Reflection on PBL: Ostia Antiqua

Well, our first project has been presented! I'm glad that our team worked diligently until the very end in order to make a great presentation. I think we served the objectives by creating legitimate Cd's of useful Italian phrases for student involvement and future use. I think our presentation was engaging, although it could have used a little more pizazz (something to work towards next time). Finally, I can't wait to see Ostia Antiqua in person on our trip to Rome in December! Learning about it's people and their lifestyles will help me to imagine the grandiose arrangements of some and the bare minimum of others. I believe that they lived alot like we do today:

• we still worry about our borders (as Ostia was a key port of Rome it had to be carefully protected from enemies)
• we still learn reading, writing and arithmetic then continue to college to become professionals in our field (although I am glad that women continue going to school today)
• and we still trade with other countries

My business professors talked in class about how our world is becoming smaller and smaller by the minute do to technological advances and increasing competition from other countries. I agree with them, however I think that our world has always been a global enterprise seeing as Rome traded with its neighbors many, many centuries ago.
Overall, I do not think our group took this project to its full potential, but I think that is the point of this class: when presenting a topic, how will you solve the original problem given, how will you have the topic relate to your target audience, and what would you do better next time. Problem based learning isn't about getting the correct answer (which is what I though it was until now), it's about learning from your answers to make yourself a better person, presenter, whatever it might be that is a weakness. On that note, I think on this next project I should concentrate more on time-management. I feel like I presented my topic well, but could have done a better job if I had focused more on the problem at hand towards the beginning of the assignment.

Ostia Interesting Facts

So going through the research, I found some interesting facts about the people of Ostia.
1. Ostia Antica is a rather large city as it was Rome's main port for global merchants and world-transportation.

2. Some excavationists say that it is better preserved in comparison to Pompeii.

3. The residents formed collegia which were groups of men within the same profession. These groups would support political leaders and lobby for benefits for the community.

4. An average family consisted of a father, mother, daughters under the age of 15, married sons, the sons' families and slaves. In the days of the republic, the father was the absolute head of the family. He could even sell his children into slavery! He could arrange marriages for his daughters when they were only 12 to 15 years old! He would do this for the money it would bring to his family. The young boy and girl had little to say about it.

5. If your family was endowed enough to educate you, tutors would come to the house or you would attend a private school teaching writing, reading and arithmetic.

6. However, only the rich could send their children to school and have slaves wait on them. His home may have looked like the Roman house shown in this picture.

7. In the 100's AD, people in many parts of the empire were becoming Christians. Like the Jews, the Christians believed in just one god. They worshipped only their god, and would not worship the Roman gods or the emperor. Romans were usually tolerant of other religions within the empire. However, when the empire began to have severe troubles, emperors tried to force people to follow the Roman religion. For Jews and Christians, this often meant sacrificing everything they owned, even their lives for the sake of their beliefs!


8. By the time of the Roman Empire, the Romans were sending ships to the far corners of the ancient world as they knew it. In Italy farmers grew grain and planted olive groves and vineyards. Olive oil and wine were shipped to cities throughout the empire. As the empire expanded, olive oil and wine were also produced in Gaul, Spain, and North Africa as well as Italy. Which meant lots of activity in Ostia!

9. The English surname "Chapman" actually comes from the man who used to call on houses and collect urine from people. His hands were invariably chapped from handling the stuff so he was called the chapped man. Sorry to my cousins the Chapmans!

PBL Assignment #1

For this group project, my group and I were assigned the city of Ostia Antiqua. We brainstormed different areas of research and then categorized them all. Four areas were apparent: town history, city culture, ancient construction and present excavations. I gladly took city culture to be my reign of expertise for this presentation.
I LOVE learning about other people. Now, I'm not a stalker or anything of the sort; however I love to imagine being in other places. Let me tell you: reading fictitious stories about the places you've been or even making up your own stories, allows you to visualize the surroundings, the emotions of the character and the sense of being in the plot line.
So, I undertook Ancient Roman Culture and more specifically those traditions and daily activities found only in Ostia Antiqua. How did they live? What did their house look like? Who was around them? Education? Religious Ritual? What was a typical day for a rich man, poor man or a young child? What was of value to them?