Month: November 2012

Dura Europos and Me

Dura Europos

Thanks to Evernote, I’ve been able to digitize most of the notebooks I’ve written on Dura Europos. I know take digital notes on the small city, but thumbing back through my Moleskine notebooks full of clippings and hand written notes makes me feel a bit like Indiana Jones with his father’s collected notebooks on the Holy Grail.

In many ways, Dura is like my holy grail.

I started studying the city while working as a curatorial assistant to Susan Matthews at the Yale Art Gallery while doing my graduate studies there in ancient religious art. In fact, my real first job was to spend time with the thousands of objects that Yale has in its warehouses and the gallery basement and lovingly “digitize” Yale’s collection of slides, objects and paintings from its involvement with the excavation of Dura Europos in the 1930’s. It was magical.

I still go back to those dark and stuffed basements and warehouses full of artifacts, beads, paintings, statues, detritus and debris in my mind and realize what a chance Prof Matheson allowed me to fall in love with a place.

Ten years later, I still want to go:

Dura-Europos, a Melting Pot at the Intersection of Empires – NYTimes.com: “As a city of extraordinary cultural diversity,’ said Jennifer Y. Chi, an archaeologist and the exhibition’s chief curator, ‘Dura-Europos has great resonance for the modern world, where multiculturalism shapes the very nature and quality of daily life.”

Here’s a nice interactive site on Dura that the Yale Art Gallery has put together with maps, images and descriptions. I highly recommend checking it out.

I would share my Evernote notebook with you all
 but would Dr Henry Jones Sr share his holy grail notebook? Nah.

Why Teaching is Dying

How could anyone think this is a good idea or a way to produce “great” teachers?

Getting an Earful—of Classroom Management Training – Rules for Engagement – Education Week: “Teach For America is using one tool that works live and in the moment to advise teachers as they work with their students. Teachers are fitted with earbuds, while a mentor equipped with a walkie-talkie watches them in action, giving them cues and suggestions in real time.”

Shameful.

iPhone Passes Outlook in Email Usage

Email marketing is an essential part of what we call Discovery Marketing. Retention is the new acquisition, after all.

We love to use resources like MailChimp or ConstantContact to help our clients find the best relationships with their customers or users. Often, we get questions about HTML emails and pretty graphics as a part of those campaigns.

We like to caution people to remember the mobile component and how much customers are using devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android devices to perform tasks like checking on email during the day, during a sports event or in the evenings.

In many ways, the iPhone and competing devices have re-opened the possibilities for email that programs like Outlook slowly smothered.

And here’s some more positive news about email usage on the iPhone that bolster our point…

“Email marketing campaigns have been a classic marketing technique since the rise of the Internet. Traditionally, people would use their computer to open up an email client like Outlook or Hotmail and sift through the contents of their inbox. Now, more people are accessing and opening emails via mobile devices than ever before. In fact, a recent email experiment in which one billion “opens” of emails were examined shows that the iPhone accounts for most email opens, more so than Gmail, Hotmail, and Windows Live combined.

So, yes… use email marketing.

But keep in mind those of us that routinely use iPhones etc as our preliminary email processing machines for real effectiveness in your campaigns!