Many of you have probably heard of the Black Death or the bubonic plague. I must note that the Black Death may have not been caused by bubonic plague but back to the point. Sydney, Australia, experienced the bubonic plague during the early years of the twentieth century and the State Records Authority of NSW has created a nice gallery of photographs taken during the time. I have included a photograph of some professional ratcatchers with their haul as well as a photograph of a butcher’s shop.

The gallery, Purging Pestilence – The Bubonic Plague, features 20 excellent photographs as well as an overview of the outbreak. There are also links to government records and files regarding the outbreak. Additional photographs taken during the time can be found with this search of the State records.

This material would be useful as primary and secondary sources for teachers working with Year Nine students in NSW who are covering the history of Australia during the period 1900 to 1914. I shared all of the photographs, via a quick slideshow and an overhead projector, with my students in Year Nine yesterday, across three separate classes.

The butcher’s shop below and this photograph resulted in expressions of dismay and disgust as well as delight. That’s the way a classroom should be. Weave the photographs into a story and let the history stir their emotions. 

The gallery is part of a series of digital galleries that feature stories regarding tragic shipwrecks, criminal history, the bushranger Ned Kelly and famous murder cases just to name a few.

During the Year Eleven Preliminary Course in Ancient History (NSW BOS Syllabus) the students are given an introduction to archaeological technique. Topics include aerial photography, crop marks, dendrochronology, underwater archaeology, managing a dig, carbon dating and so on. There are a number of useful web sites available for students to access. Two sites include Past Perfect and Background On Archaeological Methods. Each site is quite different but useful in its own way.

Past Perfect examines the archaeology of Durham and Northumberland with photographs of digs, artefacts and the region. It incorporates rendered and VRML reconstructions of the sites. It provides valuable insights into the lives of the original inhabitants, building methods and climate change. In addition Past Perfect has a section dedicated to the techniques of the archaeologist. There is a wealth of material to explore within the site. In terms of classroom activities students could explore the site as groups and publish their own findings on nominated sections of the site.

The site, Background On Archaeological Methods is a straightforward site that sets out in plain English the key components of archaeology. It can act as a quick introduction to archaeology for students and the general public alike. Topics covered include site grids, dating, stratigraphy, artefact recovery and record keeping. 

Additional web sites focused upon the techniques of the archaeologist can be found linked to from this dedicated web page.

I have been catching up on Google Reader this week. Just read Dan Meyer’s post Crisis of Faith which is his response to Jeff Wasserman’s blog post where Jeff describes his frustration with technology and his decision to let it go. Jeff’s blog post did not surprise me. It is best that you read Jeff’s original post. Dan Meyer responds by stating that Jeff Wasserman does not have the right to refuse to use technology. Dan’s statement surprised me somewhat. Best to read the comments to Dan’s post yourself.

I have given Google Reader a break recently. There were three reasons for this. First of all my wife and I were busy doing work around the home, I was preparing for the new school year and I had grown tired of reading blogs repeatedly peppered with angst, judgement calls and defenses of this or that position. Give me a blog with simple practical advice any day. Let’s just get on with the job.

There is a term that constantly pops up in blogs that single-mindedly push technology within the classroom setting. The term is 21st century. As far as I can tell this century is not all that different to the previous one. Many people associate the term 21st century with the future if you get my drift. As a ten year old I was looking forward to the 21st century. Well, the 21st century has arrived and nothing much has really changed. The year is 2008. People are not living on the moon. The Concorde has been mothballed. I am certainly not flying to work in an aero-car each day. I am in a car pool to save on petrol costs. The fact that it happens to be the 21st century has no bearing on how I teach or make decisions. I better keep this post to a minimum so I do not become a hypocrite. Cheers, John.

The new school year began today, at least for the teachers. The day began with a Mass and a morning tea along with the staff of St. Paul’s Primary School. The two schools are situated side by side. The students begin returning on Thursday.

The most interesting item of news is that our school shall phase out its current staff laptop policy so that we are in keeping with the policy of our regional office. Presently the school supplies staff with either a Mac or PC laptop and has done so for about seven or so years. The laptops are replaced every two to three years. All of the other schools in our region do not have such a policy and staff are encouraged to purchase their own laptop via salary sacrifice. That reduces their taxable income. Not such a bad idea.

The change in policy does not particularly worry me. When I joined the school four years ago I already had a Mac laptop and I have since replaced it with a new laptop via salary sacrifice. I prefer to own my own laptop as I have greater control over its management and I prefer to look after it myself.

There are arguments for and against this change in policy. It is felt that from a fiscal perspective it is better that the funds be devoted to purchasing additional equipment for the students, particularly in the event that we evolve into a 1:1 school like some of our sister schools in the region. It is also felt that it is more egalitarian if the staff are on a similar agreement as the staff in the other schools. The staff would have access to dedicated desktop machines and shared laptops.

Others feel differently. It is felt that a number of staff may be unwilling to purchase their own laptop. Some felt, particularly heavy users of technology, that they would find it challenging to share laptops with others staff when the demand was high. Some feel that the staff are effectively taking a pay cut of $2000.00 to $3000.00 dollars as they will have to purchase their own laptop. They feel that the current policy within the school should continue as evolving syllabi demand that instructional technologies form a compulsory component of the teaching and learning programme.

I personally am not worried by the change. I think the experience of working in a startup company where we supplied most of our own equipment, used our own mobile phones for all communications and occasionally waited for 3 months between pay cheques taught me to be grateful for whatever benefits I receive from my employer these days.

During the last few weeks Shao Ping and I have been re-organising our home. Following that downpour in December we decided that it was not such a good idea to have so much stuff downstairs. Our neighbour Dale who helped us to quickly move a lot of stuff upstairs agreed. We had created a rather nice study downstairs where we had our books, records, CDs and files. It was a nice place to escape. There was a sofa and a good desk.

But when that water started flowing in and we had to start shifting all the stuff closest to the floor upstairs it was essentially a pain. Now, we really do not want to go through that again so the books are coming upstairs. Maybe that downpour will not happen again. Maybe it will. Given climate change I am not willing to take that risk. I am yet to sort out the records. I am going to sell some on eBay. Many of them are bootlegs by David Bowie.

Yesterday I went through boxes of old files. I even found stuff going back to my days in the ANZ bank as a young bloke. My training assignments, notebooks and guides were all there. I ended up in the audit department and that was quite enjoyable as I was able to travel far and wide as myself and other auditors inspected groups of branches in diverse regions. I would find myself in one horse towns that normally I would not get the chance to visit.

I thought I had cleared out most of that material before our move to Singapore years ago but there it was. I spent all of yesterday going through the files and most of them went into our paper recycling bin. Even old assignments from university, and paper work from my time at the Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory at the University of Wollongong. Time to let go. I kept a few files that were either typical or special but that was it. About 6 packing boxes of stuff was reduced to a small box. The rest will be recycled. I still have two more filing cabinets to go. Some of the old newspapers and historical documents I will take to school.

At one stage I was employed by the university to train at least two teachers from every school in the region how to use the Internet. The trained teachers would be the Internet Contact Persons for that school. Every Tuesday and Thursday a group of teachers would come to the university and I would teach them how to use Netscape, Alta Vista, gopher searches, etc and the various ways one could go ‘back’.

Now, you may find this difficult to believe but I always carried a back up of the Internet with me on a number of floppy discs when my training took me to sites other than the university. I had used the software WebWhacker to completely download some web sites including Volcano World, The Nine Planets and a couple of others. I copied the folders to a set of floppy discs. Of course I could not do that today as these web sites have increased dramatically in size. Back in 1996 and 1997 it was possible.

I was conducting a training session at the University of Wollongong’s Shoalhaven campus at Berry on the south coast of NSW. We were using some Windows PCs running Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. Might have been Windows 95 but I doubt it. There was a great storm and a lightning strike broke our connection with the Internet.

We decided to have a tea break and I placed the contents of the floppy discs on the server. The participants copied those folders to the computers and they simply clicked on the index.htm file for each web site’s folder to explore that web site. As a result they could learn how to use the Netscape browser. They could learn all of the buttons and most of the menu items. They could still learn how to download images and text. Just about the only thing they could not do was conduct a search.

Later that day the connection to the Internet was restored and the participants could learn about searching the Internet using Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Infoseek and others. I always enjoyed showing the teachers how to filter and refine the Internet searches. Another neat trick was showing them the power of exploring directories by altering the url of a site. The workshops were always enjoyable. The only time I was reasonably distracted was when one participant insisted on using the mouse “upside down”. When they rolled the mouse towards themselves the cursor went up the screen and vice versa.

I found some old publications from back then. Later today I will scan a couple of them online and write a quick blog. I hope you will be amused, enlightened and perhaps a little intrigued.

I would love to read some of your stories from the early days of the Internet. Ten years ago is really not that distant but in terms of the Internet it seems to be ages ago.

This afternoon, my sister’s husband Kieran will be coming around to help us shift the bookcases upstairs. Then we shall all retire to the pool in our backyard and later a barbecue. Isn’t life good?