Yet few students in an introductory classroom experience the integrative teamwork and analytical debates which are so central to archaeological inquiry. Project staff are designing a Digital Learning Environment that encourages a more learner-centered approach to instruction than is normally possible in a traditional introductory archaeology course. The goal is to facilitate student access to rich, authentic, multimedia archaeology data in a context that engages them in the pursuit of the past, and encourages them to develop collaborative research and problem-solving skills. Asked to evaluate the earliest farming in Africa, for example, students can search for sites with dated evidence of food production, such as plant remains or artifacts, and display the search results chronologically on a dynamic time scale, on a choice of maps of Africa, or as a sortable list. They can then link from any site displayed to a web page that contains archaeological data and multimedia information for that site.
Students can use information they discover at individual sites to refine their next research steps.
Once the design of TimeWeb is refined, project staff will create an integrated suite of student tools to enhance asynchronous collaborative teamwork using the TimeWeb. Staff are evaluating the use of the TimeWeb visualization tool, first in different archaeology classes taught at Indiana University by J. Sept, and subsequently in the classrooms of archaeologists at two other universities. Staff believe that these instructional tools can not only transform student-teacher relationships in archaeology, but also model an innovative strategy for improving the quality of learning opportunities for students across a range of disciplines. An independent evaluation team is collecting data and reporting useful feedback for future development of both the digital learning tools and the related classroom strategies. For each of the three years of this project, the evaluation team will focus on process, concept learning, and interactivity while simultaneously gathering data to inform decision making about all aspects of the project.