Conference: Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World, 1-3 Oct 2009

As I don’t expect I’ll be in Oxford any time soon , maybe somebody could take notes on William Harris’ presentation on the timber trade in the Roman world? Many thanks! I’ve been interested in that trade for a while – it is woefully underexplored – and I have some thoughts on it coming out in the Cambridge Companion to the City of Rome (due out soon, I believe!), but these are mostly cursory. I’m imagining someone like Harris probably has some very interesting things to say…

Conference: Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World

Oxford Conference on Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World
1–3 October 2009

The Oxford Roman Economy Project will be holding a three-day conference
on trade, commerce, and the state on 1–3 October, with sessions on
institutions and government stimuli, trade within the empire, and trade
across imperial boundaries. Attendance is free, but, in order for us to
plan numbers, please register with Gareth Hughes
(gareth.hughes@ orinst.ox. ac.uk).

Thursday 1 October 2009

Government intervention or stimulation through fiscal instruments,
markets, subsidies for military, long-distance supply etc.

10:00–10:30 Coffee and registration

10:30–13:00 Morning session

• Philip Kay, Oxford —Financial institutions and structures in
the last century of the Roman Republic

• Alan Bowman, Oxford —Taxation and fiscal controls

• Boudewijn Sirks, Oxford— Law, commerce, and finance

13:00–14:00 Lunch

14:00–15:30 Early-afternoon session

• Elio Lo Cascio, Rome Sapienza— Market regulation and
transaction costs in the Roman Empire

• Jean-Jacques Aubert, Neuhâtel—respondent

• General discussion

15:30–16:00 Tea

16:00–18:00 Late-afternoon session

• Hannah Friedman, Oxford—Supplying the Faynan: local resources
vs imperial will

• Salvatore Martino, Lecce —Transport in the Roman
Mediterranean: an integrated system

• Colin Adams, Liverpool — respondent

18:00 Drinks

Friday 2 October 2009

Trade and manufacture within the empire.

9:00–10:30 Early-morning session

• William Harris, Columbia — Trade in timber under the Roman
empire

• Ivan Radman, Arh. Mus. Zagreb —Prices and costs in the textile
industry in the light of the lead tags from Siscia

10:30–11:00 Coffee

11:00–12:30 Late-morning session

• Ben Russell, Oxford — Moving mountains: contextualising the
imperial stone trade

• Emanuele Papi, Siena — Import and export in Mauretania
Tingitana: the evidence from Tamusida

12:30–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:00 Early-afternoon session

• Danièle Foy, Aix-Marseille —Lacirculation du verre en
Méditerranée antique : matières premières, produitsfinis,
vaisselle, vitres et contenants

• Michael Fulford, Reading — The pull of the north: Gallo-Roman
sigillata in Britain in the 2nd and 3rdcenturies

15:00–15:30 Tea

15:30–17:30 Late-afternoon session

• Michel Bonifay, Aix-Marseille — The diffusion of African
pottery under the Roman Empire: evidence and interpretation

• Paul Reynolds, Barcelona — Supply networks of the Roman East
and West: interaction, fragmentation, and the origins of Byzantine
economy

• Andrew Wilson, Oxford—respondent

17:30–18:00 General discussion

18:00 Drinks

Saturday 3 October 2009

Eastern and Red Sea trade, India, Arabia and the deserts.

9:00–11:00 Early-morning session

• Dario Nappo, Oxford — Costand profit in Red Sea trade

• Jennifer Gates-Foster, Texas — Eastern Desert trade

• Steven Sidebotham, Delaware —respondent

11:00–11:30 Coffee

11:30–13:30 Late-morning session

• David Peacock, Southampton — The Roman Red Sea ports and the
Chinese connection

• Barbara Davidde, ISCR Rome — The port of Qana, a junction
point between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea: the underwater
evidence

• Roberta Tomber, British Museum—respondent

13:30–14:30 Lunch

14:30–16:00 Early-afternoon session

• David Graf, Miami — The Silk Road between Syria and China

• Raffaela Pierobon Benoit, Naples Frederico II — From Palmyra
to Northern Mesopotamia: the archaeological evidence

16:00–16:30 Tea

16:30–18:00 Late-afternoon session

• David Mattingly, Leicester — Rome and the Garamantes:
practicalities and realities of Saharan trade

• General discussion

18:00 Drinks

Interface, NETSCI09, and MHR

Oh, if I but had the coin to go to conferences… (I’ll tattoo your logo where’er you want: corporate sponsorship?)

Two conferences appearing on the networks and archaeology mailing list this morning:

InterFace is a new type of annual event. Part conference, part workshop, part networking opportunity, it will bring together postdocs, early career academics and postgraduate researchers from the fields of Information Technology and the Humanities in order to foster cutting-edge collaboration. As well as having a focus on Digital Humanities, it will also be an important forum for Humanities contributions to Computer Science. The event will furthermore provide a permanent web presence for communication between delegates both during, and following, the conference.

Delegate numbers are limited to 80 (half representing each sector) and all participants willbe expected to present a poster or a ‘lightning talk’ (a two minute presentation) as a stimulus for discussion and networking sessions. Delegates can also expect to receive illuminating keynote talks from world-leading experts, presentations on successful interdisciplinary projects, ‘Insider’s Guides’ and workshops. The registration fee for the two day event is £30. For a full overview of the event, please visit the website.

And, on the premise that great conferences always take place in fanatastic locations, NETSCI09 this year is in Venice:

The aim of NETSCI is to bring together leading researchers, practitioners, and teachers in network science to foster interdisciplinary communication and collaboration.

They have a subsection on network science and humanities, which I’d love to attend. On a related note, a paper of mine has been accepted for publication with Digital Studies, on re-animating the brick production networks of first and second century Rome -a proxy for patronage networks- with an ABM that generates civil violence: a theory of civil strife through malfunctioning patronage.

And finally, a book of interest:

Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean

How useful is the concept of “network” for historical studies and the ancient world in particular? Using theoretical models of social network analysis, this book illuminates aspects of the economic, social, religious, and political history of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Bringing together some of the most active and prominent researchers in ancient history, this book moves beyond political institutions, ethnic, and geographical boundaries in order to observe the ancient Mediterranean through a perspective of network interaction. It employs a wide range of approaches, and to examine relationships and interactions among various social entities in the Mediterranean. Chronologically, the book extends from the early Iron Age to the late Antique world, covering the Mediterranean between Antioch in the east to Massalia (Marseilles) in the west.

This book was published as two special issues in Mediterranean Historical Review.

I’ve skimmed through the original special issues, and – I’m happy to be wrong – it seemed to me that ‘networks’ were being used more as a metaphor than an actual theory with methodological implications, as used by such people like Barabasi. (and now I’ll get some angry emails…

Conference Announcement: Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World

I look at Roman networks, myself, but the questions being posed by this conference are of wider value to archaeologists and ancient historians more generally. I know some of the participants, and know they do interesting work, so it should be well worth the while! A networks perspective I think has much to offer us, especially when these networks can be explored using theories of evolving networks (see Barabasi’s work, listed at the bottom of this post, or trawl through some of my stuff on ‘publications’):

Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World

6-9 JULY 2009

Organisers: Dr Claire Taylor, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos, University of Nottingham

This conference will examine the networks of interaction within and between different groups in the classical and early hellenistic periods. Questions for exploration include:

• What constituted a ‘community’ within the Greek world?
• What networks did people create, belong to, and destroy?
• How were different groups of people interconnected, and how did they negotiate the ‘boundaries’ between them?
• How did communities change in response to social, political, economic impulses?
• How can we use network theory to access the lives and activities of people for whom little traditional evidence survives?

PROGRAMME
Paulin Ismard (Université Paris Est Marne la Vallée; Equipe Phéacie): Networks of communities in classical and hellenistic Athens: cultural aspects.
Claire Taylor (Trinity College, Dublin): Social networks and social hierarchies: towards a model of social mobility in Athens.
Ben Gray (All Souls, Oxford): Exile communities and the citizen ideal in the later classical and hellenistic Greek world.
Kostas Vlassopoulos (University of Nottingham): Free spaces: contexts of interaction between citizens, metics and slaves in classical Athens.
Ben Akrigg (University of Toronto): The metic population in Athens.
Peter Hunt (University of Colorado, Boulder): Ethnic identity among slaves at Athens.
Barbara Kowalzig (Royal Holloway, London): Trading gods and trading networks: economies of trust in ancient Greece.
Vincent Gabrielsen (University of Copenhagen): Naval and grain networks at Athens.
Christy Constantakopoulou (Birkbeck, London): Beyond the polis: island koina and other non-polis entities in the Aegean.
Esther Eidinow (Newman College, Birmingham): Networks, narrative and negotiation: magical practices and polis religion.

If you would like to attend, or require further information, please contact Dr Claire Taylor claire.taylor [at] tcd [dot] ie,
Dr Kostas Vlassopoulos konstantinos.vlassopoulos [at] nottingham [dot] ac [dot] uk,
or see the website: http://www.tcd.ie/Classics/cnagw/index.php.

Graduate student bursaries are available to cover the cost of campus accommodation: please contact Dr Claire Taylor if you wish to apply, or download the form from the website: http://www.tcd.ie/Classics/cnagw/index.php

Selected works of Barabasi relevant to a networks perspective:

• Barabási, Albert-László, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, 2002. ISBN 0-452-28439-2
• Barabási, Albert-László and Réka Albert, “Emergence of scaling in random networks”, Science, 286:509-512, October 15, 1999
• Barabási, Albert-László and Zoltán Oltvai, “Network Biology”, Nature Reviews Genetics 5, 101-113 (2004)
• Barabási, Albert-László, Mark Newman and Duncan J. Watts, The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, 2006. ISBN 0-691-11357-2
• Réka Albert, Hawoong Jeong, and Barabási, Albert-László, “The Diameter of the WWW”, Nature, 401:130-131, 1999

Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference II – registration open

The second edition of Brock’s Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference is taking place this summer. Registration is now open. I was able to attend last year, and it was the highlight of my conference season. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend this year, so I’m going to miss out on some brilliant sessions.

Interacting with Immersive Worlds
An International Conference presented at
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario
JUNE 15-16, 2009

Register to attend at: www.brocku.ca/iasc/immersiveworlds

Focusing on the growing cultural significance of interactive media, IWIW will feature academic papers organized along four streams:
-Challenges at the Boundaries of Immersive Worlds features creative exploration and innovation in immersive media including ubiquitous computing, telepresence, interactive art and fiction, and alternate reality.
-Critical Approaches to Immersion looks at analyses of the cultural and/or psychological impact of immersive worlds, as well as theories of interactivity.
-Immersive Worlds in Education examines educational applications of immersive technologies.
-Immersive Worlds in Entertainment examines entertainment applications of immersive technologies, such as computer games.

The IWIW conference also features 4 keynote speakers:
-Janet Murray, Director of Graduate Studies, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology
-Espen Aarseth, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communication, IT University of Denmark
-Geoffrey Rockwell, Professor, Department of Philosophy and Humanities Computing, University of Alberta
-Deborah Todd, Game Designer, Writer and Producer, and Author of Game Design: From Blue Sky to Green Light

Visit the conference Web site at www.brocku.ca/iasc/immersiveworlds

Organizing Committee:
Jean Bridge, Centre for Digital Humanities, Brock University, jbridge@brocku.ca
Martin Danahay, Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University,
mdanahay@brocku.ca
Denis Dyack, Silicon Knights, Catharines, Ontario, denis@siliconknights.ca
Barry Grant, Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, bgrant@brocku.ca
David Hutchison, Faculty of Education, Brock University, davidh@brocku.ca
Kevin Kee, Department of History, Brock University, kkee@brocku.ca
John Mitterer, Department of Psychology, Brock University, jmitterer@brocku.ca
Michael Winter, Department of Computer Science, Brock University, mwinter@brocku.ca
Philip Wright, Information Technology Services, Brock University, philip.wright@brocku.ca

10th VAST International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archeology and Cultural Heritage

First call for papers:

10th VAST International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archeology and Cultural Heritage
7th Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage

(VAST’09)

September 22-25, 2009, Valletta, Malta

http://www.vast2009.org
======================================================================================

——————–
Call for Papers
——————–

-Towards a “digital agenda” for the integration of technologies into Archeology and Cultural Heritage-

Nearly every organization whose mission includes promoting access to cultural information, is well aware of the value of digital applications, and digital technologies are finding their way into cultural organizations. Nevertheless, a clear-cut division still exists between humanities researchers, computer science researchers, information scientists, librarians, and campus technologists, which prevents a complete achievement of the  potential represented by the integration of these disciplines. Each community has distinctive practices, lingo, assumptions, and concerns. Understanding technology needs of the humanities, and more specifically of Archaeology, Libraries and Cultural Heritage, has particular relevance to the future of knowledge and education delivery, as well as, to develop shared technology services to enhance humanities research now and in the future.

The main goal of this VAST is to bring together professionals from all fields to start a true dialogue on CH needs and ICT solutions and achieve a true integration of disciplines. This VAST aims at disseminating the idea of a more systematic integration of digital practices in research and education programs for CH, exploring good practices, guidelines and skills development possibilities to structure long-term initiatives and move towards a “digital agenda” for Archaeology, Libraries and CH.

This is why we are seeking contributions that advance the state of the art in the technologies available to support sustainability of human heritage.

- 2/3/4D Data Capture and Processing in CH
- Augmentation of physical collections with digital presentations
- Data Acquisition Technologies
- Digital Libraries
- Digital capture and annotation of intangible heritage (performance, audio, dance, oral)
- Interactive Environments and Applications for CH
- Long term preservation of digital artefacts
- Metadata, classification schema, ontologies and semantic processing
- Multilingual applications, tools and systems for CH
- Multimedia Data Acquisition, Management and Archiving
- Multi-modal interfaces and rendering for CH
- On-site and remotely sensed data collection
- Professional and Ethical Guidelines
- Serious games in CH
- Standards and Documentation
- Storytelling and Design of Heritage Communications
- Tools for Education and Training in CH
- Usability, Effectiveness and Interface Design for CH Applications
- Visualization

- KEYNOTE SPEAKERS -
Archeology: Dr Zahi Hawass – General Secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt
Museums: Mme. Christiane Naffah – Director of the Research and Restoration Center for France Museums

- BEST PAPERS AWARD -
The best papers presented at VAST 2009 will be selected for re-submission on a special edition of the upcoming ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), an online, peer reviewed publication.

- (NEW!) VAST-STARs -
VAST 2009 introduces the “VAST-STate-of-the-Art Reports (VAST-STARs)”, inspired by the EG STARs. These are papers providing useful novel overviews of research in the fields of computer graphics, computer science  and related fields that can benefit the multidisciplinary nature of VAST. They are survey papers in what the community considers important areas that have not been covered before or recently. Their aim is to give a detailed account of the principles, algorithms and open problems of a research area, so that an interested reader can quickly become up to speed in this field.  We warmly encourage all colleagues to submit to the VAST-STARs reports. The VAST-STARs will be published with the full papers and are also eligible for the best paper award. Two VAST-STARs will be selected by peer review and will be published in the EG proceedings together with the full papers.  VAST-STARs authors will present their work with a 60 minute presentation during VAST 2009.

- PAPER SUBMISSIONS -
We are soliciting five types of contributions:

=Full research papers presenting new innovative results. These papers will be published by Eurographics in a high-quality proceedings volume.

=VAST-STARs providing a useful novel overview of research in the fields of computer graphics, computer science  and related fields that can benefit the multidisciplinary nature of VAST.

=Project papers focusing on on-going projects, the description of project organization, use of technology, and lesson learned not innovative technical content. These papers will have an oral presentation and will be included in a “Projects & Short Papers” proceedings volume. Authors will have the option to present a poster during the breaks to provide more information regarding the project.

=Short papers presenting preliminary ideas and works-in-progress. These papers will have an oral presentation and will be published in the “Projects & Short Papers” proceedings volume.

=Tutorials and Workshops: half-day and full-day working sessions that provide an opportunity to educate and share on key topics of interest face-to-face. Tutorial submissions will be published in the “Projects & Short Papers” proceedings volume. Workshops that provide supplemental materials in time for the CD-ROM printing will also be included. All material will be made available on the VAST 2009 website.

All types of submissions will be reviewed and feedback given to the authors. See detailed information on the VAST 2009 website under Submissions.

- COMMITTEES -
Event Committee: Kurt Debattista – University of Warwick, Sandro Spina – University of Malta
Program Committee: Cinzia Perlingieri – University of California at Berkeley, Denis Pitzalis – The Cyprus Institute, STARC
Local Organisational Committee: Sandro Spina – University of Malta, Chris Porter – University of Malta, Keith Bugeja – University of Warwick.
VAST-STARs Committee: Fotis Liarokapis (Coventry University – UK), Michael Ashley – University of California at Berkeley

- ISC -
Achille Felicetti (PIN – University of Florence)
Aderito Marcos (Universidade do Minho – Portugal)
Alan Chalmers (University of Warwick – UK)
Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University – Ireland)
Alberto Proenca (Universidade do Minho – Portugal)
Daniel Pletinckx (Visual Dimension – Belgium)
Daniel Thalmann (Virtual Reality Lab – Switzerland)
David Arnold (University of Brighton – UK)
Erik Champion (Massey University – New Zealand)
Eva Zányi (University of Warwick – UK)
Fotis Liarokapis (Coventry University – UK)
Graeme Earle (University of Southampton)
Holly Rushmeier (Yale University – USA)
Kriste Sibul (ICOM-CC – Estonia)
Jean Angelo Beraldin (National Research Council – Canada)
Juan Barcelo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – Spain)
Michael Ashley (University of California at Berkeley)
Milena Dobreva  (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics – Bulgaria)
Karina Rodriguez-Echavarria (University of Brighton – UK)
Luis Paulo Santos (Universidade do Minho – Portugal)
Mercedes Farjas (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid – Spain)
Nadia Thalmann (MIRALAB – Switzerland)
Paolo Cignoni (ISTI – CNR -Italy)
Robert Sablatnig (Vienna University of Technology – Austria)
Roberto Scopigno (ISTI-CNR – Italy)
Sofia Pescarin (CNR – Italy)
Stephen Stead (Paveprime Ltd – UK)
Vittore Casarosa (CNR – Italy)
Maria Theodoridou (FORTH – Institute of Computer Science – Greece)
Bianca Falcidieno (CNR – Italy)
Isabelle Bloch (ENST – France)

- IMPORTANT DATES -
Abstract submission (full/project/short/workshops/tutorials/VAST-STARs): 12th May 2009 (23:59 PTZ)
Paper submission for full papers and short papers: 15th May 2009 (23:59 PTZ)
Author notification: 21st June 2009
Camera-ready: 28th June 2009

- CONTACTS -
Conference Web Site: http://www.vast2009.org/
Event Chairs: Kurt Debattista, Sandro Spina – org_committee<at>vast2009.org
Program Chairs: Cinzia Perlingieri, Denis Pitzalis – prog_committee<at>vast2009.org
General Info/Organisation/Logistics: Sandro Spina – info<at>vast2009.org

Archaeology in, and archaeology of, Second Life

Right now, it’s 6.17 am, EST, which makes it about 11.17 am Dublin time, and 3.17 am Second Life time. No doubt, there’s a wild party going on somewhere in Second Life, but here at the RWU virtual excavation prototype, all is quiet.

I’m waiting to give my presentation to the folks at WAC6 in Dublin, but last I heard, there were some technical issues on their end – so a good thing I made a video of the presentation!

Youtube, in the end, could not handle my video because they have an upper limit of 10 minutes – my talk clocks in at 13. Google video doesn’t have a length restriction, so I went with them (but seeing as how they own Youtube anyway, I wonder why the distinction). It took forever for the thing to upload – I had to leave the computer running over night. I uploaded as an AVI file – Camtasia makes excellent SWF files, but for reasons unknown to me, it truncated my video – after nearly two hours of rendering – to 4 minutes and 32 seconds! Anyway, the quality is a little blurry, but I never said I was Fellini…

The argument of the talk, in brief: SL for archaeology: a place to ‘do’ archaeology’, a place for archaeological VR, and a place for archaeological teaching and outreach.

• SL as a place to ‘do’ archaeology: Virtual worlds have always existed – from the caves of Cro-Magnon, to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, to Disneyland, SL just the latest in a long line of virtual worlds. Indeed, since SL is a world of imagination and flights of fancy, it has more in common with the virtual worlds of the past created by historians or archaeologists in their reconstructions. How do we understand SL then? Think of games: what do games teach best? Not what they are ostensbily about, but rather, how to play them. The rules of the game might correspond with various historical epistemologies (think Civilization franchise): the rules of the game make a kind of argument for how the world works: a procedural rhetoric (in Ian Bogost’s felicitous phrase).
• What are the rules in SL, in this world where ‘anything’ is possible? The rules are best expressed through how SL allows objects and scripts to be built: so to understand the rules and their implications means casting the same kind of archaeological eye over this virtual material culture and landscapes as we would in the ‘real’ world.
• therefore, if millions of people choose to spend their time and money in SL or other similar worlds, archaeology has a role in uncovering and studying the procedural rhetorics of this new frontier.

That’s strand one. Strand two:

• traditional archaeological VR: clean, antiseptic, disembodied: you can only experience it by looking at the pretty pictures. In SL, since you are embodied in an avatar, you can explore the experience of the space; space-syntax in the real world explores how interconnected spaces give rise to certain kinds of experiences, so it should be possible to use SL to explore interconnected, re-created ancient spaces with space-syntax tools…. also, SL tends to clean up after itself (if you drop something, it gets returned to you) so in the presentation we take a  side trip to SL dumpster to explore how one artists’ collective uses SL to collect others’ trash to study the lives of residents.

Third strand: SL for teaching

• if the argument about procedural rhetorics is correct, and that the only thing games teach you is how to play them, then I make that a virtue by translating archaeological metaphors into the basic building blocks of SL. Demonstration of the RWU virtual excavation prototype, integration with Nabonidus on-line recording system.

And so, without further ado, the video which should make much the same argument as above:

Archaeology in Second Life – WAC6

I was originally supposed to be going to Dublin for WAC, to give two papers. Unfortunately, life intervened and I’m not able to go. However, I will be giving one of those presentations anyway, via Second Life in the Art, Archaeology, and Technology: Current Experiments in Interpretation session.

Abstract for Electric Archaeology: Archaeology In, and Archaeology Of, ‘Second Life’

Archaeology is about material culture, about exploring the human condition (not necessarily in the past) through how we create and manipulate objects & landscapes. In recent years, the power of computing has opened up new universes for exploration, places where individuals create the worlds around them. This paper discusses my archaeological explorations in the current leading virtual world, ‘Second Life’. This world deserves archaeological study – perhaps even needs archaeological study – in that it is nothing but pure construction of will and imagination. ‘Virtual Worlds’ are in themselves nothing new: from the Haning Gardens of Babylon, to Hadrian’s Villa, to Disneyland in Florida, humans have been creating fantastical worlds for many different purposes, with simple entertainment not necessarily the prime motivation. Building on these observations, the paper discusses my own attempts to alter this world for archaeological outreach: a re-usable archaeological excavation.

It will be a live presentation from within Second Life, if all goes according to plan. If not, I’ve already recorded a video presentation to be given in case of emergency, and I’m just waiting for Youtube to do its magic. It turned out to be much more difficult to make this video than I anticipated.

Firstly, you need to do screen captures in Second Life. I followed the directions here to make that work.

Then, I downloaded Camtasia studio (trial version) to do the movie editing. I spent a fruitless day stitching together my stills and clips and then trying to match the audio to the video. I found it easier (relatively speaking), to do the audio first, and then the video.

I used audacity to record my stream-of-consciousness lecture, and then imported that. (Is there anything more cringe-inducing than listening to your own recorded voice? At least when I speak live, I can react to my audience; speaking to a recorder makes everything into a monotone…).

I will make the video public after the talk, which is on Monday, 11-ish am (an early start at 6am EST!). If you’re interested in being in SL while I do the talk, let me know and I’ll send you the coordinates. I want to use the voice-chat feature, but for some reason I can’t get the microphone to work right yet. If I don’t get that fixed, I’ll be doing a mean amount of typing…

My virtual excavation prototype is coming along nicely. It has several contexts/layers, salted with artefacts from around the archaeo-web-o-sphere.  I have a large media projector loaded with the Nabonidus webpage; when students touch that, it opens a browser window allowing them to log into Nabonidus and to do their recording. Picture below:

In my preparations for the talk, I’ve been visiting many different sims, and I came across an amazing temporary build, A Cruise on the Nile:

It was part of a fund-raising effort for breast cancer research, in the ‘Duchy of Greystoke’.  Worth a visit if it’s still up.

Sugata Mitra, Hole in the Wall, Self Organising Systems in Education, and Instructional Robotics

Those were the topics covered by the keynote, Sugata Mitra, at the recent MadLat conference in Manitoba, in his keynote address (Self Organising Systems in Education) and his later session, Instructional Robotics. He began with a contentious statement: that the future of the world economy lies with raising the quality of education in the rural peripheries. He illustrated this by way of parable: western companies have long been installing call centres in cities like New Delhi, to take advantage of low-cost, english-speaking and educated workers. But, as wages slowly grew, the call centres got re-located further from the core. The workers there weren’t quite as well educated, but could do the job. The same pattern repeated, and the call centres moved further and further out – and the quality of english declined inexorably.

Mitra asked himself, why is the education in these remote places not providing decent results? He went out, and performed standardised tests on students at schools from 60 to 260 km distant from the urban core. His graph showed a steep drop the further out. Now why was that? he wondered. In his research, he showed that the strongest positive correlation with the poor results was the teachers’ own desire (or lack of) to be in that school. The poorest schools were not necessarily the most financially poor, but the ones where the teachers perceived that they were working in a remote undesirable area. Poor motivation = poor results.

Mitra found that ‘remoteness’ was not just geographical. In the UK, he performed the same study, and found that the presence of subsidised housing (council flats/estates) was as strong an indicator of teachers’ desire to be somewhere else – hence poor results at the school.

The future of the economy in the developing and developed world, Mitra suggested, is in improving the education of these ‘remote’ (whether geographically or socio-economically) areas, since these are the areas with the lowest labour costs. Technology can address this problem, but why do we always test new technologies in the city schools, where the results will be good anyway?, he asked.

His first presentation then was about the hole-in-the-wall computer experiment, where he provided computers to remote regions (setting them up so that they would run no matter what the environmental conditions). Typically, kids were on the machines within minutes of their installation, punching buttons and moving the mouse, exploring what would happen. These children had no English, but as they gathered around the computer, a kind of self-organising educational ecosystem would emerge, with rings of children discussing what was on the screen, offering suggestions of what to do next to the one or two children actually punching the buttons. Mitra installed one such computer, went away for three months, and when he came back, the children said, ‘Please sir, we need a faster processor and more RAM’! They were teaching themselves English so that they could play games and find out information.

(He suggested, incidentally, that as long as computers were in public places, kids wouldn’t get into the seamy side of the internet: no computers in kids’ bedrooms or you’re asking for trouble! Also, that schools that provide one computer per student were not going to get as good results as when there is one computer per 5 or 6 students. I wonder what the one-laptop-per-child people’d make of that?)

His second presentation addressed the problem of teachers not wanting to be in particular regions: “Is it possible for teachers to live in areas that they prefer and still be ‘present’ in schools where they do not, physically, wish to go?”.

This led to a discussion of ‘presence’- what is the main difference between in-class and online education? The presence of a teacher. So how can presence be effectively created for distance/online education? In experiments, Mitra has found that Skype could be used effectively under the following circumstances:

• uninterrupted, reliable, >1 Mbps bandwidth at the teacher and student locations
• a projection system at both ends providing near life size images of the teacher and learners (in his presentation, Mitra phoned up an English teacher in Argentina and showed the difference in ‘presence’ between mere voice, small-screen projection, and life-sized projection using Skype and the video projector – it was quite astonishing!)
• a directional microphone, such as those on most camcorders, that doesn’t pick up feedback, at both locations,
• good lighting

Mitra discussed some future experiments he is going to conduct, where he will try to emulate the physical environment – if it’s hot and humid in Bangalore, the heating & humidity control in the teacher’s office back in the UK should be ramped up appropriately…

He finished his presentation by discussing the ultimate iteration of telepresence: a physical machine, controlled by the remote teacher. Such things already exist, like the Mars Rover, or the deep-sea submersibles that took pictures of the Titanic. Mitra wants to hook up a Roomba-like robot to be controlled by the remote teacher. It will have a screen on it showing the teacher’s head, with directional audio and sound control… in this way, the teacher’s tele-presence can be remotely projected around the room as the robot goes wherever the teacher wants. No more cheating on distance ed exams!

I haven’t done justice, in this short report, to everything Mitra talked about, but I came away from his instructional robotics presentation convinced that this man is going to transform how distance ed is carried out. He’s current at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, so keep your eyes peeled for interesting things from that quarter.

MadLat Conference, Winnipeg

Just got back, will post more when I have a moment – keynote speaker was excellent, and his session on ‘Instructional Robotics’ was fantastic, though poorly attended. I expect people were put off by the title… but imagine a remotely operated vehicle, armed with camera, directional microphone, and wee video screen roaming the aisles of a distance-ed classroom, and you get the picture…

My presentation was well attended, which made a nice change from the Classics conferences I’ve gone to and given an online learning or games-related paper. Typically, the classicists are just not interested – there’ll be me, the moderator, the other two presenters, and the guy who thought that this was a session on Attic pottery….

Anyway, one nice comment at the end of my paper was along the lines of, ‘it’s very interesting to see someone actually implementing games or Second Life, and not just talking about the theoretical side of things!’ In truth, I’m not that far removed from the theoretical side, though I have subjected students to some of my experiments.

Right. Presentation is here, designed and implemented courtesy of Flypaper, whom I thanked in my talk. It might not live at that location for too long, in which case I’ll post it somewhere else, if necessary.

Dodging Bullets in Presentations

I love the circularity of the internet sometimes. My post on Flypaper got picked up by an automatic blog aggregator, and was put on “Hey Jude” under a posting on ‘The Problem With Powerpoint’. Somebody clicked on that, and wordpress stats told me about it. So I went to the post, and lo! there was this extremely well done powerpoint on ‘Dodging Bullets in Presentations’ by Rowan Manahan. Whether you use Flypaper, Powerpoint, or something else, the lessons here are extremely good. Maybe all conference presenters should view this one before they do their papers…! I know I’ve been guilty by times…