Network meeting in Darmstadt
For the second time, the DiKopA network had a meeting in Darmstadt to discuss standing issues and most importantly plan the next workshop. We met for two days and had productive ideas about our 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 in which we ask students of archaeology what they actually learn in terms of digital competencies. This is no easy task, as we discussed in detail what questions to ask and more importantly how to ask them. In order to help us, we invited students from the DASV, an umbrella organisation combining the student bodies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland of archaeological institutes.
They had already done such a survey, but with different questions and had a lot of good ideas. We discussed the whole day to finalise our list of questions. We will now as a next step create a survey and send it through all channels available. If you are a student in Germany, please expect an invitation in the following months. And of course: Please participate!
2nd Workshop
On the second day, we discussed the upcoming workshop in 2025. As we had a first workshop already, we wanted to talk a bit about the future this time. So, we came up with four basic panels: ???, ???, Digital Teaching and an open discussion about the needs of digital competencies in archaeological studies. We collected some ideas who to invite, but at the moment we are still searching for a date mid-2025.
I personally will report on the hackathon(s) on Archaeogaming I have done until then. The first one will take place in Cologne this weekend actually! But we plan to do some more in different cities throughout Germany. On the second workshop however, I hope to be able to present some results of how teaching works with Archaeogaming and how hackathons are a valuable addition to traditional teaching.
Our website
Lastly, a point that took us a long time. We of course created a project website for ourselves, but also for later as a reference to our project and a collection of links, tutorials, and further material. We were supposed to host the website at the University of Darmstadt, but due to technical difficulties, couldn’t. The time it took to figure that our however was unproportional.
Lastly, we finally decided to host the website somewhere else and register an URL until it can find a more permanent home on a university server. You can have a look yourself at https://dikopa.net/. It only features some informational pages for now, but in the background, we are already working on a competencies page and a resources page that will launch as soon as the first tutorials are ready. So, look out for updates soon.
