To respond to a question, simply write  a post on your own blog, or a short tweet, or a comment on this blog if you don’t have your own. Please don’t e-mail reponses though as I’d like the responses to be online where they may be read in full. To let me know you’ve responded, simply leave a link to your response as a comment on this blog post.

For the first week I’m going to pose the question (which is drawn from something asked at the last plenary session of Engage 2011), but I’m looking to you to suggest questions for the next two weeks (again, comment here or tweet me @m_law).

You don’t have to have attended the Engage conference to take part in the blog carnival.

This week’s question is: How do you place value on your engagement work?

How do you ensure you’re being inclusive? Is it better to work with some groups than others? Are there, for example, ‘soft targets’ who are more ready and willing to work with universities and is it a bad thing if you limit your engagement to these groups?  If you were asked to prove that you’re paying more than lip service to engagement, how would you do so?

Let me know your thoughts by the evening of Thursday, December 8th. If you’re suggesting a new topic for next week please let me know by that date as well.

Sophie Duncan, deputy director of the NCCPE, opened the day with a show of hands from the different sectors represented at the conference, showing a good balance of Higher Education researchers and other professionals. One delegate, Rob Greenwood, travelled all the way from Memorial University in Newfoundland to learn about public engagement in Britain.

Prof. Mary Bownes of Edinburgh University explained the rationale behind the Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement was that to make a difference in global issues, it is essential to work across disciplines and with other agencies. As a result of partipating in Edinburgh Beltane, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Herriot-Watt University now award prizes for Public Engagement and Edinburgh University has Public Engagement written into job descriptions for academics.

Prof. Mary Stuart of University of Lincoln explained how the University, founded in 2001, was designed to be a civic university which has engagement with the city as its focus, and which trains students to be producers, not consumers.

Dr Steven Hill of the RCUK Strategy Unit spoke about the importance of research for building the economy, making people healthier, and enhancing people’s lives culturally. He described impact as the difference research makes to the world. He also noted that the Beacons for Public Engagement project has emphasised the diversity and creativity in Higher Education.

I’ll be back at the conference tomorrow and will blog more. You can also follow on Twitter with the hashtag #engage_2011.

Negotiating Coasts and Islands: Landscape and Environmental Perspectives

Cepaea hortensis on my car

I parked my car in the visitor car park of Van Mildert College, close to some bushes. In the morning, the snail had gone – there was a little trail and some excrement left behind, but the trail ended abruptly where evidently the snail had dropped off.

I was impressed at how firmly the snail was stuck to my car. It isn’t hard to see how Hygromia cinctella, a species introduced to Britain in the 1950s,  has become so widespread in such a short time in the era of mass (human) transport. If my snail had been carrying fertilised eggs there would soon be a new population. As it is, if it survives to mate next year, it will be adding something new to the genetic diversity of Cepaea hortensis in the North East.

I’m wondering why it stayed attached the first night. Was the snail aware that it wasn’t in a very good environment in my garage, or is the length of its dormancy related to something else?

A variety of dog skulls

Dr Jacqui Mulville and artists Paul Evans reprised their Future Animals project, which invited children to imagine how people might change animals in the future.

Some of the future animals

We also demonstrated how people maximised their use of the animals they killed through costume, and showing people how to make coin purses out of empty milk cartons (which is making the most of our resources today).

I wrote a brief guide to the local archaeology, which we displayed at the stall, and authored an augmented reality layer for Layar, which I was unable to test due to poor phone signal. we also displayed some finds.  Finally, a quick activity used to draw people in was the Washing Line of Time, where we invited people to pin some key dates on a washing line divided into different periods.

The Washing Line of Time

The weekend was a lot of fun, and we saw over a thousand people at the stall. That Einstein’s Garden exists is a wonderful thing, and I was very happy to have been invited. It was also a pretty steep learning curve. One of our activities was to excavate finds from a sand pit, which very quickly became a creche as parents headed off to  see band, buy food etc. We withdrew the activity, and did not allow unaccompanied under-8s at the stall after that. We hope to go back next year, our heads are already buzzing with new ideas.

a social media based project that will allow archaeologists working all over the world to document what they do on one day, July 29^th 2011. This date coincides with the “Festival of British Archaeology“, which runs from 16^th – 31^stJuly 2011 and is one of the hundreds of events being held to celebrate archaeology in the UK and beyond.

Contact: Day of Archaeology Team dayofarchaeology@gmail.com

Logo by Colleen Morgan

The final question in Middle Savagery’s blogging archaeology carnival relates to publication:

How could we best capture the interplay, the multimedia experience of blogging as a more formalized publication? What would be the best outcome for this collection of insights from archaeological bloggers?

This is tricky, and I’m sure there will be a lot of varied responses from my fellow bloggers . I think a couple of things would be desirable. Firstly, I think the blog posts should be presented verbatim rather than summarised, with the addition of Colleen’s summaries as an introduction, rather like the introduction to a set of conference proceedings. If we’re talking about formalising the record of a blog discussion, it’d be nice to have a feel for the participants’ own style of writing (and thus a sense of what blogs are like). Perhaps each author’s contributions could be compiled into a single essay.

Secondly, I think the comments should be published as well – subject to the individual commenter’s permission. As last week’s question reveals, comments are part of the package.

Thirdly, I think the publication needs to come quickly. So much can change on the internet in such a short time that it’s quite undesirable to be still be waiting for the book of this in 2014. The last time I was involved in an internet-related session at a conference, the papers were published in SAA Archaeological Record for precisely that reason, which – given that this is an SAA session – seems appropriate.

I’m not really sold on peer review in this case. When I started responding to this carnival I had no idea formal publication was a possible outcome (which actually leaves me feeling a little vulnerable) and, although I do put quite a bit of consideration into what I’m going to write, blogging is a much more off-the-cuff and informal exercise than academic writing. Much of what has been written is opinion rather than research, and (perhaps I’m not being imaginative enough) I don’t see that peer review is appropriate for this kind of writing. Of course there should be a careful editorial eye passed over this, but I think the key with this collection is to embrace the informality.