Archaeology Education On-Line:
An Interview with Mark Garrison
During the spring and summer of 1999, the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium of small liberal arts colleges in the southeastern United States, offered an introductory archaeology course and field school in Turkey. The project included faculty members from the Art History, Biology, Classics, Geology, and History departments at various ACS schools (Trinity University, Southwestern University, Rhodes College, Birmingham-Southern College, Rollins College and Millsaps College) as well as DePauw University, Trinity College and the College of the Holy Cross. The actual archaeological field project in Turkey is sponsored by Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Like dozens of field schools at small colleges throughout the world, the ACS and its cohorts used interdisciplinary faculty and resources to enrich the student's field and laboratory experience. Unlike most of the other field schools, a major portion of the experience was placed online.
The course involved investigation of the site of HacImusalar, the largest mound in ElmalI Plain (located in southwestern Turkey, ancient Lycia) and one of the most important sites in the region. HacImusalar is a tell containing archaeological evidence of occupations beginning in the Neolithic and continuing to the Roman/Byzantine occupation and beyond. The 1999 season was the fifth at HacImusalar since it was first surveyed in 1993, but it is the first one supported by online teaching materials.
Recently, team leader Mark Garrison of Trinity University shared some of his thoughts concerning the experiment.
I believe yours is the first course in archaeology with an online component, or at least one of the first. What was the impetus to build it? How did it come about?
I cannot say definitively that our class was the first in the country, but you are correct that it is one of the first archaeology classes to go live over the web. The course is in fact part of a much larger initiative to explore the use of IT in teaching undergraduate students here in the Associated Colleges of the South (a consortium of 15 small liberal arts schools). The leader of that initiative is Dr. Kenny Morrell of Rhodes College. Kenny and I were trying to envision our first course to go over the web, and I suggested the archaeology course. The idea really took off. I (and other faculty) taught the class in Spring 1999 and then we took students to Turkey for a summer field school in Summer 99. It was a great success.
What are the mechanics? How many people were signed up, how does it fit into the regular course work?
In Spring 99 we had students log onto a web site that had a chat room component. There, students could access the lecture for that week on their browsers, and follow along the live audio lecture with pre-posted text and images on the browser. Audio was live via a telephone line set up as a conference call. Each school had a classroom with computer terminals and a speaker phone in it. Everyone logged on at the same time and dialed up to the conference call. The lecturer spoke
and everyone could hear him/her. Students could also ask questions over the phone line. Beforehand students had to access the readings off the web site and post responses to questions about the readings via a bulletin board. Then students engaged in discussion about the readings via the bulletin board asynchronously. Initially we had about 20 students signed up, and we ended with about 15 or 16 students. The class was one hour credit. Each school offered the class within its curriculum. Thus, in some places it was a course in anthropology, in others classics, etc.
Do you foresee any additional tecnological implementation as well, such as live notebooks, like Matthew Sprigg's No Barriers site; or online cataloging; or public archaeology?
This next semester we are going to streaming audio and video, as well as the chat room environment. Conference calls are too expensive for the the long-term health of the project. The students seemed comfortable enough that they should be able to ask questions via the chat room format as easily as speaking questions over the phone line. The course is already completely archived. You can access all lectures, both visual material and audio. You can also access the bulletin board student discussions.
Was the project as successful as you expected? What kind of problems/successes did you find that surprised you?
The project was more successful than we ever imagined. The biggest problem was resources for students doing projects. Most of the libraries could not support the type of specialized research that they were doing. I was especially struck by the high caliber of the student responses on the bulletin board; very good stuff there. Initially everyone was a little put off by not being able to see each other, but we all got used to it. The video streaming may help that a bit in the future. The students really found it helpful to meet and interact with their colleagues before coming to Turkey. In essence, they had a "virtual" personality with whom they were familiar.
Was the inter-institutional interaction as successful as you wished? What might improve it? What are the benefits? How did you handle course credit?
Yes and no. Interaction is greatly increased by the fact that all the faculty also participate as research partners in the excavation that takes place in the summer in Turkey. Thus, the level of inter-institutional interaction is very high. However, we want very much to bring in more schools from the ACS consortium. Right now we have six schools. It would be nice to get that number up to 9 or 10. Critical to this is making contact with a faculty member who is interested; this will not work without a strong personal commitment from a person on a campus. The benefits are access to a wide and deep expertise in archaeology, the chance to participate in a large, multi-disciplinary, international archaeological project in Turkey, and learning much about the use of IT in both research and teaching.
Each school has the course on its books. Thus, students simply enroll for the course as they would for any other course on campus.
What do you see as the future of online education? My impression today is that the most successful online courses are combined with face to face interaction. Would you agree?
A most critical aspect of this project is the local faculty liaison. Students who had lots of interaction with their faculty (off the class
lecture time) did the best. This brings home the important point that the web is not a replacement for a live faculty member; it is a vehicle to expand course offerings that a faculty member can offer (or rather that a faculty member can oversee). The centrality of the teacher-student exchange, the core of the small liberal arts college mission, is not changed by the type of course that we offer over the web. We think that we are augmenting the liberal arts experience; in some ways we are re-defining the nature of the "classroom experience," and making more elastic the role of the teacher. It still comes down, however, to face to face exchange between student and teacher.
See ya next week!
