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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part VI

In spite of the frustrations documented in the last post, our trial was a truly useful experiment in making academic research more open to and usable for a broader audience, and we can be hopeful about indications for future productive collaborations. We believe that the positive outcomes outweighed the few negatives, and that the obstacles were not intractable.

Students felt that they could engage with the primary source material, which is a rare opportunity for ninth-graders. As a consequence, students felt a stronger sense of ownership of their own study, thereby supporting Dewey’s goals for the democratization of education. In time, we should be able to see whether students also reinvest their interest in Classics as a subject that provides them with unique opportunities to participate as researchers.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part V

It was not all plain sailing, however. Inevitably, we encountered problems and frustrations with conducting this trial. What Elton and I learned, and what we document here, may help to inform how to design and conduct future collaborations, because the obstacles largely address infrastructural concerns, or pragmatically, “getting work done on the ground.” The researchers themselves felt that they were not fully able to carry out the trial as thoroughly as they might have because of the school syllabus and timetable.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part IV

Encouragingly, the results showed that the students enjoyed using Hestia, particularly the ability to scan the ancient locations and find out about what Herodotus says about them using GoogleEarth. Initially we thought that was accounted for by the fact that GoogleEarth was new to students and that they enjoyed the novelty of seeing the world from satellite. Rather than GoogleEarth’s novelty, most of the students were already seasoned users of the application. So it appears that Hestia was building upon their technological familiarity.

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Hestia Meets a Virginia (US) High School Latin Class: Part III

One of the ways that my collaboration with Hestia added to my own “pedagogical toolbox” as a teacher was working with Elton to design the survey.  The survey itself had to target a student audience and, at the same time, deliver robust information for the research team. I had a lot of experience and interest in writing good questions and assessments to evaluate student mastery, but I did not have a lot of experience thinking in survey metrics.

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