Jean Sept Presentation
[in computer lab]
I just wanted to point out that this is just my own homepage here. And, on it I've got general links on the top and down below I've been putting all my classes on the web for years and the different generations of them. And, I've got examples of some of the things we've been talking about on the webpage, so if any of you guys are just interested in stuff here, it's all up here in all its glory and you're all welcome to poke around and I'll be pointing you to one or two things on there. There's also some links way down on the bottom, some of the instructional technology projects I've been involved in. I've done a CD-Rom, (several of us). And, the project I'm going to introduce you guys to today is something I call "Prehistoric Puzzles." But, anyway, that's just an intro to my website.
So, once you've gotten to this website, I've got a hidden link to it that you just add MATRIX.html (this is case sensitive). Add that to it and it's a page that comes off of my website. It should look like this. All I've done is just put a presentation on the web for your so that afterwards you can link up to the same things from this page, just to make it easy. So, it's different from Erin's, but Erin will link to this at some point. So, what we're going to do now is talk about what happens when the information age meets the Stone Age, because I'm an Archaeologist like you guys, but I do the world's oldest archaeological sites. They're in Africa. But, the project I want to tell you about is, I've been playing around with sites for a long time and technology for a long time and like most of you I have this fondness for the particulars so the first, I did a CD and it was a case study of the details of one archaeological site. But, as you know, for those of us who teach a lot of intro classes one of the challenges, and we heard . . . Lynn was advocating this, was it only yesterday? Well gosh, we want to tell stories and focus on the big picture and the big questions and this kind of stuff. And the challenge of doing that in an intro class is that it's all too easy to stand up in the front of the class and tell them what you think the big story is, and then they remember it and memorize it and spit it back at you. And, that's really dissatisfying for all the reasons we've been hearing about the last few days.
So, I've been trying to explore with colleagues here on campus ways of creating, in this case, digital learning environments that can help get around that fundamental problem, particularly for introductory classes and get around it in an archaeological context. So, if you follow the bouncing trough here it'll take us into some things. Here we are in Indiana and you think it would be easy to teach Indiana archaeology students about archaeology, but as we all know we face a number of challenges. Even if you update from Indiana Jones to Angelina Joele, I'm not sure we're making much progress. How do we challenge these student perceptions? How do we get at that? Particularly when you only have kids, in many cases, one semester. It's probably the only archaeology class they're ever going to get. We have all these ethical goals that the SAA listed. How can we do that? How can we get there? I've been trying to play around with an idea that has a lot to do with thinking about what our students are being confronted with now. We talk about the information age, think of all the stuff, all the information, all the stuff almost bombarding us over the net now. More and more archaeological sites are publishing their databases online. There's all this multi-media that the students are getting exposed to. All the newspapers. All this stuff.
Surely one of the challenges we're going to face is helping students learn how to sort through all this stuff, make sense out of it, evaluate it, learn how to prioritize, learn how to develop hierarchies with all this information. And, and part of what we do as professionals, I was commenting a little bit about this earlier, is this notion of what we do is we've learned how to take questions, ask questions, figure out what kind of data we need to work towards answering those questions. That's what we all do. And, that's what I would like to encourage students to do as well. But, in our new information age, I think one of the real challenges is to give students new tools to help them manipulate and manage information wherever we find it. So, one of the things I've tried to work on is to figure out how can we do that? And, I have more questions than answers, I'm afraid. But, the basic challenge I think is to help students learn how to go back and forth between data questions. And, my goal is, in this particular project, is to try and help students create tools for doing that.
A wonderful example that you've all just heard is another approach, and in some ways a lot more of a creative approach than what I'm talking about here, but it's a real challenge. I think particularly for students, when I do a lot of African pre-history and we've got ...in Indiana, Africa is just some island somewhere off of Florida as far as I can tell. We've got immense challenges of time. Africa is the longest pre-historic record on earth. While time and space, fundamental questions, how can we give students a way of understanding what happens in time and space. How things change. While my own inclination is to focus on the particular, is why I did a CD-Rom of data on one particular site. One of the things we also have to worry about, and intro students worry about this all the time, is how can we understand the big picture through time and space and how can we help students learn to create their own stories, build their own narratives of what happened through time and space. Can we give them tools to help them do that for themselves?
So, that's my big goal. But, let me give you one example and pick up on something that came out of when Ruth was talking. You guys started talking about all the fantastic databases that are going online. I just wan to give you one example of the kind of thing that I think all of us can do in classes with existing datasets. It's sort of activity based approach that, I think, it seems to work pretty well in my classes. I'm going to click to the class example link here, just to show you guys. This is just an example of one of the questions I ask my students to grapple with. In the case of the early Stone Age in Africa, the question is culture, with a big question mark. You guys are all busy worrying about the subtle details of culture, we just want to know if there was culture. And, one of the ways to put that into context is to actually look what are closest relatives, chimpanzees, do today. And, so one of the things I ask students to do is to grapple with this question. The tool, the information we have is information about technology at the early sites. We have an interpretive context that comes from chimpanzee tool use today and one of the tools that I have students play around with is the notion of classification or typology, if you will. Well, the, there's a wonderful source of data, it's a database, a fairly simple one online, called Chimpanzee Cultures. And, I've used it in my Archaeology classes in African Pre-History. And, if you want to see the assignments I do, looks like you can click on this assignment webpage and click there directly or you can go straight to the Chimpanzee Culture page. And, basically this is what I ask my students to do.
It says . . . last week we started looking at ...assemblages and we talked about how the central question we focused on was how the classification system or typology influences the conclusions are archaeologists can come to about early sites. So, it's this notion of what you do with stuff. So, that's the basic question. So, I say to give us a comparative perspective on this question. We're going to continue by asking another question. How do the artifacts of these early sites vary? And, what might that mean about their possible cultural variations? But, what we're going to approach this in today's class is we're going to look at tool variation in another animal, in this case chimpanzees. The database is online. And, what I ask students to do here is to look at, use, get access to this database, play around with it in class, we meet in a computer lab, and design a typology that they think would be appropriate for chimpanzee material culture. And, then apply their typology to this cultural variation and ask the same question -- How variable are these toolkits? And,we come back and they ultimately write an essay on how would they compare the kind of variability they can get, they can see, in Chimpanzee culture today to the kind of the variability we have access for in the early archaeological sites. So, that's the assignment I give to students.
If you want to take a peak at how this database is structured, I think it's really easy to use and it's kind of fun. You click on, go to the Chimpanzee Culture website, click on the database link and it should, here we go. What you'll get is a little pull-down menus here that you can, it's a fairly simple database, but it lets you search. You can search by the type of activity. It says specify activity material. I want to look for leaves or rocks or stems or wood. Or, you can specify by function. So, I'm going to pick "play," you guys can pick something. And, I'm just going to search, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just going to search their database for all the objects that they've classified as "play" objects. And, what it brings up is five different records of different sorts of, each of these is an artifact that's been used for something that they've classified as play. So, if you go to the, I just went to the "self tickle" one. And, what it does is it gives a brief description of what they mean by "self tickling," what the actual reference is, and it shows you the presence or absence of this type of behavior using a tool in their repertoire of chimpanzee behavioral studies sites. So, there are a bunch of them and it's growing rapidly and rapidly adding to this.
. . . So what I get the students to do is to explore these things and play around with stuff. They can also go to a Nature article that's an early version of the same data and play around with that. And, virtually in a one-75 minute period, they develop a, I get the students to work in groups, and I ask each student to develop and come up with a rational explanation for a typology that they think would fairly represent the range of chimpanzee tools that exist. And, then to think about how their typology, to compare that with a kind of typologies that we studied for the early Stone Age and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of different types of typologies. And, what happens is different groups in the class come up with different typologies for the same set of relatively simple simple tools and really leads to an interesting discussion of why typology makes a difference in terms of our ability to interpret. Yes, sir?
Q: Will we be able to access the same database?
Sure, it's online. It's free. It's open. That's why I gave you this link because I have links to all these things. It's not at IU, it's coming out of ... And, I guess it was last year, I had forty students accessing it at the same time. We crashed their server. But, other than that, to me it's a wonderful example of a resource that a group of researchers has created out of the goodness of their heart, that we can use. And, I encourage you all to do comparable things because I find that, they didn't know until the summer that I use this in my archaeology classes, they were pleased. So, it's a good deal. Other questions?
Q: How much of this do you have them, you assign, do you have them do some of this in the class? And are there assignments that are web-based on your syllabus that you say, you know, we're not going to spend time on the computers in class, we're going to do other things and here's your assignment. Go do this outside the classroom.
You can do it both ways. The thing is that if you want to encourage them to work in groups, it helps if you have time in class to help them get the groups established and you can model for them the kind of group behavior you think is appropriate. So, I find it works really well to have an in class group activity, using the computer. And, then their own assignments can grow from that or once they've done it once they're more comfortable doing it again. So, I find that if you want them to do it outside of class you should spend at least a little time inside of class modeling why it's a useful activity. And, otherwise they'll think it's something tangential, it's something exterior outside. If it isn't important, why should I be doing it? Why are we spending time in class doing it. But, that's partly because of the way I've structured my classes. You can do it another way. The goal is to get the students, obviously, to take the responsibility for learning themselves. And, so you can approach it in different kinds of ways. Any other questions? Ok.
So, that's an example of how I've tried to use an existing database. And, what I want to do now though is show you something that I've tried to create myself. And, this is working with some colleagues here. I've gone back to this thing here. And, basically this is back to my goal of dealing with African pre-history. Without an immense amount of time, a huge amount of cultural change, how can we get students to actually get access to that data and play around? Um, so I'm going to click on the Tools. And, the kind of tools I think, for example, if you think about that chimpanzee data thing, it's fine, but they're looking at one example of a tool each time and it's giving them a little graph of it or a summary. But, each time they're looking at a little piece at a time and you don't have to do that very long before you're crying out for someway of summarizing this stuff and pulling it together. And, wouldn't it be neat if the computer could help you do that?
That's what I've tried to do for a database we're creating on African pre-history. And, I should just apologize here to you. This is a little bit like my standing up is a, as a car salesman, a used car salesman even, and saying I really want you all to buy my car and I want you to imagine how fast it's going to go and how comfortable it's going to be. But, in fact, unfortunately, the car is sitting up here in piece in the front of the room. We've got the motor over here in a couple of parts and look at those seats over there? Aren't they going to be nice when you finally get the chance to sit on them? So, I apologize. What I'm showing you is functionally incomplete. But, what I hope you'll be able to do is get a sense of the kind of things we're working . . . towards. And, basically, I think that if we have a lot of information online, that it would be really useful if we could give students tools to help them visualize patterns. How do we do that? How do you define what a pattern is? How can you think about it in space and time? You give them, ideally, tools for analysis and tools for collaboration.
Mostly what I've done in this particular project is created tools for visualization where analysis and collaboration are goals, too, but we ain't there yet. But, the idea of visualization, I don't know if any of you guys have played around with meteorology or are familiar with meteorology classes on your campuses, geography classes that look at changing climates and stuff. The computers have just revolutionized the way undergraduate classes in meteorology are taught because they have this immense amount of quantitative data that they can suck into the local work stations and ask students to play with. That it's real data, it's real time data, but they have created a series of little tools to allow students to play around with different climate parameters and sort of say, "ok, well what happens if we change this parameter? What does the data look like? What kinds of patterns would that produce?" And, it helps students really get a sense of, of how climate works. What are the components of climate and weather? Why does weather change? Well lets tweak this little variable and see what happens. And, there are a lot of examples in mathematics and everything else where folks have created tools to visualize quantitative information.
But, isn't it ironic that so much of what we do as Archaeologists is based on visual stuff. It's different kinds of artifacts or understanding patterns that we can detect in the soil or whatever it is. And, yet we don't, that kind of visual stuff is really hard to summarize. And, it's really hard to get students to step back from it all and look for ways of categorizing or classifying or understanding why that's important. In my experience, it's been hard for me to get students to go from looking at a bunch of individual things to stepping back and summarizing how to make sense of that, how to build an argument based on looking at a lot of individual stuff. It's something that they're, it's hard for them to do particularly in one semester. So, what I was trying to play around with to create tools for visualizing archaeological stuff. And, what I'm going to do is get you guys to play around with a tool we've created called Time Web to help students begin to explore. And, this is exploratory rather than what the tool does is help students explore. What I try to get them to do, having used the tool to explore, is actually to create their own interpretations and write stuff.
And with the possibility of going out to Berkley in the Spring, I'm hoping that folks in Ruth's classes out there will help me create materials to add to the database that we're going to start playing around with. But anyway, the goal is to explore relationships in time and space. We've collected evaluation stuff, and later on you can come back and look at the examples that we've done and look at a ...presentation of this. Unfortunately, as of right now, this only works in PC, on PCs. It doesn't work on Macs and that makes me sad because I'm a Mac person. And, it's actually written in something called a JAVA. It's the biggest JAVA ... , as far as I know, that anybody's actually written. And, JAVA is a dying programming language now. And, we opted for it a few years ago and we thought it was going to be the next best thing, it's going to be platform independent and all this stuff. Didn't happen. So, this may die this year, for all I know. But, I show it to you as an example of something I think we need to be working towards and just to get you guys thinking about stuff. Yeah?
Q: How long is the code that you have with JAVA?
I actually don't know. It's really really long they tell me. It's real big.
Anyway, you guys can click through, click on the little thing that says...you'll get to this page. And, uh, I have a choice here. I'm going to ask you guys to click the door of testing version rather than an older version, just for the hell of it. So, click on this thing called Time Web Jar and if you take, sort of alternate if you click on one at a time, it's most likely that we'll all get loaded on. It'll load slowly. And, what you should do is you'll get a little screen that says Time Web and don't click when it does that, just wait. And, eventually you'll get something that looks like this and that means the program's loaded. And, it will take a while. You'll get a grey screen for a little while. So, while we're all waiting for Time Web to load on your machines, I'm going to introduce you to it and give you a sense of the kinds of things you can do with it. And, then when you're all loaded up we're going to play. Yes ma'am?
Q: Who is Wisdom Tools?
Wisdom Tools is a company, it's a start up company a few years ago in the hay day of whatever, now it's down to about three employees again. Owned, directed by my colleague, Marty Siegel, who is also a professor here at Indiana University. And, he's a colleague here in the School of Education and this project that, we're collaborators on the project, he's actually the computer interface design expert and he's been responsible for the programming side of this stuff. And, I've been responsible for a lot of the other stuff, getting the data, trying to get some of the things working. But, it's a long story. So, this is not something I've done on my own. And, we've done it from support from granting agencies that are acknowledge on the web, too. So, are people loading slowly?
Q: Do we have to click off the Wisdom Tools icon? Or will it load?
It'll load and this little .... So, slowly but surely. One by one, these will all come up.
So, let me introduce you to it, while we're waiting, just to give you a sense of what's going on. . . . Can you guys see that ok? What you get here, this is what we call the query interface. What this is is a front end to a database. And, my goal here is to, what I wanted to do is stop lecturing to students about old patterns in the past and to give them a tool to, I wanted to ask questions and I wanted them to ... around in the data and work in groups to try find answers to the questions. And, then talk with other students to find out how good their answers were. And, I wanted to work around a sort of consultant that would go around from group to group and encourage them, and do stuff like that rather than telling them what was happening.
. . . What we created was a database that has a lot of information in it about archaeological sites in Africa. And, what this window here, that will eventually pop up here, does is it shows you some of the ways the information has been classified, not all the ways, but some of the ways. For example, it defaults to the regions and you've got choices of central Africa, east, north, southern, and west Africa. And, basically how this works is if you go up to east Africa and click on it, it opens up a whole bunch of the country in east Africa. And, what I can do if I'm a student or you guys, I can select one of these, like Kenya, and uh if I do this in a sense what I'm saying as a student, "I want to go find all the sites in database that are located in Kenya." So, I've clicked on Kenya and then I pick this funny little button here that someday we'll redesign and I click on that and what happens is Kenya moves over into this active green bin over here and it's highlighted over there. And, up at the top of the screen you'll see this sort of string of little icons and those are grey which means they are not active. They're two of them now that are active. There's the one with the little pink ...called a query button. The reason that's highlighted is because this is the query screen that we're looking at. As soon as I pick Kenya and moved it over here another button highlighted, next to it, called a ....button. And, what that tells me is that I am now set to run a query of the database and as a student I can go search for sites in Kenya. So, I can click on the "run query" button and it's going to go off and find all the sites in the database that have been logged in that are from Kenya. And, we are working slowly today, I can tell. All of this is working off the server on the other side of campus. On a good day...it's frozen? Why don't we, every other, if you have Time Web up, keep it up and if not, maybe just log out. All you guys turn yours off, close the browser. I'll log in again here. It's a real problem so sometimes it's better to have students work on their own. You wouldn't do this with 200 people, at least not all at once.
What I set out to do was create a database that was appropriate for student inquiry, rather than researcher inquiry. Because, I was trying to avoid the problem of putting my colleagues' datasets up on the web because they're very proprietary. So, what I've tried to do is summarize information that's been published and then ask colleagues for original audio-visual materials, which a lot of them have provided without a problem. And, my goal ultimately, one of the nice things is that basically the core of this thing is classification and we have some basic information in the database. But, my goal is to be able to link each of the sites to the individual author's webpage and have the students go look for that. I've crashed the whole thing twice! You've got the address, but the goal is to play with the thing. Did everybody log off of it? Log out of Netscape for the moment and I'll try one more time. If I can't log into the thing itself, I'll show you the screens. This is why I have the ...presentation for when it dies. I'll go into the old one here.
Q: There's a bunch of kind of computer-based simulations out there of archaeological data and they sort of run a gamut from datasets that are completely made up, like Fugawi Land that students can play with, and real datasets, like perhaps this one and Okinichi Town is a real dataset. The problem sometimes with the real datasets is they have an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that they're real, so you have this sense that you're doing real stuff. The disadvantage is that real datasets are often complex and the patterns are very subtle and noisy. And as a consequence, sometimes it's hard if you're dealing with a class of students who aren't already experienced data analysts or geologists, to get them to be able to see patterns that are that complex and loaded with noise. I had some ideas on that, but I was wondering what your thoughts on that are?
JS: It's a real open question. I think one of the things we need to help students help with is how do you cope with ambiguity? That's one of the big things. But, you're right it can be really frustrating for our little dualistic colleagues to try and deal with that. I think that messiness is democratic, it's reality and I think that's a goal. Whether we should all do it in our classes of 250, I don't know?
??: What we did was we took a real archaeological excavation of Pueblo Grande and we selected data for students. So, instead of using everything, what we decided to do was use, tailor make the research questions that they were going to have to do. Because the idea was just to give them a feel for what it might be like to use information, not a whole full thing. It's really for very introductory levels. So, we didn't give them all the data that was collected, we didn't give them all the information. We took a sample of houses where we had very good dates, we took some of the information that abled them to look at relative dating techniques and absolute, compare artifacts from each, house size and shape from each. But, it was very basic. So, that was how we used real data. We extrapolated from it and selected with a very particular purpose in mind. So, it's not the greatest thing. What I find, though, when we do this in a class is that the students are overwhelmed at that level and then when they realize that they only got a tiny piece of the data, that's their first indication of how much is involved in archaeology. So, it's a really, it's a great teaching tool for them to know that they just got maybe 10% of what was collected, even from those units on that site. So, it helps them get a feel for how to process it, but also understand that they only have a small part of it. I don't know if it's a good way to do that or not, but...
R: Sounds good. We handle it by tailing the questions very specifically. In our case, we focused in on questions of architecture rather than artifacts. Just because they are hundreds of thousands of artifacts and only twelve houses. So, it constrains the problem and they know what a house is. But, it's very hard to think of questions that they can do when they have a chance of getting an answer in a certain amount of time.
My problem with the ...one's in the world is that students if they realize that they have the data they're guessing there's an answer there somewhere or there's two or three answers. So, it sort of almost defeats the purpose. I think that all of us have created little paper datasets in our classes to get students to try to do problem solving. But, I think that's where technology is the opportunity, we can do anything with computers. We should be able to use them to help students get access to real information that is manageable. That's why I talk about the tools, that we should be able to do that. So, if it's numbers we have statistics. What kind of tools do we need to allow students to cope with archaeology?
Q: Diane, I agree with you. I think that one strategy is to actually make these selected things or simulated things from a real base.
For example, instead of telling the students of the origins ... in Africa, what I want to be able to do is to get students to work in groups. Instead of saying, "OK we've read about in the intro class about the ... or something. If you guys were going to go look for evidence of food production in Africa, what would you look for?" Form a team. "You guys do North Africa. You guys do Central Africa. You guys do East Africa. You guys to South Africa. I want you all to form a team of experts and we've talked about zoo archaeology already. We've talked about this and we've talked about that. Well, apply it to this question. What would you look for? How could you recognize evidence of food production in this context that we've never seen before? Go in and look." What I've tried to do is design a structure to this database to help students do those types of queries based on different ways of classifying evidence. The other thing I've tried to build into to is different people's approaches to classifying evidence. So, I knew nothing of ceramics, let alone ceramics in Africa and boy was I surprised to find the many different ways there are to describe and classify the ceramic assemblages of different parts of Africa. So, what I tried to do is try to build in different descriptive frameworks and students can search the database using those different frameworks based on particular author's approaches. So, that was something I was trying to do as well. But, let me just show you what the thing is suppose to look it and maybe it will come again.
This is what I was actually going to try to show you. It's East Africa Kenya. And, if I would have run a query and in a sense what it creates is different ways of viewing the data. And we'll go off and find about 170 sites at this point, not lots. But, the tool bar at the top all of sudden ...into a bunch of different dots. And, what the tool allows students to do is look at the overall distribution of sites in time and in space. And, depending on what they've asked for, they can see different patterns and then they can drill down into the data for individual sites to try and explore what it means. This is what we call the overall time line view. And, as you can see we've got a lot of older sites in their right now. You have to go back about 2 and _ million years in Africa to get all the sites in Kenya right now. What we've done is try to, thinking about time is really hard for students. They don't understand time. And, what this is is actually a dynamic time line. What it allows students to do is zoom into time, to move through time, to stretch time to the sort of time focus that's appropriate for the kinds of questions that they're interested in.
And this, we call this, what we have is three view of times. This is what we call the forest view. As if you're flying over the forest with a plane and sort of looking down and all you're going to see is clusters, sort of little dots, that represent equivalent to a historigram through time. It's a cumulative plot basically with the number of sites in time. But, if you want to get a better sense, you can click on the tree view. It's interesting we talked about goals. When I first started working with my computer, we had this little time line tool and it took me a long time to help them understand that time was not a fact, time is a hypothesis, data is a hypotheses for an archaeologist. One of the things I wanted the students to be able to play with was how do we know how old something is and it depends on what kinds of techniques you use to get data. And, so all these sites their date ranges are based sort of on different things. And, what students can do is they can go in and look for sites that have data gathered from a particular technique and they can go back and forth. Each side is represented by a range and even here you have a million and a half years and when you zoom in a little bit the site ... ranges are, they're bars. But, all of sudden you're only seeing a little part of it.
So, what you want to be able to do is zoom in a little bit more. So, here I'm zooming in on one of the ... sites. But, each time you zoom in you see less and less data. But, one of the nice things about this tool is that it allows you to literally stretch time a little bit. I'm going to zoom in here and see what happens. Grab one of these bars here and literally drag it and that expands time. So, instead of having zero to 2 million years, all of sudden you're looking at 1 million years and the duration of each site stretches out here. Or you can zoom in again and see an even smaller set. When you're talking about sites that are very early in the time range, all of sudden you have this huge expansive time. But, if you're looking at sites in more recent time periods, obviously the .... This has the ability to zoom in so you can look in. Everything from one year to 2 and _ million years. One of the fun things you can get students to do is go up to the present at one year intervals and just start sort of clicking the little thing year by year to see how long it's going to take it to get back to 2 and _ million. But, they get fed up and just want to get there. But, even that in and of itself gives them a sense of how much time are we talking about. So, that's kind of fun. It's just a silly thing. What each of these sites is hooked up to is a series of webpages.
Now, what we're trying to do is create a web thing that the pages are generated dynamically rather than having, because right now I forget what it is, but it's just a huge number of webpages sitting on a server somewhere and most of them are fairly empty because most of the sites don't have a lot of info. But, if a student would come and click on this site, what it does is it opens up a webpage of the site with different types of information in the site and there's general description. And, all this stuff we enter into a database and it splats out on these webpages. So, this is a case that the site has a bunch of animal remains, baboons, crocodiles, whatever. It's actually organized in a bunch of different levels. We've got some media related to this site. This is just one of my own images. So, the idea is to create a database where students within, in a sense, within two or three clicks and see where a site is and time here to looking to explore some of the details are about, what's contained in the site. The only limit is to the amount and energy we put into the database. But, what the presentation doesn't show you is there is a mapping tool that works really nice. Instead of seeing sites in the time line, it will show you a map of Africa. It also has a little time line, so you can actually show sites appearing and disappearing through time. You can almost play movies. So, if your students are clever and they ask for sites that contain different sorts of information, they can actually see the distribution of these sites appearing and disappearing through time. It's just a way of giving them a sense. In Africa, if you look for evidence of domestic cows, for example, the earliest ones are in the north and then you can actually literally see them appear. You can almost create your own little quick time with these sites. So, that's the overall goal of this thing. I'm not sure, I suspect it's not actually going to work for us.
Maybe what we should do is get rid of the chance and do story boarding now.
Maybe it's a good time to talk about more general issues and web and archaeology.
Anne Pyburn: Let's move downstairs.