Thoughts on teaching, technology, learning and life in an era of change.

Archive for February, 2010

Neat Safari browser tip
February 28th, 2010

Every now and then you are working on your computer. You type this and that. You right click here. Your right click there. Anyway, whilst composing my previous post regarding aerial archaeology I discovered a neat little Safari browser trick quite by accident.

I control clicked on the title bar of the Safari browser and it listed the parent directories for the currently viewed web page. This can be useful when thoroughly exploring sites and saves one from deleting sub-directories one by one in the browser address bar. I tried the same trick using Firefox yet the same result was not achieved.

Aerial archaeology
February 28th, 2010

One of the topics covered during the Preliminary Ancient History course in Year 11 is the work of the archaeologist. A subset of that is aerial archaeology. The combination of flight and photography has provided archaeologists and historians with a valuable tool. How valuable?

Aerial photography allows the archaeologist to view entire sites and also to recognise features that may not be clearly visible at ground level. Soil marks, crop marks and shadow marks are visible via the technique. Buried structures and slight, yet regular, undulations in the land can be revealed. As a result structures that have been ‘lost’ or forgotten over time reveal themselves to the researcher.

Aerial archaeology
Remote Sensing and Archaeology Project
Aerial photo analysis and survey – GIS and Remote Sensing for Archaeology: Burgundy, France
UK Aerial Archaeology
Classics and Ancient History – Aerial archaeology in Jordan Project - Archive PageFlickr Sets
Aerial Archaeology Flickr Group
WIkipedia – Aerial Archaeology
Wikimedia Commons – Aerial Archaeology Photography Category

Soil marks
Learning Archaeology: Pre-Ex: Aerial Photography: Parch Marks and Soil Marks

Crop Marks
Learning Archaeology: Pre-Ex: Aerial Photography: Crop Marks

Photograph acknowledgement. The picture above is ©Copyright Civertan Grafikai Stúdió (Civertan Bt.), 1997-2006.; http://www.civertan.hu/. It is released under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 and older).

Additional archaeology links can be found on this page on my main site.

Leadership versus power
February 14th, 2010

Politicians, politicians….

Leadership and power. The two go hand in hand yet both are different. Quite different.

Leadership can inspire. Power on its own cannot.

Power can cause change. Power can do good. Power can do bad. Power can corrupt.

People sometimes find themselves in a position of leadership yet they fail to grasp the meaning of the tern ‘leadership’. They exercise power yet they do not exercise leadership. They do not inspire. Those that follow do not do so by choice. They do not follow due to inspiration.

Those in a position of leadership must rise up beyond the self and consider the community. Leadership must inspire.

It is the difference between a politician and a statesman. Politicians merely attempt to exercise power. Statesmen lead. Not too sure if any of Australia’s crop of politicians in Canberra could be considered statesmen. As for those New South Wales, well, what can I say?

Photo credit: Leadership. http://www.flickr.com/people/pedrosimoes7/