Network meeting in Darmstadt
For the second time, the DiKopA network met in Darmstadt to discuss ongoing issues and, most importantly, to plan the next workshop. We met for two days and had productive ideas about the second half of the project, what to do next and finally launching our website for good.
Demand Survey
So one of the big topics this time was that we want to start a German-Austrian-Swiss survey asking archaeology students what they are actually learning in terms of digital literacy. This is not an easy task, as we discussed in detail what questions to ask and, more importantly, how to ask them. To help us, we invited students from the DASV, an umbrella organisation that unites the student bodies of archaeological institutes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
They had already done such a survey, but with different questions, and they had lots of good ideas. We spent the whole day discussing and finalising our list of questions. The next step will be to create a survey and send it out through all available channels. If you are a student in Germany, please expect an invitation in the coming months. And of course: Please participate!
2nd Workshop
On the second day we discussed the next workshop in 2025. As we already had a first workshop, we wanted to talk a bit about the future this time. So we came up with three basic panels and an open discussion about the needs of digital literacy in archaeological studies. We have collected some ideas about who to invite, but at the moment we are still looking for a date in mid-2025.
I personally will be reporting on the hackathon(s) on archaeogaming that I have done so far. The first one is actually taking place in Cologne this weekend! But we plan to do some more in different cities all over Germany. At the second workshop, however, I hope to be able to present some results on how teaching with Archaeogaming works and how hackathons are a valuable addition to traditional teaching.
Our website
Finally, a point that took us a long time. We created a project website for ourselves, of course, but also as a reference to our project and a collection of links, tutorials and other material. We were supposed to host the website at the University of Darmstadt, but due to technical difficulties we couldn’t. The time it took us to figure this out, however, was disproportionate.
Finally, we decided to host the site elsewhere and register a URL until it can find a more permanent home on a university server. You can have a look for yourself at https://dikopa.net/. It only contains some information pages for now, but in the background we are already working on a skills page and a resources page, which will be launched as soon as the first tutorials are ready. So watch out for updates soon.
