Special issue of Innovate Online

The February/March issue of Innovate Online has a number of articles of interest for readers of this blog. To read these articles, you need to register, which takes about a minute. Then the full text is made available in a variety of formats.

V-Learning:

How Gaming and Avatars are Engaging Online Students

Len Annetta, Marta Klesath, and Shawn Holmes describe how avatars in virtual learning environments (VLEs) can contribute to the learning experience by giving students a sense of social presence and investment in the learning community that may otherwise be difficult to access. VLEs have the potential to become the next generation of instructional tools for online learning. By allowing students to simulate the campus experience online, VLEs offer rich, flexible class environments without compromising their reach to diverse students desiring online courses. Describing studies carried out in the WolfDen VLE, Annetta, Klesath, and Holmes examine how gaming and avatars are engaging online students and the role personality may play in a student’s selection of an avatars.

Learning at a Distance:

Engaged or Not?

In this study, Pu-Shih Chen, Robert Gonyea, and George Kuh compare the engagement of distance learners in educationally effective activities with that of their campus-based counterparts and compare the engagement of older distance learners relative to younger online students. Although distance learning is the fastest growing segment of postsecondary education, questions remain about the quality of distance education; a key unresolved issue is the degree to which online learners are engaged in effective educational practices. These results indicate that distance learners are generally as engaged and often more engaged than other students in most educational practices, with the exception of active and collaborative learning activities. Older distance learners report greater gains and are more likely to use higher-order mental processes (e.g., analysis and synthesis) than younger distance learners. Chen, Gonyea, and Kuh discuss the implications of these results for colleges and universities and indicate directions for future work.

Experiential Work-Integrated Online Learning:

Insights from an Established UK Higher Education Program

Lydia Arnold explores how work-based learners can embrace technology-enabled ways of learning. The case study of the BA (Honours) Learning Technology Research (BA LTR) program at Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom , shows how a unique learning blend that combines online social learning, work-based learning, inquiry-led learning, and high degrees of personalization can be used to enable and empower learners. Additionally, Arnold illustrates the unique characteristics of the BA LTR program and the role that these play in enabling work-based learners to participate fully in learning. The article explores the role of the work-based context as both a source of motivation and an authentic learning environment for BA LTR learners.

Lulu.com and bypassing the publishers

I first became aware of Lulu.com, the print-on-demand site, after visiting Sebastian Heath’s ‘Mediterranean Ceramics‘ blog. He writes:

“As I’ve mentioned before, Billur Tekkök and I are editing the digital publication Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia). I’ll talk about our work as part of the AIA panel “Web-Based Research Tools for Mediterranean Archaeology“.

One point that I will stress is that we intend to deliver this information in whatever formats will be useful to users. Currently, this means the website, a PDF file released under a Creative Commons license, and as a bound volume available for purchase from Lulu.com. It’s pretty trivial to generate the PDF - which we produce so that users can take all our content into the field - and then upload it to Lulu, after which third parties can purchase a printed copy.”

Sebastian writes that the version for purchase from Lulu.com - the printed version - will ultimately only be an archived version of the constantly changing internet edition, and so he writes, “don’t buy this book”. I was struck immediately by how useful this approach is. There are things I’ve written for various conference proceedings that, anywhere from 3 to 6 years later, still have not come out. So over to Lulu.com I went.

This site is one of the print-on-demand variety. You upload your files (formatted according to their specs), and they keep it, with cover art and blurb, in their database. Should somebody purchase it, they print it and send it off. You the author set the price after the printing cost, and Lulu takes a 20% of that as a commission. You’re getting therefore 80% of the profit. Not a bad deal, really. A downloadable version can also be made available, at any price you set.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I set about to publish my own book. Now, for archaeologists, I can see many advantages to this system- specialist catalogues that wouldn’t otherwise find a publisher, site notebooks, conference proceedings, textbooks, collected writings… I opted to create an archive of this blog. After all, I have no idea *where* in the real world this blog lives. What happens if the server goes on the fritz? I’ve got somewhere around 140 posts, nearly 30 000 words of material. This thing has eaten many hours of my time. I want something to show for all of that effort, just in case… It seemed to me too a good idea to make the download free, because after all who would pay for what they can already get freely by going to this site?

It was all quite straightforward. I selected what turned out to be 98 pages of blog postings, organised them thematically, added a table-of-contents, and turned any links into footnotes with the full urls. Then I uploaded it to Lulu, selected some nice cover art, and voila. I’ve purchased one copy to keep on my shelf - an archive of this blog. I might never sell a single copy, but that’s ok. What is a nice benefit though is that people might find it without ever having come across this blog, and so widening my readership.

Anyway, if you’re interested, the book lives here.

The Ecology of Games

Today is obviously a blog-writing day. Last post for now - ‘The Ecology of Games‘ may be downloaded freely in whole or in part from this page here - and it’s legal! Many of the big names in game studies are in this volume.

The Ecology of Games
Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning
Edited by Katie Salen

In the many studies of games and young people’s use of them, little has been written about an overall “ecology” of gaming, game design and play–mapping the ways that all the various elements, from coding to social practices to aesthetics, coexist in the game world. This volume looks at games as systems in which young users participate, as gamers, producers, and learners.

The Ecology of Games (edited by Rules of Play author Katie Salen) aims to expand upon and add nuance to the debate over the value of games–which so far has been vociferous but overly polemical and surprisingly shallow. Game play is credited with fostering new forms of social organization and new ways of thinking and interacting; the contributors work to situate this within a dynamic media ecology that has the participatory nature of gaming at its core. They look at the ways in which youth are empowered through their participation in the creation, uptake, and revision of games; emergent gaming literacies, including modding, world-building, and learning how to navigate a complex system; and how games act as points of departure for other forms of knowledge, literacy, and social organization.

Contributors:
Ian Bogost, Anna Everett, James Paul Gee, Mizuko Ito, Barry Joseph, Laurie McCarthy, Jane McGonigal, Cory Ondrejka, Amit Pitaru, Tom Satwicz, Kurt Squire, Reed Stevens, S. Craig Watkins.

About the Editor

Katie Salen is a game designer and interactive designer as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Design and Technology, Parsons School of Design. With Eric Zimmerman, she is the coauthor of Rules of Play (MIT Press, 2003) and coeditor of The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2005).

Centres for Digital Humanities & Other Resources

Some links and resources that may be of use to readers of this blog:

Intute

“We are a free online service providing you with access to the best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists. There are over 21,000 Web resources listed here that are freely available by keyword searching and browsing.”

Brock University 

 UCLA

Malaspina University College

Indiana University of PA 

And from HASTAC, another listing of various centres.

Also:

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organization set up initially to coordinate more closely the activities of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (founded in 197 and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (founded in 1973). The effort to establish ADHO began in Tuebingen, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a Steering Committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the executive committees of the ACH and ALLC approved the governance and conference protocols at the 2005 meeting in Victoria. In 2007, the ADHO Steering Committee voted to enfranchise The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI; founded in 1986 as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines).

Essays on History and New Media

 Some more reading of note for Digital historians, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

“Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. We sponsor more than two dozen digital history projects and offer free tools and resources for historians.”

MAGIS: Mediterranean Archaeology GIS

It turns out that what I thought was so clever yesterday, was done some time ago by folks at DePauw:

MAGIS, an inventory of regional survey projects in the greater Mediterranean region.

As of today, they have 288 survey projects in their spatially-searchable database. The interface is a bit clunky though, and relies on popups, which my browser consistently shuts down, despite me telling it not too. Platial and my BiblioCartography also have the advantage of allowing others to embed the maps in their own applications. If I get around to it, I might incorporate the MAGIS inventory.

BiblioCartography

In my research, I have often wished to know what kinds of archaeological projects were going on in a given region. This usually involved a bibliographical search on various names describing the region or place names I know within the region. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I know the name of the principle researcher synonymous with the region’s archaeology, and can search for that person’s published works.

But what if I don’t know these things? What if research in an area has yet to be published? It can sometimes be an extremely frustrating process. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just zoom in on a map of the region, and discover who is working there, and the relevant publications?

Problems should be solved by those who see them, and so, I have created just such an annotated map for archaeologists using the tools of platial.com

The map lives over on the side of this blog. I have created a sample annotation for how I think it will work: I have located a site that I have worked on (Forum Novum), provided links to relevant webpages describing the project, and included a small bibliography of published works relevant to that site. Marking a new site is a simple point-and-click process. You too may create annotations by using the buttons underneath the map. You can embed the map in your own website – and I’d be enormously pleased if you did!

I would suggest using the following format when you describe a site, because this will allow for more effective searching of the map:

Site name, site type

Links to major relevant website(s)

Names of principle investigators (which could be included in the tags)

Relevant bibliography

Indici ai bolli laterizi: digitised someday soon, hopefully?

So the only copy of Steinby’s ‘indici ai bolli laterizi’ in Eastern Canada is at the University of Toronto’s library. Drove down here to get it, some six hours in the car. Then another five hours flipping back and forth, back and forth, slowly trying to identify some blasted brick stamps… what a way to spend a lovely summer’s day.
You haven’t lived, until you’ve catalogued brick stamps.

I recall seeing once or twice that the whole CIL 15.1 was going to be digitised into a searchable database. Whatever happened to that scheme? It’s been several years since the ‘La Brique Antique’ conference at the French Academy in Rome, where Steinby and Kendricks revealed the plan. Of all the various ways computers could make life easier for the suffering classical archaeologist, this’d be top of my list…

Useful education-in-SL stuff

I came across this list from Angela Thomas, who got it courtesy of Ed Lamoureux. Very useful stuff!

Historical GIS and various Google Earth Mashups - into SL?

What would be enormously cool would be to link the various historical GIS / Google Earth Mashups - into SL. After all, the world depicted in the historical GIS only exists as bits bytes and imagination. So why not take the next step through the GIS into a representation of its data in SL? Imagine that you were interested in the development of the city of Ottawa in the 19th century, and one of the addresses you find is linked via SLURL into SL. Click, and you’re in that structure, with its contents and inhabitants available for conversation. Would this be anything more than a gimmick?

Perhaps… but if the experience of the space has any effect on how lives were lived in that space, perhaps not. Maybe the way to link it would be to allow users of the GIS interested in particular locations to tag them with a SLURL to their own reconstruction of that space/place… a 3-dimensional discussion - virtual living history?

Here’s a list of various historical GIS etc for perusal…

Various Historical GIS Systems

China Historical GIS
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/

Allows dynamic interaction with the map, simple querying of the dots-on-the-map – then, once you’ve found it, it will map it for you on Google Earth, Multi-map, etc

Great Britian Historical GIS

Data and university research lives at:
http://www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis/

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System is a unique digital collection of information about Britain’s localities as they have changed over time. Information comes from census reports, historical gazetteers, travellers’ tales and historic maps, assembled into a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. This site tells you more about the project itself and about historical GIS.

A separate site, funded by the UK National Lottery, has been created to make this resource available on-line to everyone, presenting our information graphically and cartographically. This site is called A Vision of Britain Through Time and presents the history of Great Britain through places. It can be found at:

www.visionofbritain.org.uk

Some points of interest re the GBHGIS:
• Like any mainstream GIS, the original GBH GIS could hold information only about units whose locations we knew. There are a few historical units which appear, for example, in tax lists but whose location is unknown. There are a great many more whose boundaries have yet to be mapped. The core of our new system is a systematic list of all the units we know about - currently over 48,000 units, linked by over 150,000 relationships.
• This core system is not, strictly speaking, a GIS at all: it is implemented using Oracle database software, requires no locational data at all and is organised as an ontology, or “polyhierarchic thesaurus”. Each unit can have any number of names, hierarchic relationships are held very flexibly, and we use a system of “date objects” which enable us to record changes as precise calendar dates, as years, or as strings of text such as “at least 1174 but possibly as early as 983″. [SMG: This is interesting, because it is much more flexible, lets all sorts of ‘fuzzy’ data get incorporated]
• Although knowing boundaries is not compulsory, we use the Oracle Spatial extension to hold over 40,000 boundary polygons, with dates, for many units. These polygons were created by our own earlier work, by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver’s work at Exeter University on the boundaries of Ancient Parishes, and recent work we have done on Scottish parish boundaries. The system can use hierarchical relationships to infer approximate locations for units lacking boundaries.

The public face of the GBGIS:

www.visionofbritain.org.uk

You interact with this site by inputting a place name or a postal code. I used the postal code for where I used to live – KT10 8NS and received the following info:
“Elmbridge is a District/Unitary Authority in the county of Surrey, in England. It is part of the South East.
This is a modern unit which was reported on by the 2001 census. Most of our historical statistics were originally gathered for units with quite different boundaries. To give you a clear picture of long-run change, we have used our detailed information on boundaries and population distribution to redistrict the historical statistics to the modern units.
Statistical comparisons will be made with England and Wales (change comparison)”
There followed information broken into the following sections:
“Population: In 1801 Elmbridge’s total population was 6,986. In 1901 it was 35,058. By 2001 the population was 121,911. -> more information”

“Life and Death: In 1851, 114 babies in every thousand died in their first year. In 1911 it was 80. By 2001 the rate was 3. -> more information”

and so on, for “industry”, “social class”, “language and learning”, “agricultural and land use”, “work and poverty”, “housing”, “roots and religion”, and then some more cartographic materials - “boundaries”, “relationships and changes”, “other units”

So while this site presents a vast amount of material in an appealing and effective manner, it is still for all of that, rather static.

National Historic GIS (US)

http://www.nhgis.org/

This site hosts information you can grab for your own GIS uses. You search their catalogue for info related to a place of interest. And you must register first.

Buffalo Historical GIS

http://history.buffalostate.edu/BuffaloGIS/StartGIS.htm

The Buffalo Historical GIS (Geographical Information System) is an interdisciplinary project directed by Dr. Jean Richardson of the Department of History and Social Studies Education. Other faculty participants include Dr. Tao Tang and Mary Perrelli from the Department of Geography and Planning, Dr. M. Stephen Pendleton of the Economics Department and Dr. Gordon Fraser of the Great Lakes Center.
This prototype consists of several ArcIMS map layers containing feature data digitized from historic maps of Buffalo. The following maps are currently available:
• Buffalo in 1850
• Buffalo in 1900
• Pan-American Exposition 1901
• Buffalo Ward Boundaries
Future map layers will include additional feature categories such as schools, hospitals, grocery stores, taverns, theaters, etc., with links to additional text and images. Other map layers and attached databases will allow the display of demographic data such as population density, ethnicity, household income, property values, and governmental information.

National Historic Sites of Canada

http://www.pc.gc.ca/progs/lhn-nhs/index_E.asp

Not a GIS per se, but rather a java-based clickable map that lets you click through to a blurb on a historic site once you’ve zoomed in on a particular area. And interestingly enough, a national historic site might not be in this system IF it is not currently under the admin of Parks Canada – sites admin’d by the NCC for instance are missing…

Grand repertoire du patrimoine bati de Montreal

http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/index.php#

This site lets you search by house # and street, to pull up all of the information (and sometimes photos) related to that house IF it is a designated heritage site. I am certain that at one time this site provided thematic map layers of the city and related the heritage info for particular house of interest to those maps… but I can’t seem to find it now.

From the Museum of London:
http://www.mapmylondon.com/

a google maps mashup for annotating the city of London

Speaking of google maps mashups, see the following for historically themed mashups:

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/#history

And on a not very related theme at all, but relevant to the idea of a historical gis type site where you’d get to manipulate historical documents on your own is:

http://elearning.unifr.ch/antiquitas/modules.php?id_module=17

This is a site related to the classical world. The module itself is a numismatics module that takes you through how to classify, study, and publish ancient coins. Notable for the fact that you can manipulate some of the coins, and are taken by the hand through the entire process – including how to work with the often impenetrable coin catalogues. Now imagine that for an 1875 Valuation Roll and how to decipher 19th century handwriting…

World Explorer

http://www.world-explorer.info/news.php

From the website: an internet application that allows visitors to explore the world and it’s events using Google Maps and a dynamic timeline. The application is still in development, but we are working to build a community of interested people who can help get this project off the ground.

Historical Marker Database

http://www.hmdb.org/

‘History happened here’ is the theme – users mark up the world (via google earth) with historical information…

Your History Here

http://www.yourhistoryhere.com/

from the website: “Do you know something unusual about a place, building or street? Some odd factoid, rumour or tidbit? Share it here, and if you’re lucky someone will follow up with more info on your place.”

Also: “Hello, and welcome to YourHistoryHere, the place where you can share your knowledge about those unusual places, buildings or things that make places interesting to live. This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We’re building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we’d love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com? Tom Steinberg, mySociety Director - 23/08/2005″

What is also interesting about this are the discussions that seem to erupt after somebody posts a new spot – disputing / corroborating what the original poster had to say.

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

http://www.dziga.com/eruv/index.php

taking things down to the level of a single street, from the website: “eRuv is a digital graffiti project installed along the route of the former Third Avenue elevated train line in lower Manhattan. The train line, dismantled in 1955, was more than just a means of transport; it was part of an important religious boundary — an eruv — for a Hasidic community on the old Lower East Side. Using semacodes, the former boundary is reconstructed and mapped back onto the space of the city. Pedestrians with camera phones can then access location-specific historical content linked through the semacodes.”