M. Willis Monroe

@willismonroe.com

1601 Followers 199 Following

Cuneiform Studies, History of Science/Religion, Quantitative Humanities, Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Co-Director of the Database of Religious History.

Schematic drawing of a plane with areas of damaged illustrating survivorship bias (from Wikipedia)
A chart of Munsell soil colors for the 10YR range
A crab in a riverine scene from a Neo-Assyrian wall-relief found at Nineveh.
Two people stand facing each other, other people are seated. This is a quaker wedding taking place in an old meeting house in Newport Rhode Island.
The cover of an issue of the New Farmer's Alamanac on a white table with a cup of coffee. The cover image is a paper cut image of an agricultural scene. The title of issue at the top of the image is "premonition".
A line chart showing amount of power supplied by the grid in blue and the amount of power generated by our solar panels in red. The second to last day on the chart has the red line above the blue line meaning we generated more than we used. A pinkish-red exclamation point was drawn on top of the graph at that point adding emphasis.
A screenshot of a Google sheet writing group tracker.
A selection of user avatars that can be used on Dogthr.com
John Wee's edited volume "The Comparable Body: Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman Medicine"
Meme based on an old Facebook UI the text reads "Marked Safe From" and then I've inserted custom content that reads "A book on the Ancient World having any chapters outside of Greece and Rome".
An image from the end of the article showing the team involved.
A screenshot of the front page of an article on Proto-Elamite
A white board with lines drawn across it. Each of the lines represents a division of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Students drew the lines and were asked to divide the epic into three parts.
A scatter plot (x-y graph) showing individual tombs in the valley of the kings. The x-axis is years BCE, the y-axis is the number of rooms. Each tomb is plotted indicating if it's a king, queen, or prince.
Two hypotheses about the valley of the kings, tombs get bigger over time and kings have bigger tombs than others.
Screenshot of the Theban Mapping Project website
I social network of the Old-Babylonian copper merchant Ea-naṣir drawn by students from his dossier.
A graph showing what types of tasks were asked by each discipline, Education tops the charts with 40.6% of questions being used for direct output creation.
"An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over." Questions asked of Claude when assigned to Bloom's taxonomy, students are using AI to create answers and submit work rather than understand hard problems. 39.8% of all questions were used for "Creating" the highest level, the taxonomy is supposed to show a pyramid structure standing firm, this is the opposite.
Breakdown of questions asked of Claude and their assigned "subjects" compared to percentages of undergrad majors. CS really stands out here.
The Robot at the Back of the Classroom: Student Engagement and Assessment under the Shadow of Generative AI (Workshop) Session Chairs: M. Willis Monroe, University of New Brunswick; Emily Hammer, University of Pennsylvania Description: Students and instructors across our disciplines have been impacted by the advent of easily accessible tools for generative AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). These tools present problems for traditional pedagogical methods and have a deleterious effect on students’ motivation to learn. However, these tools are not going away and their usage is only going to become more common. How can we teach, engage, and assess our students in this rapidly changing landscape? This workshop will consider the unique benefits that courses structured around archaeology and ancient texts can offer, including innovative pedagogical solutions that facilitate deeper engagement and more effective assessment methods. We will focus on three aspects of teaching in our modern pedagogical landscape: 1) How to assess students accurately despite the threat of generative AI being used in lieu of actual student work. This can involve various techniques from the basic switch to analog in-class writing or oral exams, to prompt injection in lecture slides. This is not just about catching academic dishonesty as such methods can result in improvements in pedagogical outcomes. 2) How to change our pedagogical structures so that generative AI is not an easy crutch or an attractive shortcut. This can involve substantially more discussion-based courses, flipped classrooms, and group research projects. 3) Potential ways to incorporate generative AI into the classroom. Our students in their education and careers will need to learn the potential benefits, harm, and limitations of these tools, as well as how to critically assess their outputs.
Three 3d-printed cuneiform tablets
A bibliography of the works authored by Edgar Banks taken from OIP 138.
A small wood stove surrounded by a fence in a living room, with a very happy cat sitting on an ottoman.
A screenshot from Ossendrijver 2012, pgs. 18-19 on the concept of zero in cuneiform mathematical astronomy.
Three 3d printed cuneiform objects from museum collections. One is the Babylonian "mappa mundi", another is a cone from the Sumerian king Gudea, and the final object is a large accounting tablet from the Early Dynastic period.
A bearded, bespectacled, behatted, two shirt wearing, watch sporting, assistant professor of ancient history standing in front of some bushes with arms crossed.
BM 34580 courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. This tablet contains a huge amount of astronomical calculations.
A screenshot of the first page of an article in SIGBOVIK 2024. The article has lots of cuneiform.
Photo of a translation of a cuneiform text that mentions "slow rain, so that the sandal was not removed"
A standard beer flight glass filled with red wine.
A very regal looking cat
Two x-y graphs on a chalkboard showing the size of tombs from the Valley of the Kings compared to the duration of a kings reign and when they died.
Wiktionary definition of "hautboy" a dated term for an oboe.
Hittite transliteration of the phrase: "What have we come to that a donkey can climb up (a staircase)?"
A screenshot of a wikipedia diff from 2004.
The results of the seriation exercise, a series of strips of paper arrayed on a table showing the full pottery sequence.
Seven page pdf of ancient pots generated with midjourney ai. This exercise will walk students through the idea of seriation.
Job posting for a Canadian historian position at UNB: https://www.unb.ca/hr/careers/posting/academic.php?id=2870
24 pages of a stratigraphy worksheet, each page has a archaeological stratum, each layer has different archaeological evidence suggesting an overall history of the entire site.
New Yorker cartoon showing a caveman exiting a time machine wearing a funny helmet and telling two cavepeople listening "I come from a hundred years in the future to warn you that nothing really changes in the next hundred years."
A sailboat with a red sail moving away from shore across the river.
A selection of buttons for Jr. Wobblies including a kitten with the phrase "An owie to one is an owie to all"
An ominous review on Google Maps suggesting that the reviewer is trapped in a boat somewhere and trying to reach the outside world.
A large black tarp covers a mound of dug up knotweed
A standard economic tablet with accounts, MDP 06, 210: https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/8010
Kuhn foils yet another plot to disprove his theory on scientific revolutions.