DiKopA: Our first network meeting in person
So I already reported on a project I am involved in called DiKopA. It is a German name that translates to “Digital competencies in Archaeology”. We are basically a group of lecturers and students that think about how to make teaching and learning in Archaeology easier with digital methods. I am a Digital Archaeologist, but not everybody is and so we meet regularly to discuss what we can do. This is a small report about our DiKopA network meeting.
Topics of the meeting
So last week (9/10th of November 2023), we met at the Technical University of Darmstadt to discuss standing topics. As we plan to create an online hub of resources, we naturally want to know who needs what. We therefore discussed to do a query at archaeological institutes in Germany to ask them, what digital competencies they are missing and which resources might help.
We also discussed an upcoming workshop we want to organise about “Chances and limits of digital methods in teaching and learning archaeology”. As we have the funding to create two of these workshops, we want to plan the first one right away. We will also publish the results of this workshop in a volume in open access, which is pretty nice.
Results of the DiKopA network meeting
We managed to specify the questions we want to ask the archaeological institutes in Germany and also decided to do an additional query with students studying archaeology in Germany. I think this is a good plan to explore what is needed and wanted on both sides. Additionally, we discussed a workshop we want to organise in 2024 and have already formed kind of the programme. There are still some bits unclear, but I think we are on track. This workshop will get very interesting.
What to expect next
We are looking forward organising the workshop and meeting again. We have a lot of work to do and especially the website will be a big task in the following three years. Some results are nevertheless online and as I reported last time, since a while now, we have our own YouTube Channel. Just recently, a new presentation was uploaded, which you might want to check out: Sofia Fonseca is speaking about creating an online MOOC on Coursera about the Archaeology of Africa. It is a great MOOC for sure, but what is also fabulous is her talk about it. You can check it out on YouTube or directly here:
