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Summary of Week 4 in Italian

It has been a busy journey from looking at the whole Roman Empire in the Claudian period to thinking last week about the later second century hinterland of Portus. Eleonora has posted a summary of the topics in Italian on the Italian version of this blog. As ever you can contact her via twitter or posting comments on the blog. Continue reading →

FutureLearn social network: Portus in the UoS MOOCosphere

I have been looking at the comments from across all University of Southampton FutureLearn courses in an attempt to understand the place that the Archaeology of Portus learners fit within the wider community of learners on other University of Southampton FutureLearn courses. As a first step I have aggregated the comments from all of the UoS courses that have run to date and then produced a simple network visualisation using the wonderfully easy to use NodeXL. Continue reading →

Week One – Your Questions Answered

  As part of Week Six we are today concentrating on answering questions raised on Week One. As a starting point Simon and I have created a video.   We have also added a video by Katherine where she introduces her research at Ostia and how it relates to Portus.   We have also added some additional cross-references to Hadrian's Wall course both on the platform and on the blog for those of you who are registered on both. Continue reading →

Hadrian’s Wall Cross References

On the last run of the course we cross-referenced it to the Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets course and also to the Roman Architecture course. This time we have provided some suggested links between the Portus and Hadrian's Wall courses. These links are reciprocal so, for example, if you are learning about Geophysical Prospection on the Portus course there is a link at the bottom that takes you to the Seeing beneath the soil step on Hadrian's Wall. Continue reading →

Sensing Portus

I have become fascinated with the ways in which we all imagine the site of Portus today and as it was in the past. When we have time we are going to undertake some rigorous formal analyses of the language uses on the Archaeology of Portus course - it provides an extraordinary insight into the prevailing understanding of the Roman past, at least as represented by our learners, and also of the impact of particular learning materials on this. Continue reading →