into now instead of catch­ing up through back posts. If a past thought is import­ant blog­gers have the sense to link back to it. It means blogs are a stream of nowcasting.

At the same time blogs have per­man­ence. There’s a mech­an­ical issue with this. There’s five years of posts here and that means that spam­mers can tar­get five years of com­ment forms to push their advert­ising mes­sages. That’s why I’ve got my blog set to auto-close com­ments after a few months. That doesn’t remove the intel­lec­tual problem.

Unless you’re dead you’ll have changed opin­ions about some things over five years. I don’t have a prob­lem with chan­ging my mind. I change my mind as I get new evid­ence, or learn more about a sub­ject. I also think I change my mind as I for­get things. I can have a poor memory some­times. I sus­pect a memory isn’t some­thing that sits in the brain to be retrieved, it’s some­thing that’s con­struc­ted in the now. Lose parts of the inform­a­tion that build the memory and you end up with some­thing dif­fer­ent. It means while I’d like to pre­tend all my changes of opin­ion are the res­ult of care­ful reasoned ana­lysis, some­time they just change. Throw into the mix the fact that you can get things wrong any­way and if you’re using your blog to build up thoughts and reflec­tions, you’ll have some­thing that con­tra­dicts what you think now in your archive. The magic of Google means that often this archive is just as easy to find as your cur­rent thoughts. It can be even more vis­ible, because how many people go back and audit their memor­ies? If it’s a change through poor memory would you even notice your opin­ion had changed?

If you’re aware of this and strive for con­sist­ency writ­ing becomes a pain.

For example, I now don’t think memes have much to offer when it comes embod­i­ment of ideas in mater­ial cul­ture. In plain Eng­lish I see lots of Greek-style temples in Sicily, but I don’t see any­thing that memes explain. Yet if you look through my archive, you might get the impres­sion that I’m taken with the culture-as-virus idea. So do I go back and delete or at least strikethrough all ideas I now dis­agee with? Do I write rebut­tals? If memes aren’t inter­est­ing and there are new ideas that are, like the Exten­ded Mind, I’d rather write about that. But I’m not going to do that till after I’ve read The Bounds of Cog­ni­tion by Adams and Aiz­awa, which is a thought­ful argu­ment against the Exten­ded Mind hypothesis.

You may vary, but my thought pro­cesses often seem to be a sys­tem­atic attempt to run out of wrong ways to do things. Yet in pub­lic­a­tions the fash­ion is to present con­clu­sions as being the inev­it­able out­come of out premises. Using a blog as a reflect­ive tool means lit­ter­ing my pub­lic note­book with ideas that turned out to be extremely evit­able. If blog­ging becomes more the norm this might become a socially accept­able part of the schol­arly pro­cess. But could the oppos­ite be true? Will it become more desir­able to have a research blog that doesn’t run into dead ends? If so will people edit them­selves for pub­lic consumption?

I’m all for edit­ing final writ­ing — my first drafts veer between the adequate to the awful — but edit­ing notes of thoughts in pro­gress on a blog both­ers me. Of course that could be because I buy into the Exten­ded Mind hypo­thesis and see my blog as an exten­sion of my mind. If it turns out Adams and Aiz­awa are write this’ll be another pub­lic dead end on the site.

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