Professor Koji Mizoguchi
Organization: Kyushu University
Location: Fukuoka, Kyushu
Collaboration details
Collaboration name: Global Social archaeology
Type: Japan Massive Open Online Course (JMOOC)
Partners: Kyushu University, JMOOC and Flinders University
Dates: March 2014 to October 2014
Summary: An online course served over a MOOC
Potential applications: To open academic knowledge up to thegeneral public and in particular to support indigenous
communities to protect their histories, to remind people of the vulnerability of their past and in thebest of all circumstances to help rejuvenate communities by helping them regain a sense ofbelonging. This activity and feedback also serves to enrich our scientific endeavours as well.
Faced with the challenge of making Kyushu University’s expertise accessible to a wider audience,Professor Mizoguchi decided to develop an online course in social archaeology using Japan’s Massive
Open Online Course platform (JMOOC). The project delivered a series of firsts: it was the first foray
for Kyushu University into MOOCs, and one of the first English language courses on JMOOC, and thefirst to bring Australian and Japanese knowledge of social archaeology together.
“Social archaeology is a discipline that is reintroducing cultural, economic and political context into
the science of archaeology. As a framework it is particularly useful when working with the generalpublic and Indigenous communities in particular. Historically, archaeology is steeped in the rise of
the nation state where feudal communities needed to be put together fairly artificially to form aunifying structure. For that purpose shared past and ancestry were considered useful for theconstruction of national identity. We tend to forget that kind of background to archaeology. So mydesire is to get that sense back into practice. My goal is to make archaeology more open to thepublic and I have had exciting and sometimes unexpected feedback in terms of how to interpret apiece of evidence from different points of view. So for that reason alone it was an excellent
opportunity to do the very first MOOC for Kyushu University on social archaeology and one of thefirst English language courses on JMOOC.
When I started to consider how to bring social archaeology to a much wider audience I realized that I
could do pretty much everything about social archaeology except Indigenous archaeology. To cover
this gap, I decided to bring in a world expert in the field. The name that immediately sprang to mind
was Professor Claire Smith from Flinders University in South Australia. Claire has been a good friendof mine for a long time and someone I value in research collaboration and she is also my predecessor
as the President of the World Archaeological Congress. One of the missions of the Congress is topromote indigenous rights and the importance of indigenous heritage. So this JMOOC course
concept fitted with the objectives of the Congress, with the objectives of Kyushu University and withmy own background and training.
Australia is one of the advanced countries when it comes to connecting archaeology to the generalpublic and more specifically with the aboriginal population.

If you confine yourself to a rigidly defined science you are discouraged from making any speculations
including interpreting what subjective meanings are attached to a particular artefact or landscapefeature. But for the aboriginal population that type of emotional attachment to their landscape andancestral relics was the most important thing. So the dry analysis by archaeologists proved to beharmful to aboriginal individuals and communities. In response Australian archaeologists began todevelop a very practical and pragmatic work ethic or code of practice when doing archaeology withaboriginal people. This framework is cutting edge. Working with Australians in this sense benefits
not only me but also my Japanese colleagues, allowing us to draw on the same sort of ground and tolearn how we can do the same sort of thing, for example, with the Ainu population, the officiallyrecognized indigenous population of Japan.
I contacted Claire to see if she was available for that kind of project and she immediately said yes.
Fortunately we also had a very generous funding to help her come over. She visited twice, once for ashort period of time to discuss the contents of the course in March and then again in August whenmost of the shooting of her section took place. In addition to shooting relevant footage Claire’s role
was to advance and peer review the quality of the manuscript of the lectures and also advise on theappropriate ways to show aboriginal images.
The course was advertised on the JMOOC designated website and Claire kindly posted a message tothe World Archaeological Congress mail list which I couldn’t do as the president. That was very
helpful and thanks for that we had quite a few students from Australia – 68 or so. In all we hadstudents from 53 countries across the world with about 400 from Japan and another 400 fromabroad. The lecturers ran from 25 September to 23 October this year. Along with the lectures there
was also a comments board where students could post questions to the lecturers and also exchange
ideas with their fellow students.
The next step is to extend the course and put it on Edex or Coursera and again Claire has promised
to join us. Claire is coming here soon to help with this and also I have started another, and at thisstage informal collaboration with her to educate students about social archaeology. Hopefully thiswill be advanced in the future with other Australia universities. In the meantime, Claire will be avisiting professor at Kyushu and will give 12 lectures plus convene a three hour workshop forstudents between November this year and January next year.
I am keen to deepen my relationship with universities in Australia and am looking to see how I cansend students to Australia and also bring Australian students here to study Japanese archaeology. At
the site of the new Kyushu campus there are the Jomon (hunter gatherer), the Yayoi (early ricefarming), the Kofun (mounded tomb) and early Historic (Asuka and Nara) age sites of nationalsignificance that are still to be thoroughly examined. I am convinced we can offer a very attractive
place for Australian students to come over and experience Japanese archaeology and our students
can go to Australia and experience cutting edge social archaeology there.
I have come to be convinced that unless you spend at least a couple of years abroad in an English
speaking circumstance, you never become comfortable to write, listen and speak English at a levelsufficient for conducting serious academic debate in English. I am determined to send as many of mystudents abroad as I can to offer then that type of opportunity. In the future I would like to send mystudents regularly to Australia for them to have that exposure.”