iPodi Lateiactum

I have been listening to The History of Rome podcast for over a year now. As a Classicist, I've learned some Roman history in formal classroom settings, but I've found that listening to this podcast has really strengthened my understanding in ways that regular lectures may not. First of all, it's been produced (nearly) every week for at least two years. The constant reinforcement over such a long time allows for both breadth and depth of information retention. I myself am an aural learner, love to learn through listening and storytelling. Things I read in print or on the screen can slip out of my head but something expressed with a human voice stays with me. This podcast has really been a significant part of my education.

Which is why I was ecstatic to see this week that The History of Rome has been nominated for a Best Educational Podcast of 2010 at PodCastAwards.com Maybe some of my classmates and readers will see some of their favorite podcasts nominated as well. If you don't, then perhaps you'll consider voting for The History of Rome; trust me, this podcaster deserves to be recognized for his outstanding work and dedication.

Since I first began listening, I realized there was pedagogical potential to this podcast. Although the podcaster is not a historian or Classicist by trade, nothing he says has conflicted with what I've learned from professionals in the field. If he should make a mistake, listeners will leave a comment and he will make a correction in his next episode. So I consider him to be a reliable source of information, especially if you continue to listen every week in case of corrections, if you're first acquainting yourself with Roman history and culture (i.e. maybe it's not a good source for you doctoral thesis), and if you're learning about Rome from other sources too.

While I could see the podcast as a whole being a part of my curriculum, one episode stands out as a good example of a stand alone resource.
Every once in a while, Mr. The History of Rome takes a break from the chronological procession of events in ancient Rome and explores a social/cultural topic. The last episode he uploaded before a break for his own wedding and honeymoon was A History of Rome Wedding which you can hear yourself at this link.
When I first heard this episode, I had just caught up with the podcast and so was hearing it as the podcaster was about to get married. He refers to his own wedding preparations and plans in the episode and connects them to Roman traditions. It's always fascinating to realize that we do things as the Romans did; we wear wedding rings, white dresses and veils, get married in June, eat wedding cake, etc. As he puts it: "Weddings are a confusing amalgam of emotion, tradition and bureaucratic legalese. If that doesn't sound like the Romans, well, I don't know what does."

I also enjoy his inclusion of his own wedding practices because it reminds us that when we're learning online, or anywhere, that the people we're learning from are real people with their own personal concerns and life events. The History of Rome listeners are a great community to be a part of, and so many people shared their congratulations and well wishes to one of their favorite podcasters that week.
I think for students, moments like these might remind them that it's just everyday people who are passionate about ancient history and culture, that in addition to the mundane affairs they also devote themselves to learning and sharing what they learn. We're reminded us that we can all be lifelong learners and that we can share our creativity with supportive learning communities.

Communicatio Collaboratioque cum Securitate

ePals is a website that helps for teachers and students to connect with other teachers and students from around the world. It is a secure website that allows teachers to monitor conversations and make sure that they are appropriate. However, this isn't merely a social network. ePals also provides structured curricula with help from its partners like National Geographic. I think that this is one of the most attractive elements of the site. Yes, communicating with students and teachers from around the world can be a learning experience in itself. However, I think that without structured learning activities, it would be hard to move away from purely socializing into active student-centered learning.

Exploring the site for myself, it seems that many participants are focused on modern cultural concerns and social issues. This makes sense to me. While learning about chemistry, or math, or grammar, with students from around the world could be very exciting, these subjects don't have such an integral component of global connection and cooperation.

And I do think that what we can learn in a Latin class is relevant to modern social concerns. By learning about the Roman people, who are separated from us by time and distance, we can see the broad spectrum of human experiences and how some concerns have been with us for millenia. The slave economy of Rome connects to human trafficking and exploitation of workers today. We can better understand the struggles for the rights of women and LGBT identified people when we can see the place in society they held in Roman times. The impact climate and climate change have on politics and economics are timeless phenomenon that I think can be studied in a course on current events or a course on Latin.
However, I think that without a foundation in the basic facts of Roman history and culture, it's hard to begin to explore the deeper questions and connections. Based on just a beginning exploration of ePals, it seems like this kind of content is not its primary focus.

And yet, quick search for languages showed that there are Latin classes looking to collaborate. Some are ready to communicate in Latin as well as work on projects about Roman history and culture. Both Europe and the US have been influenced by Roman culture and it would be exciting for students to compare the different ways this influence manifests itself in every day things we take for granted, like architecture and celebrations.

As with any website, it's what you make of it. I can see myself connecting and collaborating with these Latin classrooms across the country and around the world. Even if the site isn't geared towards Classics specifically, simply having a social network devoted to structured and secure learning would be a great benefit.

Chartae

Big Huge Labs is a website offering all sorts of free tools to manipulate images either from your own computer or a Flickr account. I can see myself making calendars, jigsaw puzzles, mosaics and slide shows in my own classroom. But the first tool that caught my eye was the trading card maker.

I once observed a middle school Latin class learning about the major gods and goddesses by playing a modified Pokemon. They created cards for six different gods and goddesses and wrote down their attributes and key facts about them. I don't remember the point system exactly, but I believe they had 30 points total and could distribute those points among their six cards any way they wanted. To play the game, each student found a partner. The students would pick a card to play and each read the information from their card to their opponent. Then, they would take turns with dice (how very Roman; Romans loved to gamble with dice, or aleae). Whoever had the lower roll, would subtract however many points they lost by from their card. When one person lost all their points, they took their opponents card and now had strengthened their deck for their next round.

These kids were having a great time! They drew and designed their cards themselves. However, using Big Huge Labs and a Flickr account they could create cards that look more like commercial ones.

Here's a card I created using an image of a statue of Minerva I found on Flickr. Students could learn some art history if they find photographs (and attribute them to the artist) famous statues or paintings of the gods and goddesses. They could also use their own photographs or pictures they created themselves.

This game might also work if students were learning about the major players in the Roman civil wars.

Vikipaedia

Our class has just finished working on our wiki projects, and is moving on to a discussion of copyright and licensing. This article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine seems very appropriate

Prize Descriptions

The author delves into the Wikipedia's policies on authorship, the culture of Wikipedia contributors, and also praises Wikipedia as the best source for explanations of new internet phenomena, video games, web tools, and technologies.

I, and I'm sure many of you, use Wikipedia regularly for quick references to all sorts of things. Students certainly are. I think it behooves to understand the strengths and weaknesses and creative processes behind this resource.

Coruscans

Photo by Ian W. Scott

Can you imagine this being the wall of your dining room? I can, and do, but only when I think of what I'd do if I won the lottery.

This wall painting came from the House of Livia in Rome, the murals of which are now housed in the National Museum of Rome, Palazzo Massimo. This photograph was taken by Ian W. Scott and I was able to find this at Flickr.com

Photo by Ian W. Scott

Here's a close-up of the same wall so you can see the beautiful detail that goes into Roman wall painting, also taken by Ian W. Scott.

Before this week, if I wanted to use an image in a presentation for students or in a blog, I would probably go to Google Images, take whatever I could get (I was usually disappointed when looking for something specific), and then use it without knowing where it had come from and being unable to attribute any kind of credit.

I wasn't modeling very good behavior for students. In the classroom, students need to learn to give credit for the creative efforts of others. It's fair to the creators and, it also helps teachers to recognize students' own original work and creativity.

Fortunately for those of us who are taking advantage of the Read/Write web and want our students to do so too, there is a resource helping us find images (and other creative works too) and use them in a way that is fair to the original creator.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation who provide free licenses, consistent with rules of copyright, to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry. They are creating a middle ground between "all rights reserved" full copyrighting, when works can't be used or remixed at all, and public domain, when works can be used in any way without any recognition of the artist.

Creative Commons offers six different kinds of license to meet creators various needs.




1. Attribution: the work can be used, distributed, remixed, reworked, for commercial or non-commercial use as long as credit is attributed to the original creator.




2. Attribution Share Alike: the work can be used, distributed, remixed, reworked, for commercial or non-commercial use as long as credit is attributed to the original creator. Any derivative work created from the original must also have an Attribution Share Alike license (so the cycle of creativity can continue).




3. Attribution No Derivatives: work can be used commercially or non-commercially as long as credit is attributed and the work remains unchanged.




4. Attribution Non-Commercial: Remixing and reworking are both allowed. New works must acknowledge the original creator and be non-commercial. Those who've used the original work don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.




5. Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike: Others can remix and rework the original non-commercially as long as credit is given. All new work based on the original will also carry the same license (so all derivatives are also non-commercial).




6. Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: Work cannot be changed or used commercially in any way. Can be used non commercially if credit is given to creator (sometimes called the "free advertising " license).

For example, both the images I've used have the Attribution Share Alike license. This means I can use them if I attribute the images to Ian W. Scott, I can change the image (maybe add captions showing all the different kinds of flowers and their symbolic significance), use the image in another work (a presentation perhaps), and even sell that other work, but I would have to license my new creation with an Attribution Share Alike license.

I've very pleased to have found a way not only to find great images, but also to share them fairly.

Lector Gugeliense

In finding a Latin title for my post, I was reminded of how the Latin words for "read" and "choice" can look so similar. A "lector" is a reader, as in the English word for someone who reads at a church service, but a "lectus" is something chosen, like our word election.
This goes straight to the heart of using a Google Reader; it's a new tool for making choices about what to read on the web.

Just wanted take a moment to share how setting up a Google Reader was fun if only because I somehow managed to out-tech a very tech savvy friend of mine. We had a good laugh about how the reader of dead languages learned a new web tool before the software engineer had even heard of it.

What the Google Reader did was create a page where the blogs, columnists, and websites I follow are all updated in one place. Instead of me going out into the web, the web comes to me. It's a little overwhelming and easy to be inundated. However, I think if I carefully sort through my RSS subscriptions, keep them well pruned, I'll find that it's a useful tool for staying current in the field.

Reading about RSS feeds in Will Richardson's "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms," he gave instructions for how to subscribe to certain topics in current events using the advanced news search option at Google news.

Now, Latin isn't a subject that we often associate with current events. However, many people come to learn the Latin language because they are fascinated by Roman material culture, by ancient archaeology. Archaeological finds do appear in the news. Usually I find these articles by dumb luck or because friends found them by dumb luck and knew to pass them along. Now with a news subscription on my Google reader for ancient Roman archaeology, I'm reading fascinating articles about very recent discoveries.




And they aren't trivial discoveries either. Here's an article from MSNBC about a Carthaginian warship discovered on the Mediterranean sea floor. This is a vessel sailed over 2000 years ago and sunk in combat in the final battle of the First Punic war, a conflict that dramatically shaped Western history. We could all be speaking languages derived from Carthaginian right now if things had turned the other way.
For all students of history, both young and old, sometimes the physical evidence draws us in and provides a sense of awe that written accounts do not. I know I could use an archaeology feed like this to really reach some of my students who aren't connecting with the history and the culture through texts. In fact, there's no reason they can't subscribe to a relevant RSS on their own and teach me a thing or two. There's great potential for rich, student directed learning using a Google reader.

Convenite!

I know our course is on webtools, using the internet for communication and networking, but I just wanted to make a quick endorsement of real face to face networking. It's great to be able to get in touch with someone at any time through email and social networks. It's great to find relevant Twitter feeds or blogs and read the thoughts of professionals and educators whom you might never meet in person. But meeting them in person is more fun. If you find a conference or convention relevant to your field, I highly recommend attending.

Over Columbus weekend, I was fortunate enough to connect with colleagues and old friends at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) conference in New Jersey. It was a lot of travel time, but I'm glad I went. Maybe this is something that only a small, specialized field like Classics can do, but the conference was a great mix of scholars, professors, booksellers, writers, high school Latin teachers, graduate students and undergrads. The panels were therefore on very diverse in topics and and had diverse potential applications in my own studies and work. Everyone had something to offer and we all learned a lot from each other.

As convenient as internet networking can be, networking in person is a truly great experience. Try to find those opportunities to come together with fellow educators and make real connections!