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Peer Comment

Whitney Battle-Baptiste

Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. wbbaptiste@anthro.umass.edu

Cite this as: Battle-Baptiste, W. (2015) Peer Comment, Internet Archaeology 39, http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.39.9.com1

'to truly see - we have to DO.'

This statement spoke to me directly. I am a blogger who happens to be an archaeologist. I am also a woman of African descent living in the United States who happens to be a tenured professor of archaeology and a wife and mother of three amazing children. All of those factors led me to the practice of blogging, because I needed a space where I could share, engage and chronicle the experiences that have made me the type of scholar I am. Blogging and social media can be a very personal exercise, and simultaneously, a very public method of sharing. To think about archaeology in this space is challenging and exciting at the same time, that is why this article struck me so deeply; it spoke to the way that social media has changed my life (academically and personally).

The landscape of archaeological training is changing at a rapid pace. It is much slower than the attention span of most social media consumers, but the push to present archaeological sites and findings on Facebook, Instagram and weblogs can no longer be ignored. So, for those of us spending most of our time within the bounds of the university, we have to come to grips with the unique set of challenges that stem from teaching students from a digital generation. Our students are coming of age in a time when the Internet is a given, almost all information has its own highway (or a YouTube channel) and physical boundaries do not limit the ability to experience a multitude of things from far away places. As the experiences of our students have changed, so have their expectations in the classroom. We as teachers, think more about student engagement in our lessons, the intricate details of our syllabi, the benefits of team-based and group learning, and all of the energy that goes into creating a dynamic course in the 21st century. In my opinion, these factors all become the foundation for the future of archaeological knowledge. Archaeology, to its credit, has always been about doing and seeing, yet when these two elements are combined today, a different sense of what archaeology can be emerges. We can teach our students to think critically about process through reading, remembering, and writing. Yet, we can also imbue a level of understanding that will become a part of their knowledge base.

The strength of this article was not just in the discussion of the application of different communication tools to share information, but how the use of social media puts archaeology in the present. This approach also moves the learning process beyond the university landscape and forces us as practitioners, and the students we teach, to think of themselves as agents in the production of archaeological knowledge. What is enhanced is the idea of learning in general. What Perry demonstrates is how students acquire a sense of responsibility and ownership in their understanding of archaeology and heritage practice. As one student remarked, 'I was actually having an impact …', which as the student continued was '… something not so common in most undergraduate experience'.

As someone who has used blogging as a major part of an archaeological field school requirement, the experience was mixed. It was an excellent lesson in how to think more critically about assignments, frequency and overall training. The bottom line is that the weblog experiment did not work the way we envisioned. I know that I (it was mainly my idea) did not prepare students for the varying expectations of creating entries or facilitate real dialogue about the general nature and complications of archaeological blogging. I fell head first into the same critiques that Perry describes in her piece. Not only did I take for granted that students knew how to blog, I was reinforcing the central idea of blogging for blogging's sake. This approach also created an atmosphere of 'circular justifications about the value of blogging'. Without thinking critically about the real audience and the temporary nature of a weblog dedicated to an archaeological field school that approach will forever be encompassed in a moment and most likely never beyond. The frequency in which students had to 'share and reflect' created the same pressures as the weekly essay or critical thought piece that would traditionally be written on paper and handed in at the start of the session. There was no difference except how the students turned the assignment 'in'. I clearly needed this article a year ago, before that experience. However, I must testify in this response that I am feeling a bit more empowered now, because in reading the results, the feedback of the students interviewed helped me to see the shortcomings of my overall approach to the practice.

Another strength of this piece lay in the student interviews and feedbacks. It is often a mistake for instructors to see the idea of blogging as yet another creative exercise, and Perry demonstrates the value of highlighting the uncomfortable aspects of the writing process. Students therefore can actively learn, through real-world experiences, how social media directly exposes us to a living, breathing, and contradictory world. This exposure for many of Perry's students marked the first time there was an independent experience in doing course work beyond the traditional essay. This, in the age of instruction, testing and other forms of formulaic rubrics makes the idea of a blog an inviting and realistic form of writing.

Training students with a focus on 'future-making' archaeologists is powerful. Creating a methodology that not only keeps archaeology relevant, but also widens the scope of how archaeological theory is understood beyond the borders of academic institutions brings hope to the longevity of the discipline in an age of immediate results. Blogging can become more than an assignment, it builds confidence in how students see themselves and their role as facilitator in the process of knowledge production.

There has been a great deal of emphasis, as Perry points out, about blogging as a 'tool for sharing and outreach', which she sees as circulatory. Perry therefore, contemplates the effect blogging has on those of us engaged in the actual work of archaeology. Often, we do not critique the effects of alternative forms of publication on archaeology in general. Where are the checks and balances? Blogging has become a method to increase our ability to create an emancipatory and reflexive form of archaeology, which for me holds a great deal of weight. As I stated in the early portion of my response, it is through blogging that I have been able to merge the varying aspects of my own identity to give a particular tenor to my writing as an academic archaeologist. In my opinion (and I agree with Perry here), we can also use the weblog to engage in current forms of activism, political engagement, and issues that are relevant to the communities we collaborate with. The Internet, therefore, becomes a space where archaeologists from across the globe can not only share but transform how we communicate with each other and a variety of publics. Future-orientated archaeologists can use critical heritage discourse, for example, to see connections across time and space and 'think in the open'; in order to truly see, we have to DO and understand the relationships between observing and participating, looking and acting and all of the situations in between.

As Perry contends, we have to abandon the concept of simply defending the act or art of blogging, but to 'do archaeology with purpose, a means to insert us into the future', so that as archaeologists we emerge into logics of 21st-century technoculture and remain on the side of 'techno-optimism'. For this, I am so thankful for this article, this dialogue and this challenge. Blogging should and will 'constructively interfere with the past, present, and future of archaeology'. It is the only way that we will ensure that, as Perry points out, her students as hackers will 'create the possibility of new things entering the world'.

Response to Peer Comment

I am very grateful to my reviewers Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Stuart Jeffrey for their thoughtful, considered and critically-engaged responses to my article. I deliberated for several weeks on whether or not to reply to their comments, in part because I did not feel that it was necessary for me to have the last word in this exchange. Indeed, as Jeffrey notes, I do see it as simply a 'first salvo in a conversation between and among students and educators on the values of blogging', and hence I was conscious of the possibility that I might immediately shut down the conversation by attempting to reassert my argument or otherwise prioritise my experience over those of my reviewers.

That said, I also see this discussion as one that goes beyond students and educators alone—an exchange that, as Battle-Baptiste acknowledges, encompasses the entire profession, and in fact, pushes beyond the profession into general efforts at future-making and 'current forms of activism, political engagement, and issues that are relevant to the communities we collaborate with'. Blogging, as I and my students have applied it, is just one mechanism for participating in such future-making. I do not believe that it should be the only mechanism. I do not believe that it works in isolation from other forms of practice and thinking. I do not even necessarily believe it is the most robust means of achieving the types of social, intellectual, experiential and cooperative outcomes that sit at the core of my own (and, I think, Battle-Baptiste's) pedagogical ideals. But I do believe that we are currently in a predicament where lack of concern for evaluation and a serious dearth of critical analysis of impacts mean it is near impossible to even initiate—let alone sustain—a meaningful conversation about archaeological blogging's (and the larger social web's) relationship to professional development, to knowledge-making and to world-building more generally. I have been inspired, then, by my students' engagements with their weblogs, because—of their own volition—they have stretched these engagements far beyond anything that I might have anticipated. Indeed, the structure of my modules is such that students were not actually directly assessed on their blogs, but rather on summative reflections on the process and effects of their blogging. This assessment style meant that students could have potentially invested minimal effort in the blogs themselves. However, for the most part, what became obvious is that they deeply invested themselves in developing their online forums—some going on to produce associated academic articles about their merits (e.g. see Harper's 2014 piece on 'blogs as knowledge-making space'); others connecting to new audiences and communities of practice who, in turn, facilitated publication and active participation by the student in varied activities that extended far beyond academia and beyond archaeology itself (e.g. Reilly's 2013 invitation to publish in the Mitford Society's annual book).

The latter point is especially important, because it challenges Jeffrey's contention about the narrowness of the students' 'real world' interactions, and it complicates the view that 'real world' archaeological work does not typically include blogging. A not insignificant number of our students move, upon graduation, into careers outside of archaeology—politics, law, marketing, etc. Their weblogs are arguably means, then, to explore these extra-disciplinary opportunities whilst still enrolled on their degree programmes. Their performances here enabled connections, considerations and actions that might have set the stage—and perhaps even better prepared them—for their transitions into different fields of practice. Even where students might have gone on to more traditional archaeological occupations, their blogging efforts represented to them engagements with what they felt 'real world' archaeology should entail. Whilst "stultifying, conservative and often inaccessible forms" of publication might be, as Jeffrey says, the "status quo" in the discipline, I am not convinced that my role as a pedagogue should thus be to teach students to reproduce that status quo. If the university is outputting new professionals who have no skills to rethink or rework traditional publication forms, no training in the use of tools that are relatively ubiquitous in other fields of practice (including in everyday life), and no appreciation for how media experimentation can affect expertise, disciplinary development, or the world at large, then one might argue that we are setting archaeology up for obsolescence.

Blogging is clearly not a panacea, but it provides one method by which students (and others) can potentially enlarge themselves and, at once, critically consider the dimensions of the profession, its impacts and its audiences. It is literally a conversation starter, and I look forward to seeing this conversation mature.

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