New Publication on Teaching with Digital Tools available for Download

As many colleges and universities around the United States and around the world move to remote teaching in response to COVID-19, ISAW can share news of the publication of the volume DATAM: Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by Clinical Associate Professor Sebastian Heath.

DATAM publishes papers presented at a conference of the same name that took place at ISAW in October of 2018 and that was co-organized by ISAW's Associate Director for Digital Programs Tom Elliott and ISAW's Head Librarian David Ratzan. The Society for Classical Studies partnered with ISAW to put on the event. The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota has now made the full text of the resulting volume available for free download from its website.

Link to download: https://thedigitalpress.org/datam/ .

The chapters include essays that find overlap between the role of Classical Studies as an intellectual environment in which students learn to think critically and the increasing importance of that skill in today's information rich digital world. Three-D modeling, rich video media, and games also appear as effective tools that teachers can use when asking students to engage with archaeological data and the material world. The introduction of computational methods without requiring specific coding skills is presented. That not everyone has the same access to digital tools is a concern, while the ability of the same tools to encourage self-learning is an opportunity. These are the themes that inform the volume as a whole, along with a sense that we are in a period of pedagogic experimentation so that a willingness for the teachers themselves to learn and adjust along the way is important. The volume can be useful to anyone thinking about digital teaching and may be particularly helpful for faculty who are responding suddenly to rapidly changing circumstances.

Table of Contents:

• Editor’s Preface, Sebastian Heath
• Preface Helen Cullyer
• Foreword, Shawn Graham
• Futures of Classics: Obsolescence and Digital Pedagogy,  Lisl Walsh
• Teaching Information Literacy in the Digital Ancient Mediterranean Classroom, David M. Ratzan
• Dissecting Digital Divides in Teaching, William Caraher
• Autodidacts and the “Promise” of Digital Classics,  Patrick J. Burns
• Playing the Argonauts: Pedagogical Pathways through Creation and Engagement in a Virtual Sea, Sandra Blakely
• Programming without Code: Teaching Classics and Computational Methods, Marie-Claire Beaulieu and Anthony Bucci
• Digital Creation and Expression in the Context of Teaching Roman Art and Archaeology, Sebastian Heath
• Digital Janiform: The Digital Object from Research to Teaching, Eric Poehler