Projects

Mash-up Archaeology: Aggregating Web Content on Museum Archaeology and Archaeological Heritage

Status: in progress

Description

Undergraduate and postgraduate students, who use the Web in order to get resources that may be relevant to their studies, face the issues of finding relevant websites, filtering useful content and keeping track of updates. This is usually a time consuming, fragmentary and often distracting process that requires a substantial effort from the user’s point of view. Even when a university department provides paper or online lists of websites, keeping track of all the updates on those websites may be a challenging process both for students and academics. Furthermore, in the last few years new social media (such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites) are being exploited by academic and cultural institutions, leading to a dramatic increase in the amount and type of web content available. Traditional web portals that link to websites rather than ‘mashing up’ (i.e. combining in an integrated web interface) their content cannot cope efficiently with aggregating quickly and efficiently updates. The increasing volume of material and the emergence of new social media also raise pedagogical issues concerning the development of appropriate skills for using such material in teaching and learning. Students not only require appropriate technical skills to access and filter web resources, they also need the skills to evaluate and critically distinguish between new and changing forms of information in a manner appropriate to academic contexts.

This project aims to respond to the above challenges in aggregating web content for postgraduate and third year undergraduate students in archaeology and museum studies. Specifically, it will develop a website that will aggregate web content on museum archaeology and archaeological heritage, using web feeds and basic mash-up tools. The originality of this project is that new web content will be ‘collected’ and uploaded automatically and dynamically in a single website, shortening thus the process of finding and keeping track of the latest news and additions on relevant websites. The project’s website will provide an active environment for teaching and learning, which will not merely be about providing content, but will also facilitate the development of students’ skills in evaluation and critical thinking: During the project development, students will have the opportunity to participate in the creation and evaluation of the project. Furthermore, once the website is established students will be encouraged to play an active role in maintaining and augmenting its dynamic content by sharing web feeds. Students will be also invited to use a blogging tool to reflect upon both the class discussion and the website’s aggregated content. This will contribute towards a blended learning environment that will combine paper-based methods with online collaborative tools.

Dr Konstantinos Arvanitis
Centre for Museology, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester
kostas.arvanitis@manchester.ac.uk

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