The first DiKopA workshop is done
Between the 3rd and 4th of June, our network on “Digital Competencies in Archaeology” (german abbreviation DiKopA) met in Darmstadt, Germany. We had 10 presentations, 9 pitches, and a world cafe. The network and visitors from outside convened in the lecture hall of the university library. Short story: I learned a lot fromn the DiKopA workshop.
DiKopA
I already wrote about the DiKopA project that I am co-ordinating together with Marion Bolder-Boos and Georg Pantilidis from the Technical University of Darmstadt. We already met once within the network, but recently, we had our first full workshop. Within our funding, it was the first of two. This workshop was focused on opportunities and challenges on digital methods of teaching and learning in archaeology.
On the first day, we had two keynotes and presentations from our network and on the second day, we had some presentations, pitches and a world cafe, which basically were groups discussing certain topics. We also had a presentation of various VR apps, that were offered by participants of the University of Tübingen.
Presentations
The presentations were very diverse. Martina Trognitz started off with a pointer on data management. Other presentations talked about Serious Games in museums, general didactics, archaeogaming, and the markdown languages. Interesting to me was the concept of versioning while writing any text or paper. Maria Shinoto talked about her workflow on writing texts and using Git to have a versioning system. I will have a try, because she repeatedly said how writing like this freed her.
I myself was talking about why archaeologists need to learn and teach about video games. It was more or less a general presentation about what archaeogaming is and why it is important to understand was is being shown in video games. The medium is one of the most influential and the profession of archaeology as well as the past are regularly misrepresented. I got a lot of questions and positive feedback.
Pitches and more
The pitches were something new we tried. We wanted to give an overview on software and methods for digital teaching and learning. Each pitch was only (supposed to be) four minutes long. There were pitches on drawing software, learning systems, storytelling apps and databases. In general, I liked the pitches and the short format, although it is hard to convene the pros and cons of a software in that short amount of time.
Finally, the workshop was quite successful and I learned a lot about new workflows and software. I will definitely need some time to go through these in the near future, but hey, it also offers me topics for this blog! We also plan to publish the workshop in an open access publication soon.
