Surfing Indoors: Bringing the Net into the Classroom
David L. Carlson, Texas A&M University

dcarlson@tamu.edu
http://anthropology/tamu.edu/faculty/carlson/profile.htm

(Paper presented at the 64^th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Chicago, Illinois, March 24-28, 1999. Not for citation.)

While field archaeology has changed in the last 10 years with the introduction of global positioning systems and electronic distance metering, so also has our ability to communicate results to students and the public. Most of us are still struggling to keep up with new developments while we seek ways to use the new technologies to best advantage. My focus today is on how the Internet and the World Wide Web fits into the teaching of archaeology and anthropology. In the strictest sense, this paper is misnamed. It is not about bringing a computer to class so that your students can gather around it like a campfire while you surf to web sites exotic. Instead, it is about ways that you can use the web to expand your existing arsenal of teaching tools. Some of the most valuable contributions the Internet makes to your teaching are pretty mundane on the surface. They are also the easiest to learn and the easiest to incorporate into your courses without dramatic changes in content or presentation. I will also talk about methods that require a bit more sophistication on your part and on the part of your students, and some ideas that will not really be effective until the next generation of the Web (with the understanding that Web generations are about 2 years or less).

Getting Started

The simplest way to begin using the Internet in your class is to put your email address on your syllabus. All of the advantages of email apply to your interactions with students. No phone tag, no garbled messages, you control when you respond. Especially for large classes and for shy students, email allows you to communicate more effectively.

While email is generally one-to-one communication, you can conduct class discussions outside of class with an electronic conference or bulletin board. An electronic conference handles the distribution of email so that any message sent to the conference is redistributed to all the participants. You can use an electronic conference to remind students about upcoming tests or assignments, television specials, or campus lectures that are relevant to the course. You can also use them to make sure that everyone gets an answer to a question that someone asked after class or by email. The conference is also a way of encouraging students to talk to one another about the course. A bulletin board works similarly to a conference, but the messages do not automatically come to the student's email account. Conferences and bulletin boards assume that all of your students have access to the campus computer network and have email accounts, but that is increasingly common on campuses today. You will need to talk to some at your college or university who is responsible for the campus network to find out how to create a bulletin board or electronic conference at your institution. Once you have created the conference or bulletin board, you will be able to re-use it from one semester to the next. You can use the conference or bulletin board to facilitate communication informally or you can include participation as part of your evaluation of each student at the end of the course.

You don't necessarily have to create your own conference or bulletin board. There are many that have been already established around broad and narrow topics. There are general archaeology lists (e.g. ARCH-L), regional lists (AZTLAN-L), and topical lists (HISTARCH). There are many USENET bulletin boards as well including sci.archaeology, sci.archaeology.mesoamerica, sci.anthropology.paleo, and talk.origins. Two good sources of information about mailing lists are "Anthropology Resources on the Internet" (formerly by Allen Lutins and now maintained by Bernard Clist) and the National Center for Preservation Training and Technology "Preservation Internet Resources."

If you are going to ask your students to subscribe to one of these conferences, you should provide them with some guidance regarding etiquette. Lists with established subscribers do not always respond diplomatically to requests like, "I need to know about some books on the Aztecs by tomorrow." On the other hand, good questions usually stimulate good answers and productive discussions that draw on the experience of archaeologists all over the world.

Creating Web Pages

Particularly if you are teaching a large lecture class, creating a class web page will allow you to provide a variety of kinds of information to your students at virtually no cost to your department. I generally create a simple web page for each class that contains a copy of the course syllabus, links to web sites that are relevant to the class, copies of the transparencies that have my lecture outlines and any visual material that I use in class that is not copyrighted. I also put study guides for the tests on the class web page and post test grades (by student id number). For some classes I have developed collections of web links that relate to the material we are covering in class.

While creating visually engaging web pages can be time consuming, simple web pages are easily created with the software you probably already have on your own computer. Current versions of Corel WordPerfect and Microsoft Word allow you to convert a file to web (html) format. While the results will not be a perfect reproduction of your original, it will probably suffice. You can improve the conversion by keeping several things in mind when you create a document that you plan to publish on the web using a word processing program. Certain formatting codes that are common in word processing, are missing from the current definitions of html. Tabs and indent codes are examples of formatting codes that do not exist in html. For example, when making a syllabus with columns for dates and reading assignments, create a table in Word or WordPerfect instead of using tabs to create columns. Tables convert easily to web documents. Lists are also defined in html so that creating a numbered list or a bulleted list is another way of indenting text.

If you want to work directly in html format, you will probably be better off using a web page editor. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator each come with web page editors that will be adequate for most of your needs. The only missing step is getting your pages on the web. Your university probably provides space on the university computers for your web page, but you will have to find out how they want you to upload the information. This may involve another program or you may be able to retrieve and save your web files from your web page editor.

Web Resources

While setting up electronic conferences and class web pages will help you reach your students more effectively, you can also use the material on the web to stimulate their interest in archaeology and anthropology. While you can attempt to load and display web pages in class on a computer connected to a video projector, your students will not find this very stimulating. The web is an interactive medium that works best with when each student controls the pace and direction of the exploration. You will get better results by assigning activities to your students that are completed outside of class. Those activities should result in papers, class presentations, or class discussions. You can create these activities yourself, but you should check with the publisher of your textbook since many of them are now establishing web sites to support their texts.

The excitement of archaeology and its relevance in the contemporary world are reflected in recent news stories that concern discoveries, great debates, and controversies. All of the major news media now maintain web sites that contain much of their printed or broadcast material. You can easily find links to news items relating to anthropology and archaeology at "Anthropology in the News," a site I started about two years ago to replace a bulletin board full of news clippings that I kept outside my office. The news items on the site can be used to stimulate discussion in class or on your class mailing list.

If you have spent any time surfing the web, you know that archaeology is well represented. If you don't know what is on the web for archaeologists, you should visit some of the web sites that index other web sites. For archaeologists some good starting points are ARCHNET (the grandfather of indexes to archaeology sites, but no longer up to date), The World Wide Web Virtual Library for Anthropology, Yahoo's Anthropology and Archaeology section, Kris Hirst's Mining Company Guide to Archaeology, and Anita Cohen-Williams Archaeology on the Net.

A simple way to begin to incorporate information available on the web is to provide links to web pages that provide additional details to material covered in your lectures, in the text, or in the documentary videos that you are using. The sites can be sources of more up-to-date statistical information or of current events that relate to people, societies, or topics covered in the course. While listings like this are useful to students, you will often find that they do not use the material unless you are specific regarding how the material is to be used. The sites can provide a basis for classroom discussions or your students might use them to find ideas for research papers or reaction papers. Students could also be asked to review and critique the sites in papers or classroom presentations. You can ask for written reviews or critiques of the sites or can include questions about the sites on your tests. If you don't yet have a collection of relevant links you ask students to find web sites that relate to topics in the course. If your class is relatively small, you can make the creation of the course web site a project for the entire class.

The various activities that you can organize around the web fall roughly into four categories. First, you can assign a web site or page as you would a reading assignment and ask students to learn the material presented there. Secondly you can assign a web site and ask students to critically evaluate the logic and evidence cited. Third you can ask students to find information on the web, either a web site addressing a topic or a web page containing specific information. Finally you can have students use the web to help them master course materials through interactive quizzing.

Supplementing Traditional Course Materials

The simplest web assignment is one in which you ask students read a specific document. This activity uses the web as a kind of 24 hour reserve room. It is a good way for students to begin to become comfortable with the web. The variety of articles available on the web is still limited but it is growing. Scientific American, American Scientist, and other magazines put one or two articles from each issue online. In other cases, authors put copies of published articles on the web, or put unpublished or in-progress work on the web. As examples, the following articles are available:

• The African Emergence and Early Asian Dispersals of the Genus Homo from American Scientist by Roy Larick and Russell L. Ciochon
• Evaluation of Chaco Roads, a paper presented at the 1996 SAA Meetings by John Kantner
• The Origin of the Human Capacity, the Sixty-Eighth James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain, given at the American Museum of Natural History by Ian Tattersall
• The Viking Longship in Scientific American by John R. Hale
• Getting Their Hands Dirty: Archaeologists and the Looting Trade in Lingua Franca by John Dorfman

Your university may have purchased electronic versions of scholarly journals that your students can access. Electronic versions of the Annual Review series and Academic Press journals are available now and others will eventually become available.

In addition to assigning an article on the web, you can assign audio or video clips. The availability of these is also limited but growing. National Public Radio maintains an archive of programs and interviews that can be played with a RealAudio plugin. The National Geographic Society, PBS, and the Discovery Channel also have audio programs available. Some examples include the following programs:

• The Leakey Legacy with Virginia Morell and Carl Swisher, December 20, 1996 Talk of the Nation
• First Humans in the Americas with Michael Waters, Thomas Dillehay, Dena Dincauze, and Roger Powers, February 28, 1997 Talk of the Nation
• Human Origins with Donald Johanson, May 9, 1997 Talk of the Nation
• Early Human Ancestors with Antonio Rosas, May 30, 1997 Talk of the Nation
• Secrets of the Copan Acropolis by George Stuart and Robert Sharer, National Geographic Society, Dec 10, 1997

Video is still relatively rare on the web because the storage requirements are so great and the quality is still low, but clips of recent news stories are available on many different news sites including CNN and ABC.

Articles, audio clips, and video clips are relatively easy to incorporate into your course since they are all linear media. All students proceed from beginning to end in the same sequence so it is relatively easy to define what they should learn in the process. One of the advantages of the web is that multimedia presentations need not be linear. This means that visitors to a site may all begin at the same place, but then diverge into different directions. Archaeology has a relatively large number of multimedia sites that use a combination of text, images, sound, video, or virtual modeling to describe an archaeological site or to discuss an archaeological topic. Your students can get much out of these sites, but you will have to be relatively specific regarding how much of the site they need to visit.

Web sites that focus on particular archaeological sites have a number of advantages over printed versions. Publication to the web is fast and inexpensive. Web treatments of archaeological sites have even been developed simultaneously with excavation. Color images "cost" no more to reproduce than line drawings. They cost students nothing to use. On the other hand, they usually go through fewer stages of review and, once created, they can linger on the web after their information has become obsolete. While the sites can be a valuable complement to teaching about archaeology, you will need to exercise quality control by selecting only sites that are accurate, current, and that present archaeology as more than the collection and illustration of interesting artifacts. There are a number of good sites available, such as,

• The Jamestown Rediscovery Site by the Jamestown Rediscovery Project
• Keatley Creek, Charlie Lake, and Namu at Simon Fraser University
• Five Points, New York City by Rebecca Yamin
• Chauvet Cave by Jean Clottes

Providing less detail about sites, but fun to explore are a variety of 3-D reconstructions of archaeological sites including:

• The 3-D Reconstruction of Chetro Ketl Great Kiva by John Kantner
• Tikal by Studio360
• Tenochtitlan by Dell Maxwell
• Ancient Hrappa by Wayne Belcher
• Tunnels of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Aish HaTorah
• Virtual Palenque by Qvision

Other web sites address a particular topic. Many of these have been designed around documentary programs so that they provide a nice complement to the program if you are using the video in class. Most of them will also stand on their own and allow students to explore a topic on their own in more detail than their text or classroom presentations.

• Andes Expedition: Search for Inca Secrets by National Geographic Society
• Secrets of Easter Island by NOVA
• In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Michael Wood's series on PBS
• Collapse: Why Do Civilizations Fail? from the "Out of the Past" series by Annenberg/CPB

Developing Critical Skills

One of the biggest concerns about material on the web is how reliable it is. You can use archaeology and the web to help students develop their critical skills when it comes to evaluating claims made at web sites. As you would expect, there are web sites that talk about how to evaluate web sites critically. For example "Internet Detective" is an interactive tutorial in how to evaluate the quality of web resources. Other good pages are "Critical Thinking Resources" at Longview Community College and "A Student's Guide to WWW Research: Web Searching, Web Page Evaluation, and Research Strategies" by Craig Branham at St. Louis University. Once you have talked about evaluating web sites, you can provide a link to a web site and ask your students to evaluate its credibility. Alternatively you could ask students to compare two web sites (e.g. a fantastic archaeology site and a site critiquing those claims). The web is not the home to more outlandish claims about archaeology than you will find on television or at the news stand, but the availability of material on the web makes it easy to place claim and counter claim side-by-side.

Building Research Skills

As your students become familiar with the web you can assign them the task of finding a kind of site on the web. Here you ask students to find one or more web sites that are designed for a specific audience. In doing this, they will become more experienced at using the variety of search engines that are available. Some engines (such as Yahoo!) are better at finding web sites, as opposed to specific information on specific pages within a site. There is no "correct answer" but students learn how to find sites on the web and get the flexibility of seeking sites that relate to their individual interests. A similar activity is to ask students to find specific data on the web. This activity is slightly more challenging since students must evaluate the quality of alternate sources. In some cases there may be more than one "correct" answer so that evaluation of this activity should focus on the process of locating and evaluating the information more than the specific answer.

More challenging is to have your students learn about an issue on the web. Here the question is broader and the issue can involve strong proponents for opposite positions. Students are asked to locate two or more competing positions and analyze the issue in terms of the claims that each side is making. This activity involves more skill in searching the web for information and in sifting through numerous possible web sites for those that are relevant to the topic. It also involves a critical evaluation of two or more positions. This activity could be used as the basis for an essay question on an exam or as a springboard for class discussion. Combined with library research, this activity could be the basis for a research paper.

While the Web provides a great deal of information to assist students in learning about anthropology and the world around them, it can also tempt them to bypass the library and limit themselves to Internet resources. It will probably help if you, or a library representative, talk to students about how they can use the Web to improve their research skills with books and journals in their library. Help them to find out how to access the university library catalog online and let them know what journal indices are available online at your institution. You should also talk about plagiarism and the Web. You will get some useful ideas on Gregory Senechal's "Instructor's Guide to Internet Plagiarism" site and from the Tom Rocklin's article "Downloadable Term Papers: What's a Prof to Do?"

You should be aware of the large number of services on the Web that provide term papers to students. A few sites, such as "School Sucks" provide papers for free to students (and their instructors). Other services charge for papers. The cost is usually about $5 to $10 per page for pre-written papers and more for custom-written papers. You can find sites like these at Yahoo's Research and Term Papers section or by using a search engine for "term papers" or "research papers." There are now a few sites developing that claim to evaluate papers for plagiarism by comparing them to a database of papers, but it is very unlikely that the database can really be complete (and could never include custom written papers). As Tom Rocklin suggests it is probably a better strategy to focus on the process of writing a term paper. Require students to have their paper topic selected early in the term. Have them turn in a bibliography and an outline of the paper. Have students give a brief presentation on their paper with time for questions from other students or the instructor. While none of these guarantee that a student will not take the easy way out, they make it somewhat more difficult than if the paper is simply announced at the beginning of the term and collected at the end of the term.

Interactive Quizzing and Tutorials

Many major publishers are building web sites for their texts. Increasingly they will offer various interactive activities such as quizzing. You will want to try these activities out yourself before deciding what to require or recommend. Since there is no security for online quizzing you probably will not want to use the quiz scores directly. They may, however, be a useful study tool in helping students to master the material.

Conclusions

The web has the potential to enhance and improve the quality of teaching about archaeology. By providing students with direct access to current information and to a diversity of claims and counter claims, it helps us to communicate the process that archaeologists employ to understand the past. In that sense, the web does not replace texts or the library, but helps students see how we come to conclusions about the past.