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Sustainable Online Archaeology with Eric Olson - Ep 136
204 Plays5 years ago
Eric Olson is a full time lecturer at Cuyahoga Community College, Presient of the Stewards of Historical Preservation, and president-elect of the Ohio Archaeological Council. He talks to us today about the challenges of teaching archaeology online.
Links
- For the Ohio Archaeological Council: https://ohioarchaeology.org/
- For the article about the 1901 lagoon discovered at Stan Hywet: https://ohioarchaeology.org/140-resources/research/articles-and-abstracts-2017/514-no-shovel-required-an-archaeological-inventory-of-greater-akron-ohio
- Genghis Khan Nat Geo crowdsourcing: https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2011/07/12/return-to-the-valley-of-the-khans/
- For the Tri-C Anthropology twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/tricanthropology
- They also have a youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeqtT8ULkCfkbwaOl1sSfbA/featured
- The video game Eric briefly mentioned creating for students: https://anthropology.itch.io/b-horizon
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Sponsorship & Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 136. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Eric Olson about sustainable online archaeology. Let's get to it.
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Paul, how's
Challenges of New School Year
00:00:39
Speaker
it going? Good question. I think I'm doing okay. You know, I always talk about how we're, you know, going through the school year gearing up for this part, gearing up for that part. And now we're reaching the end of August while we're recording. And we are really in the thick of getting things ready for this new school year. That is unlike any we've ever had before. How are you doing, Chris?
Life on the Road: Archaeology in Nevada
00:00:58
Speaker
I am not doing too bad. We're about ready to, as I've mentioned before, go full time on the road. And as we're recording here,
00:01:05
Speaker
That's in four days. As you're listening to this, we're knee deep in an archeology project in Northeastern Nevada. Hopefully I'll have something to say about that on the next recording.
00:01:13
Speaker
But in the meantime, we are in the process of heading across the country. So I think we're going to be talking about stuff like that. Hey, I've got an app update. So wait for the app of the day segment, which we probably won't have an app of the day segment. But I do have an app update on TouchGIS. And I want people to stick around for that if you're interested in that after the second segment. So before we get there, though, we're going to bring our guest.
Teaching Archaeology Online During COVID
00:01:36
Speaker
Eric, how's it going? It's going good. The semester has already started for me.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we're hearing in various parts of the country, depending on where you're at. And I see national news reports of colleges trying to have in-person classes, and then immediately everybody has COVID and they have to go home. And they said, wow, that was a spectacularly bad idea. Let's do something else. And other people are just dealing with it and moving on. I see people lining up for buses out here, kids and things in Reno, Nevada.
00:02:05
Speaker
So, your school, as we mentioned in the introduction of the community college, you guys are fully online. So, well, I want to start. Well, OK, is there a caveat to that? The caveat is like I don't teach any classes in person, but I guess they're technically some classes that are in person. But I was actually just on campus today and it was it was.
00:02:27
Speaker
Nice. Nice. Well, that interesting or bad. Interesting. Yeah. Uh, neutral, we'll say stay safe. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. So let's, let's, let's talk about that. You teach there, your lecture there, your full-time lecture, as we mentioned in your intro. So have you ever taught online classes before? We'll start with that.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yes. So to give you a little context, thinking about online archaeology actually came about probably two years ago when I first started at Tri-C, as we call it.
00:03:02
Speaker
And really, this came about because online classes were already in full swing, and I was already being thrust into teaching archaeology as an online class. Before COVID even happened, we never offered archaeology as an in-person class until, I want to say last year, before COVID.
00:03:23
Speaker
and I suggested doing it in person. I was thrust into this quandary of how do I teach a class that's inherently physical, like using artifacts and talking about digging and teaching it in an online format. This raised other questions of
00:03:41
Speaker
Can we do archaeology as a whole just on the internet? And so I started thinking about how to do lessons online, how to make them more engaging and interactive, how to keep students interested, and how to basically how to do good archaeology that's not only interesting to people, but also ethical and sustainable because one of the big issues that I've had with online
00:04:04
Speaker
teaching is generating content without losing sleep at night because I'm doing more than what's expected of my regular job. What's interesting about the statement you made about trying to figure out ways to make it online learning more engaging and interactive is I don't think a lot of professors have thought about that for their in-person classes. I slept through quite a few cultural anthropology classes when I was in my undergrad.
00:04:30
Speaker
It's interesting that people are having that conversation now and they think they have to do what they should though, but they're starting to think about making the classes more engaging. I'm like, yeah, okay, maybe some of the younger people out there, the younger professors are actually just thinking about that even when they had in-person classes, trying to find other ways to do things because they slept through classes as well.
00:04:52
Speaker
But I'm hoping it's making some of the, how should we say, more established professors really think about their natural, normal teaching techniques as well, because some of those classes, man, they are just a snooze fest, even when you're sitting in person, sitting at the desk, just taking notes for an entire hour, trying to stay awake. So.
00:05:09
Speaker
I'm interested to hear what approaches you're trying to take to make this more engaging, but also what are your peers and your colleagues doing? What is the space talking about this whole thing? How are some of the older people, you may not have them at that college, I don't know, but how are some of the more established longer term professors dealing with this new online environment when they're used to just a big lecture hall?
00:05:30
Speaker
So yeah, your point of thinking about lesson plans, and this gets to a broader topic that's I think beyond the scope of this discussion, but something that I think bears a moment to mention is that you can have a graduate degree in just about any discipline and suddenly higher education thinks you are now qualified to teach that subject. And unfortunately, as you just described, that is not the case. People are not required to learn about lesson plans, curriculum, engaging students in learning classroom management.
00:06:00
Speaker
And so, luckily,
Adapting to Online Teaching
00:06:01
Speaker
I guess you could say that the silver lining to COVID is that it's now forcing professors to start to think about how to make their material more engaging. Because all of a sudden, once you make it a Zoom conference call or a WebEx meeting, and it's just a bunch of heads staring back at you, and you're just talking over a PowerPoint, suddenly it's not super exciting. And that's not some way to engage students.
00:06:25
Speaker
especially tactile learners or auditory well I guess tactile or visual learners and at Tri-C we do have I would say we have a diversity of not only students but also faculty as far as faculty go I'm pretty young I'm only 28.
00:06:45
Speaker
I was on campus today and I was constantly confused for a student. But we do have older faculty and I've also taught and still hold close ties to people at other universities in Northeast Ohio just because I went to school at Akron and I have friends at Kent and Cleveland State. Archaeology is a small discipline so we get to know each other.
00:07:09
Speaker
And so I can't speak for them directly, but I do know what they've told me about how they're approaching it. And I've heard nightmare stories like my sister who works at Akron having issues with professors who don't know about due dates or the changes to scheduling. One of the biggest hurdles has been
00:07:30
Speaker
knowing when assignments are due and making sure students understand when assignments are due and how to avoid the issue of cramming.
Role of Big Data in Online Archaeology
00:07:39
Speaker
And I think engaging students in a way that's not just PowerPoint presentations in an online streaming platform
00:07:47
Speaker
is one of the first issues to address because you'll have students who tune out or they don't tune in at the right time or they think, well, it's all online, therefore it's at my own pace. The due dates, like, for example, in my classes is always Sunday at midnight, which means usually the highest activity of student
00:08:03
Speaker
engagement is between 6 p.m. and midnight on Sunday and so you know now professors are starting to think oh now I actually need to start thinking about pacing and how to lay out a lesson that isn't just I go in I talk I tell them this is due at the next class move on with my life and
00:08:23
Speaker
When I think of online archaeology, not just in the classroom, but broadly speaking, just anytime you're online, so the public as a whole, because I consider all online content, potential education content for anyone, not just people in my class, I think of it as something that ties into
00:08:40
Speaker
What you guys talked about in the previous podcast episode and on two episodes ago, essentially online archaeology to me is inherently big data, working from home, and open access. Those are the big three things that I think are part of online archaeology. Those are obviously three topics that have warranted further discussions in of themselves, but I think
00:09:03
Speaker
They bear a context of education or a discussion of how educators or how we as archaeologists are acting as educators and promoting that information and what are the best ways to do that. And so I've got my own ideas about how to best reach
00:09:21
Speaker
not just students in the classroom but also someone who's casually interested in archaeology and wants to learn more but isn't at the level of say enrolling in my class at a community college or deciding to go on and get a bachelor's degree. They're still just as important to reach out to and engage with as you know my students might be. Obviously I'm getting paid to you know grade my students so they obviously take a little bit more priority but I still want to think of reaching future students or students
00:09:50
Speaker
of life. That sounds so cheesy to say, but when you're online, you're in public space, so anyone
Streaming Archaeology on Twitch
00:09:56
Speaker
can be watching. Yeah, no, absolutely. This is interesting. I do want to steer the conversation as we go further a little more to the online archaeology in general, what you mean by that. But I'm actually curious, since you did
00:10:09
Speaker
teaching online before COVID, and now you're doing it under COVID, have you had to retool how you approach the medium, how you approach your pedagogy because of this? Because it went from being something that was maybe not in your specific case, but something that was generally optional to something that is absolutely mandated? So at Tri-C, not really, in the sense of
00:10:33
Speaker
The archaeology class had always been online in my experience teaching it for two years prior to COVID. And I had only taught it in person at a completely different university prior to that. So initially, there was a steep learning curve. But what was nice about Tri-C, and obviously I'm speaking, I don't want to praise too, I guess I can't praise too much Tri-C. I really like the environment there. They're really teaching focused. And I think that's a big difference between community colleges and
00:11:02
Speaker
universities, when we look at the COVID responses, Tri-C very quickly said online, you know, we already have a strong online format. We are very teaching focused. We don't really have any research going on. So it's not like we have to worry about having professors take on additional classes or worry about extra training. They already have built in teacher, I guess, continuing education courses or continuing learning experiences.
00:11:31
Speaker
that they offer opportunities. Obviously, I can't speak for other universities. Having only taught at three different colleges, in my experience, it's very limited. But teaching online, the biggest hurdle was just the concept of teaching
00:11:47
Speaker
all of these classes online, but I had two years head start on it. So for me at least, it was relatively easy transitioning to the COVID policies. The only difference for me was that I was not permitted to go to campus. And so the biggest hurdle for me was switching from
00:12:05
Speaker
using in-class materials during live streams because one of the things that I've done recently that I implemented was using the platform Twitch to live stream all of my lessons. Interesting. Twitch is a gaming streaming chat. Most of Generation Z is probably very familiar with Twitch and anyone who's into video games is very familiar with Twitch. Most of the people that are on Twitch are people playing
00:12:31
Speaker
the latest and greatest video games. I mean, if you go on there right now, you'll probably see Fall Guys, you'll probably see Fortnite and Minecraft being the big ones, maybe Call of Duty. And then you have little me just sitting over here talking about anthropology and archaeology and sometimes live streaming my dig. So this past summer,
00:12:52
Speaker
I was obviously stuck at home, and I had to get some research done for a paper that had comments and revisions, and I couldn't go out to my traditional field sites. What I did was I staked out my backyard, and I literally did a dig in my backyard as part of these
00:13:11
Speaker
and I live streamed part of it. And obviously, the biggest hurdle for live streaming on something like that, if your goal is to reach a large audience, is promotion and marketing. And so I didn't have a lot of people joining the stream. I did have a few students show up, because this wasn't related directly to my class. This is more of a supplemental, like, hey, if you want to see what it actually looks like, hop in.
00:13:34
Speaker
And then I did the same thing later with the University of Akron Field School. I hopped out there for an afternoon and just basically, it's, Twitch is so portable. I was, I just took my mobile phone out there, my iPhone. I used the app and then I just clicked go live and then I was live. So I can literally go anywhere and start live streaming, which is pretty nice. And that one also had limited engagement as well, but I thought the concept was there. If I had the right marketing and audience,
00:14:03
Speaker
I could reach a larger crowd. Like if I was, say, recording archaeology on YouTube, which is a really big YouTube channel that posts all their archaeology lectures, I think there would be a following for if you just did a live stream of someone traveling in the dirt. And I've asked my friend group, that's not archaeologists, and some of my students. And they said, actually, that's kind of interesting. I would love to just have that on in the background.
00:14:26
Speaker
And when you compare that to other live streaming content, it's really not that different. And it's an opportunity for people to learn about something that they didn't learn about before, like they could be on Twitch and just see what the heck. There's a guy in a hole. Yeah, I'll I'll hop on that live stream and see what the heck's going on here. Because if you look at, like I said, the content.
00:14:46
Speaker
on Twitch or I guess you could look at YouTube and YouTube streaming or YouTube live. It's a lot of three hour let's plays of someone playing a video game that, you know, arguably in terms of entertainment value, no one's sitting down there and doing nothing else. A lot of the times people will put it on and they might not even watch it at real speed. They might watch it at two times speed or one at one point five times speed or they might be
00:15:15
Speaker
doing something else and it's just sort of like background talk radio, almost like a podcast. And so I think there's a real opportunity for us as archaeologists to engage a segment of the younger generations that we're not necessarily reaching with traditional educational pedagogy, like lecture-based pictures in a PowerPoint format.
00:15:39
Speaker
That's interesting. I really like this idea of using Twitch like that. We did interview Amagomas a couple of months ago in this year, 2020, I guess this is this year. They were using Twitch for exploring archeological topics in, not in Second Life, in Animal Crossing, which is very interesting what they were doing. But I don't know of anybody that's been Twitch streaming actual excavations. I do think that's an interesting take on it having
00:16:08
Speaker
you know, real time, but you don't have to be 100% fully engaged. You can kind of dip in and out. You can listen to it like background music. Yeah, that sounds appealing. That also, I think you're right. I think that that is going to meet a lot of people where they're at already. So I hope that you keep
Post-COVID Teaching Evolution
00:16:24
Speaker
continuing with that experiment because that's pretty cool.
00:16:27
Speaker
a little bit back to the pedagogy. Since you have had experience prior to COVID teaching online, do you also turn that around your experience and educate the other educators who don't have the same experience? Do you have any kind of structured way of doing that at Tri-C?
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, so what I've been doing is being a thorn to some people in their sides. And you can think of it that way. More of an annoying reminder. I try to make everything that I do in my classroom setting as accessible to other professors as possible. So I haven't kept up with it as much lately because I've been inundated with all these other projects that I'm working on, like creating an online archaeology video game, which is currently available if you wanted to play it.
00:17:14
Speaker
not to plug or toot my own horn. I don't make any money off of it. It all goes to nonprofits. But the idea is that I make these things accessible and I send out monthly emails to our small pool of faculty saying, here's what I've done to update it. I've made
00:17:31
Speaker
things publicly accessible to them, or I offer or extend a hand saying I can walk you through this. I set up a, so the Twitch channel, I didn't give my login info to all of the faculty, but I essentially have been reminding them like once a month or so.
00:17:47
Speaker
saying, hey, this Twitch channel is for anthropology courses. It's not just Eric's personal Twitch channel. I set it up with the intention that anyone who wants to livestream can livestream that content. And then the same with I set up a Discord server so that students can actually have voice-to-voice conversations because with Twitch you can only do comments in a text chat. But with Discord you can actually talk to people. I mean, it's no different than, say, any other voice chat
00:18:15
Speaker
capabilities. But again, it's a case of a lot of my younger students, I would say if they're under the age of 25, they're very familiar with Discord and they know how it works. It's also you don't have to have video. And honestly, from a pedagogical standpoint, I'm very much of the students don't really want to show their face online. I I've done Zoom, I've done WebEx and I've sat in with a bunch of faculty like the recent faculty
00:18:44
Speaker
a Senate or something. But we had convocation a week or two ago and it was a WebEx meeting. And what struck me about it was just how many people who are professors committing the errors or mistakes that we as professors complain all the time about our students doing and what Twitch and Discord remove is those frustrations of you hearing notifications every time someone pops in or
00:19:09
Speaker
bandwidth dipping and quality of audio and video dropping because you have 50 people with their cameras on and their audio on and so there's a big lag or there's a dip in the quality of the stream. But you don't have that with Twitch because it's one way. You can leave a comment in the text chat
00:19:27
Speaker
and it's not going to affect my streaming abilities whatsoever. With Discord, you can have multiple voice channels and you can throw people around. What's really nice, what I love about Discord, I haven't had to use this yet, but what I love about Discord is that in those voice channels,
00:19:45
Speaker
If a student is not muting themselves, I can deafen them or mute them, or if they're really not paying attention or following a lot, like if they're causing, I mean, not that they could really cause much of a ruckus other than making noise, like if they stepped away from the computer and didn't realize they didn't mute themselves, I can literally take their name and drag it to another voice channel. I can literally kick them out of the voice channel and not kick them out in the way that like they can't come back and I have to ask to be reinvented. They can easily jump back in, but it sends us a gentle nudge in a simple way that says like, hey,
00:20:14
Speaker
you're causing problems, you need to address whatever the issue is. So far, I haven't really had any issues with people acting out on Discord. And I think that's primarily because these formats are familiar to my younger students. And if they're not familiar to my older students, then they're fine learning it. And I should mention this here, because I'm sure it's a question. Last summer, or rather this past summer for my summer class,
00:20:43
Speaker
I had two students in their 80s because a lot of students at Tri-C like to audit my courses. If you're over, I think, 62 or 65 in the state of Ohio, you can take classes for free if you audit them. So I oftentimes in my archeology classes overwhelmingly get two to three students who are
00:20:59
Speaker
you know, 65 plus. So I had two students this past summer who were one was 83. The other one was, I think, 79. And both of them were the most engaged, oddly enough, out of any of my students. And I was worried that they were going to struggle to figure out how to use Discord and how to use Twitch. But in fact, they were the first ones to figure it out. And the reason they told me it was because I knew I was old and didn't know technology. So I gave myself extra time to figure it out. And once you know it, they that extra time
00:21:27
Speaker
was still more than what any other student was willing to do. So anyone out there who's saying, oh, students aren't willing to learn these new platforms, au contraire. Yeah, on that note, let's take our first break. And when we come back, we'll continue talking about sustainable archaeology. And I've got some
00:21:46
Speaker
Questions about how you're going to go back to basically in-person teaching and things like that when this is all over, like what are the lessons learned? So we'll talk about that in segment two, back in a second. Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
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00:23:18
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 136.
Sustainable Online Archaeology
00:23:21
Speaker
Today, we're talking with Eric Olson, broadly speaking about sustainable online archaeology. Now, our first segment, we're mostly talking about pedagogy and teaching online, but there's a lot to unpack in sustainable online archaeology. And I was wondering if you could explain to us a little bit, Eric, what you mean by that.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah, so I had to think about what I meant when I first pitched the idea of online archaeology because lately on this podcast and on the CRM podcast talking about what is digital archaeology, I didn't feel like digital best encompassed what I was thinking of.
00:23:56
Speaker
Because digital, as Chris has said in the past, every archaeologist is basically a digital archaeologist. It's unavoidable to not be a digital archaeologist in this day and age. So when I think of online archaeology, I really, like I said in the first segment, big data, working from home, and open access. And so some of the things that I think are good examples that are a bit old at this point, almost a decade on for some of them, are things like the Genghis Khan crowdsourcing from National Geographic, where you could literally
00:24:24
Speaker
look at aerial images and try and find new archaeological sites or recent finds. I think this past year over the summer, didn't they find a new Mayan lowland village or city using aerial photography in Lidar, I think, which is arguably a form of crowdsourcing. But in order to do those sorts of things, you need to have good public engagement. So you need to have people who are willing to look at hundreds of different aerial photos. You need to have people who know how to access them, know what they're looking for, something to have access to.
00:24:54
Speaker
educational materials if they're just a member of the public, but also if they're a student have some means of interacting a good engagement with the researcher and obviously big data because you have all these aerial photos or other projects that I've worked on include data mining past archaeological journals. So something that I'm working on right now that I'm hoping to get out in the next six months, which might be ambitious. But it's a project that I spent the last two years working on where I would casually go through
00:25:23
Speaker
old issues of Ohio Archaeologist, which is a regional archaeology journal, mostly published by avocational and hobbyist collectors. And going through all of the old photos from the 1950s up to 2009, it's all digitized by Ohio State University. And no one's gone through and pulled each photo of each projectile point with a scale and at least county level provenience.
00:25:50
Speaker
and started to look at that as big data. There's also that avenue to look at is archive.org or Chronicling America, which surprisingly enough, news journalists from the turn of the 20th century were pretty adept at describing archaeological data. I remember a paper I did back in 2017 in current research of the Ohio Archaeological Council
00:26:14
Speaker
where I talk about specific newspaper articles I found through Chronicling America, where they give pretty specific details. Not the greatest of details, obviously, but for a news reporter in 1901, really specific details about an archaeological site that is completely destroyed today. We just can't get to it. It's literally at the bottom of a lagoon, and it destroyed limestone quarry.
00:26:37
Speaker
It just doesn't exist anymore. Those are what I think of partially with online archaeology, but also what we talked about with Twitch streaming. When we talked about Discord and how to engage with students, those same concepts apply to the public. How do we get them involved in mining this big data? How do we manage this big data?
00:26:58
Speaker
how do we present it in a way that makes sense, and then how do we make it accessible? This is something that was mentioned in the Big Data podcast episode, and also to a lesser extent in the CRM recent podcast episode talking about social media, in that being careful to take a photograph and not have anything that you can identify where it's from in the background. Basically, don't let people come out and loot your site.
00:27:25
Speaker
I'm kind of bouncing all over the place because this is such a large concept. But sticking to that concept of open access, because it's so integral to online archaeology, personally, I'll just lay the chips out on the table. I think open access should be universal to archaeology. And this is something that I talked to other members of the Ohio Archaeological Council at the spring meeting we had back in March, like right when COVID happened and we were online.
00:27:51
Speaker
I basically said, at least in Ohio, I can't speak for out West, which is a very different setting, but in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, very urban environments, the sites that we're finding professionally are sites that are going to be destroyed, are already
Open Access & Community Engagement in Archaeology
00:28:06
Speaker
destroyed. No one's going to be able to have access to them. They're going to become Walmart parking lots. They're going to become roads. They're going to become
00:28:12
Speaker
duplex houses or whatnot. They're not places that are at risk of future looting. The only places that are at risk of looting are sites that I can go online right now and I can read as much as I want to about Hopewell Earthworks, which is granted part of National Parks property, but not just National Parks property, but anywhere we've decided it's important, it's probably been known about
00:28:36
Speaker
for 70-plus years, and at this point, all of the documentation, archaeological reports, photographs, artifacts, etc., are publicly accessible.
00:28:47
Speaker
to that point of online archaeology, I would argue it has to be open access within reason. Obviously, we shouldn't be going out to Farmer Joe's Farm Field and just letting everyone know, hey, we're in Farmer Joe's Farm Field, come and get it. But at the same time, we need to strike a balance where we realize that most sites
00:29:07
Speaker
honestly are not going to be looters' havens. The ones that are looters' havens are the ones that people know by word of mouth and through preferential attachment. Everyone knows about site X or site Y, and it's been known about for decades. Of course, people are going to loot that site, but the site that was found on an oil pipeline project last year, and it was put into a report and part of the gray literature that no one's ever going to see, or a report part of a project that
00:29:34
Speaker
no one's really interested in reading other than the people that have to read it, then I think there's a low risk to those sites being looted. I yield my time. Yield your time. That's wonderful. I'm curious here because you're talking about different kinds of sites being more or less amenable to online archaeology.
00:29:57
Speaker
But are there certain kinds of archaeology themselves that are more or less amenable to be put online for, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it?
00:30:06
Speaker
That's a really good question. Sorry, that's the educator in me coming out. But yeah, it raises the question of representation or underrepresentation. And this is something that we've talked about in the nonprofits I'm on and how we respond to things such as the murder of George Floyd and how we reflect on black indigenous people of color, BIPOC, archaeology.
00:30:29
Speaker
And should we focus more on those underrepresented communities? How do we focus on them? And in fact, something like Tri-C, we have collections that we could be making more open access that do deal with BIPOC communities and are interesting to people because they're in neighborhoods that they currently live in.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I think that's one of the best ways to approach online open access archaeology is meeting people quite literally where their feet are or where they live. And I found in, granted my youthful limited experience, I found that people really respond and engage when they're dealing with something that's historical or archaeological.
00:31:09
Speaker
that is something that they walk by every day or that is in their backyard. People generally don't get as excited about Hopewell Earthworks if they live three hours drive from them. Despite the fact that they're UNESCO World Heritage nominated and they are one of one, there's no other
00:31:29
Speaker
earthworks like them in the world. But yeah, if you tell them, hey, there's a cemetery that was active from 1840 to 1916, and now it's a public park and it's not marked, but you can see the grass plots from where the graves used to be because the grass grows greener where the burials are. People are like,
00:31:46
Speaker
tell me more about that. I want to know more about that because I play in that park or I go to that park all the time." Or you tell them, hey, there's this really interesting site at Stan Hewitt, which is a famous large mansion in Akron where the CEO of Goodyear
00:32:03
Speaker
lived, but that context I was telling you about, the 1901 article or whatever, it was a reporter visiting the lagoon they were going to put in, or before it was the lagoon, the cave that had prehistoric burials in it. It had ritual burial items. It had projectile points. It had quite in-depth stratigraphy that they went into some detail describing.
00:32:25
Speaker
But it's now part of Stan Hewitt, and you can't physically access it, but you can learn more about it because it's part of what you spend time learning about anyway. Or if you live in the Akron School District, you're going to probably visit Stan Hewitt or learn about Stan Hewitt. If you live in the neighborhood, you probably visit its pretty gardens all the time. There's more interest in those types of archaeology, but then it's striking a balance of
00:32:48
Speaker
of representation and engaging with proper communities. And this is something that the Journal of Field Archaeology, that big data special issue was? Yeah, I think so.
00:33:03
Speaker
This is one of the issues that online archaeology has to grapple with, and that's in unequal access to data and unequal access to audience interest. So what's more interesting to people, learning about the Irish canal builder community that's still extant and part of a metro park, or learning about the bulldozed African-American community from the 1920s that is now part of Tri-C's metro campus.
00:33:29
Speaker
and is a little bit more problematic because of the history of how that community was formed during the Great Migration, the segregation policies that were in place that formed that community, and the living conditions, there's obviously a disparity between which one we want to hear more about, which one we don't want to hear more about. And so it really is difficult to balance them. And to your point of what archaeology lends itself to online archaeology,
00:33:56
Speaker
Truly, I think there's not much that isn't online archaeology capable, at least in this day and age where I can literally take my mobile phone and go live on Twitch or wherever I am.
00:34:09
Speaker
It's just a question of audience interest and making it interesting because there are communities out there that do want to learn more about these topics, these communities, these groups. It's just a matter of are we willing to put in the effort to reach out to BIPOC communities that might not even know we exist as organizations because why would they want to
00:34:30
Speaker
learn more about archaeology if they think archaeology is a discipline of white males looking at non-white people and not talking about modern injustices or talking about relevant topics to them.
Online vs. In-person Teaching Preferences
00:34:43
Speaker
Not to get political if that's, I don't know if that's political.
00:34:47
Speaker
It probably is to some people, but it's fine here. So, I mean, I'm really curious, especially since we're nearing the end of our interview here, I'm really curious as to how you think it's going to go when people start teaching a person again. And you have an interesting perspective because, as you said, you taught online archaeology for two years, and the school is already online with the archaeology program.
00:35:09
Speaker
And then you started teaching in person and now we're back to online again. So has that fluctuation or, you know, when you started teaching online versus, you know, teaching a year in person and then coming back to an online system.
00:35:22
Speaker
Do you think you have a preference? If you could just say next year when all this is over, hopefully we're going to have something else knocking down our door. What do you think is most effective? Something has got to be most effective for somebody, right? Certain people are going to respond better to online versus others.
00:35:39
Speaker
people might attend classes more if they don't have to get out of bed and go across campus. I don't know. Or maybe we can open up to people who don't actually have to physically live there a little better than we are right now. That's one of the biggest expenses with school is just getting there and staying there. What do you think is most effective having done both? If you had the choice to make, what would be your model going forward? Why not both?
00:36:07
Speaker
I mean, truly, the education solution is offering multiple different options for students to maximize the student population. And honestly, I see at Tri-C, why not just keep leaning into the online? We were already online beforehand. At least at Tri-C, I'd never taught in person. So when I said I taught in-person archeology classes, it was actually at a different college. But at Tri-C, it's always been online.
00:36:35
Speaker
I truly think that there is an opportunity for students who want to get their feet wet in archaeology, have an interest in the topic. There's just an underserved, I think, community of people who want to get real world experience. Obviously, how do you do that online? That's where it becomes difficult. Like, how do I get someone real world field experience? Obviously, we can't replace that online.
00:37:02
Speaker
But we can do, say, a two-year associate's degree program in anthropology or archaeology or whatever the sub-discipline or focus is, and that reaches students who otherwise might not go into the discipline. Because I remember the first semester I started teaching online at Tri-C,
00:37:20
Speaker
I ran into some problems with students who kept complaining because they were in Los Angeles. And so I had students who were taking my class in LA and it just boggled my mind and I ended up looking into it. And this student could have taken my equivalent of a class at like 30 different
00:37:40
Speaker
community colleges within driving distance of downtown Los Angeles. But they took mine through Tri-C, and what I think the marketability of it was, was price. And not to say that Tri-C is the cheapest of schools, but one of the biggest barriers, I think, to education is the price. And honestly, if there are more two plus two programs where it's two years at a community college getting the foundational knowledge and then finishing a bachelor's degree at a traditional school,
00:38:09
Speaker
you're allowing so many more students the opportunity to get that higher education that otherwise might not be able to. In fact, I've had students that take my classes say, Tri-C, and obviously I'm speaking just for Tri-C, but the ability to take it online, the affordability, the reliability, so something else that I hadn't mentioned either. Obviously, I'm not a Tri-C administrator, so I can't
00:38:33
Speaker
speak to all of the ins and outs of how this decision was made. But we have this thing called guaranteed courses, which is essentially the equivalent of, I mean, it is what it sounds, it's guaranteed. So students know that no matter what happens, this course will be taught, it will not be canceled. And that's something that can't be said of other universities in the area.
00:38:52
Speaker
have been dancing around it, but for Paul and Chris, who may or may not keep up with national news, the University of Akron has been in the news a lot lately about firing tenured faculty. They've mismanaged a lot of things lately. They've drawn a lot of ire in how they've handled coronavirus, but they've had that problem for years prior to coronavirus.
00:39:13
Speaker
one of the issues was if we don't have 12 students, it won't run. And so students got really worried that this class that they signed up for and scheduled and everything week one of the semester, it gets canceled. And now they are scrambling to figure out what to do. And so I think the online format really affords flexibility that just didn't exist before. And honestly, I think
00:39:37
Speaker
There's no point in scrapping it. We're already here. We've already been doing it. Why turn the clock back? Why not look to the future and say, just make online an option? The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is changing the old guard because I've had so many of my colleagues and professors say,
00:39:56
Speaker
What's the quality of the student? Some students aren't going to be as good in an online format, and there's nothing I can do about the student other than recommend that they take it in person. If I catch it early enough or I know the student in advance, I might recommend in person if I know them and I can advise them.
00:40:16
Speaker
We need to start realizing that online learning, if done right, and if done with the proper tools, it can be just as good as in person. And we need to stop thinking of it as, oh, that student took an online archeology class. Well,
00:40:34
Speaker
They're not going to be qualified to take my upper division course. They're not prepared. I've had professors tell me that. They say, oh, well, I don't want the online students taking my course because they're just not getting the same content. And I think that's the biggest hurdle because if we don't think
00:40:50
Speaker
it's as good than how are we going to ever reach the public who maybe just doesn't want to pay the price tag of a college course but still wants to learn something about archaeology or still wants to participate. We're boxing them out because of this ivory tower concept of in-person is the only way to do it.
00:41:07
Speaker
Okay. Well, on that note, and I think that's a really positive note too, because I mean, I'm all for online and you're right. Why not do a mixed model if you can, because if people can show up and do stuff, that's great. But if they can't, that's awesome. And we live in a world where we should be.
00:41:24
Speaker
Honestly, having access to a lot more than we do in this whole concept of we have to go here. I love that businesses are now offering people the choice in a lot of cases. Well, do you want to just keep working from home? Because oddly enough, it seems to work. So why not take classes from home and do other stuff from home and have more family time and people are figuring out how to have that work-life balance at home, hopefully. So that's good. Any final thoughts on that, Eric?
00:41:49
Speaker
So I thought if you are interested following up on this discussion of online archaeology or learning more about those underserved communities, BIPOC communities in particular, through How Archaeological Council's fall meeting on October 23rd, it will be all online. So anyone around the world can tune in. We will be Twitch streaming it, but we will also be doing, I believe, a WebEx meeting for it. So you're more than welcome to join.
00:42:14
Speaker
into the discussion and also learn about these specific archaeological surveys and studies that have been done with BIPOC communities, or at least that's the hope, because since I have the luxury of setting up the fall meetings, I got to choose the topics. And so it's BIPOC archaeology and online archaeology. So that will be the topic. So all the papers will be about those topics.
00:42:36
Speaker
Also, try and tune in to the Stewards of Historical Preservation Facebook page in October. We still haven't finalized how we're going to do a livestream format, but we're going to try and do some little 20-minute educational series on stuff that's going on in Northeast Ohio, if you have an interest in Northeast Ohio, which is, I know, very niche, but thought I'd plug them as well.
00:42:58
Speaker
Nice. Well, hey, we'll have both those links on the show notes for this episode. And, you know, hey, go check out the Ohio Archaeology Council. Go check out Stewards of Historical Preservation. You know, even if you're not in that area, the nice thing about these online resources is you can learn stuff about, get this, things that aren't near you or in your hometown, and maybe we'll all be better people for it, for learning stuff outside of where we live. I think that's the key to a world-rounded society. So
00:43:26
Speaker
Well, thanks a lot, Eric, for coming on. This has been fantastic. I wish you all the luck in your upcoming semester, and thanks a lot for the podcast ideas we discussed in the break. Hopefully more on that to come for all the listeners of this show at the APN. My wheels are spinning this whole time since between the break. What a tease.
00:43:45
Speaker
I know, I know, right? So again, thanks a lot for coming on and Paul and I will be back in segment three to wrap this up and to do a little update that I promised you in segment one on TouchGIS. So thanks again, Eric. We'll be back in a second. Thanks so much.
00:44:01
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:44:21
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 136 of the Architect podcast. And we're going to wrap on Eric Olson here real quick. We're going to sort of wrap up our thoughts on that. But I did mention that I had a touch GIS update and we're going out on this, you know, decent sized survey next week and I hate dribbles. And so I'm always looking for an alternative and I own an Aero, an EOS Aero 100 sub meter GPS. You know, one of those little things you can stick in your backpack and it's got the little antenna that sticks out the top.
00:44:50
Speaker
It's pretty great. It's an awesome device. But what the heck do you read that with? If you're on Esri products, sure you can read it with that, but if you can afford a $6,000 Esri license, you can probably afford a Trimble. Honestly, I can afford a Trimble. The project can pay for it, but I don't want one because they're out of date the minute you have them. Everybody's got nine-year-old Trimbles. It's like a $5,000 brick if you only use it three or four times a year.
00:45:13
Speaker
It just doesn't make any sense for my business to own one of those. I've rented them in the past. It's about $100 a day, $70 to $100 a day to rent them, which again is no problem because you pass that on to the client anyway. It's just part of your project costs. But that's also kind of a pain.
00:45:29
Speaker
So I've been looking around for other, to use Eric's word, more sustainable plans here for me as a small business. And touch GIS is something I mentioned before. But the only thing I didn't know that if it was capable of doing because it wasn't in their menu structure and it wasn't something that was selectable, was if you hook up an external Bluetooth GPS, is it actually reading that data? Is it using that antenna and reading that into touch GIS and giving you that level of accuracy that you need?
TouchGIS App Update
00:45:54
Speaker
And I finally got in contact with the makers of the application just yesterday and they said yes.
00:45:59
Speaker
They said, that's good feedback. We've heard that before. We need to display that within the application or at least the selection to maybe choose that antenna over your onboard antenna. But what they do is if you're using something that's external to the onboard antenna, it automatically just chooses that because it assumes it's a better quality. So it automatically chooses the external antenna over the onboard antenna. So that's great. And it's amazing. And again, the application is about 30 bucks a month.
00:46:26
Speaker
which is a drop in the bucket for the $40,000 projects I'm going to do next week. And it's just going to make our lives super easy. Now it is, you know, well, I'm going to be hooking my iPhone 10 up to an external GPS or somebody on my crew is won't just be me, but we're hooking probably an iPhone or an Android phone up to Shernal Bluetooth GPS and running touch GIS while recording a site. Cause we're not running it generally while we're just walking around, but running that on a site.
00:46:52
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, I'm going to have my 30,000 milliamp battery fully charged up every single day because it's going to take that phone battery down in like two hours. Yeah. And we're doing 10 hour days too. So it's going to be rough and you're going to need a big battery like that. I don't even think a 10,000 would do it. And I'm glad I've got two of the 30,000 milliamp batteries. That should solve the problem. So I just want to make that update for anybody who looked at it up or was interested in that. And I'll have probably more feedback next time on how that actually goes and the quality of the data we get from that. So just wanted to mention it.
00:47:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. The feature was there, they just didn't expose it. Yeah, and to be honest, Wild Note is doing the same thing. Wild Note recently gave support for the EOS Aero 100 and there's no button for it. There's no little satellite icon that starts flashing when it's reading it or something like that. It just works. If you have it hooked up, it just works. And I actually gave Wild Note that feedback and I suspected TouchGIS was doing the same thing, but I needed confirmation on it before I could commit to it on an agency project.
00:47:50
Speaker
And so, yeah, and wild notes taking that feedback as well. So anybody else out there making applications, if you happen to be listening to this, just let us know what you're doing. Let us know that it's reading the antenna. You know, it might be obvious if you're a software developer that, hey, if you hook up an external Bluetooth, it's going to read it. But we need that confirmation. We need that warm blanket feeling that, yes, it's positively connected in the field. We need to see that otherwise we just don't trust it. That's just the way it is.
00:48:17
Speaker
Okay, Eric Olson. How was that? That was an awesome conversation. Yeah, he's really exciting. You know, I did want to say something. I kind of quipped when he said his age, I said, oh, you're a baby. And I just meant that in relation to me, who's almost twice his age. But it actually gets to something I think that there's really important, that enthusiasm that he had in this willingness to try different things. And he also mentioned, you know, to a certain extent, the way to move forward is for the older generations of educators in this case, too.
00:48:46
Speaker
loosen the grips or retire. It's good to have this fresh blood and this fresh perspective and this willingness to try things and to experiment and to know that, hey, this would be great if I had more engagement with it, but I'm going to do it anyway because damn it, it's an interesting idea that I think is worthwhile. That is something that youth brings better than anything else. I
00:49:08
Speaker
I want him to know that it wasn't meant as an insult, and I want the listeners to know that it was just meant as a kind of silly offhand comment from my part. But as I've been thinking about it, because it's been rattling through my head ever since the conversation, is that, holy cow, that's great. Somebody's coming at this with a really nice new idea, or set of ideas, or perspective, you know? And again, that's youth. That's awesome.
00:49:32
Speaker
and bringing twitch into it and discord and just you know discussing those things as though you know assuming we know what he's talking about right which is which is fantastic because man sometimes we talk to people and you know it's just especially in archaeology i mean let's be honest there's a lot of like he said old guard out there
00:49:51
Speaker
And they're just not into these newer technologies that people are using for communication. And coronavirus, if anything, has forced people into at least learning about those things, if not actually using them. And coming up with awesome ways to do the same things we've been doing and to make it more accessible.
00:50:09
Speaker
I don't know. I think we might find out. I mean, it's, it's horrible that we just crossed. I was just looking at it this morning. We just crossed 180,000 deaths in the U S from Corona virus. And that is absolutely horrible. But if you have to find a silver lining on something, I think we're learning a lot about how to interact with people and how to engage with people in a, in a remote setting, which not that we don't want to interact with people. I mean, we still get a lot from that, but we can just hit so many more
00:50:35
Speaker
we can have so much more engagement by opening ourselves up to an online environment. I mean, this podcast is one example of that, and this network is. I'll never forget the, I can't remember what episode I released it on or what channel I released it on, but I did a talk for the Nevada Archaeological Association many years ago, and it was a Friday evening thing. It was just a short talk on a Friday evening, and I don't remember what I was talking about, and I recorded it though, and I had a quick turnaround on it because the next day I did a three-minute lightning talk.
00:51:03
Speaker
And it was, the lightning talk was specifically about accessibility of conference papers and things like that. And I had like a 15 minute presentation the night before I recorded it, released it as a podcast episode. It was only out for like, I don't know, 16 hours before I went up and did my lightning talk and already about a thousand people had downloaded it.
00:51:21
Speaker
And I don't know if they listened to it, but about a thousand people had downloaded it in that amount of time. And there were about 50 people at that conference. And I'm like, listen, we're providing this fantastic information and giving these papers. And we all drove five hours to get to this conference and we're staying in this nowhere town.
00:51:37
Speaker
And it's great that we get to have conversations at the bar, but what's the point? You know, you're doing all this research, you're putting together this paper. Let's have people hear it. Let's put it online. Let's record it as a podcast. Let's do something so it's more accessible. And people like Eric are making that happen at the collegiate level. And I just, I love it. And I hope more colleges and more universities take this whole lesson and just learn from it and figure out better ways to do it. It might mean.
00:52:00
Speaker
some more innovation in the online conferencing space as well and better ways to do this because everybody's using Zoom. There's got to be better ways or Zoom might come up with another way to make like a classroom environment that's more, I don't know, conducive to teaching. So I think it's great.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's definitely one way or the other is going to be the way for the future. And I did want to also point out one thing that I liked was the discussion that you and he were having at the end about, you know, different ways of approaching different students. And that's something that within person learning, I'm a firm believer, you know, some students do better with lectures, some do better with reading, some do better with hands on kinds of activities, that there are a whole variety of different ways to learn. And
00:52:42
Speaker
one is not necessarily better than the other, though it may be better for student A or student B because they have different learning styles. And in general, I've been pretty skeptical over the last
00:52:55
Speaker
eight, 10 years, whatever it's been of a lot of online learning about it as a method. But, you know, here in that discussion, I started to think, well, yeah, actually, some people it's better. Yeah. Why not do both? Why not do as much as possible in as many different ways as possible to reach as many people as possible. That's exciting.
Training Educators in Online Methods
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree. There's no reason why we shouldn't be doing this and having to be just part of the teaching environment. And more importantly, like Eric said, when people get a graduate degree and they're all of a sudden expected to be professors, like they're qualified to be professors, they're not taught... Like he said, they're not taught how to do lesson plans. They're not taught how to manage a classroom.
00:53:37
Speaker
And guess what? They're not taught how to be online and teach a class over Zoom and grade papers and do all those sorts of things in a remote environment. You're just not taught any of that. And hopefully that's another thing I think that universities are realizing is a massive gap in their training is because you're not taught that stuff when you're doing your professional courses, but after you have a graduate degree, you're quote unquote qualified to teach. And if you happen to get that teaching job,
00:54:06
Speaker
I feel like there really should be some sort of onboarding class, like tech onboarding class that just teaches people and you have to pass it. That's like your probationary period. You have to pass that class with some sort of test where you have to set up some sort of thing and you have to understand how to troubleshoot that because nobody's going to do it for you and make sure that happens. And maybe that should be what universities institute in the future because
00:54:31
Speaker
I feel like everybody's going to have some sort of online component to their teaching moving forward. Because once they get this in place, a lot of resources are being put together to make all this work. Are they going to just shut that off when there's all of a sudden no more virus? Probably not. So hopefully, we keep it going. So over the break, we did talk about a new podcast idea. And in light of that, and in light of the discussion we just had with Eric,
00:54:56
Speaker
Send us your thoughts on online learning. Send us your thoughts on lesson plans and putting stuff like that together. I'd really like to see some of that. And we might be able to collaborate with some of you, especially some of you that are teaching in academic circles on this new podcast idea. And at least just to brainstorm ideas on what to actually talk about. It really is focused around classroom and learning and education.
00:55:19
Speaker
and things like that. So Chris at Archeology Podcast Network, or Find the Show Notes, and Paul and I both have contact information in there, and you can get a hold of us that way. So again, thanks everybody. Thanks, Eric. And thanks, Paul. Thanks, Chris. And remember, everybody, wash your hands, wear your masks. You know, I'm tired of this. Let's just be good to each other and get through it as quickly as possible.
00:55:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:56:12
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:56:33
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.