DITHERING ABOUT...

CAA 2009 Session, Web 2.0 and Art History

2009-02-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

The panel promised to be for those interested in Pedagogy and Technology, and upon reflection, I guess that is at face value what was delivered. I can't hide my disappointment that I was ready to hear fresh ideas, not reports of the trial and error variety. I confess that my expectations may have been set rather high knowing that smARThistory founders, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, were on the docket. I am an unabashed fan of their site. I am inspired by their approach sharing conversations around works of art with the widest possible audience. It is a model that stood out clearly from the others.

Their presentation, unfortunately constrained by an overstuffed six-paper-panel, was limited to a quick overview of the development of the project. It was surely useful for those unfamiliar with the site, and I saw admiring heads nodding around the room of around 75 arts educators. But I was a bit frustrated not to pursue some of the particular pedagogical challenges that they face, like exactly why is the survey textbook not being read, and why is smARThistory a better road to travel. Sadly, the question and answer session featured misdirected queries like: "how do you stop plagiarism" and "what is a blog anyway?"

All in all, the presentation by the folks at smARThistory seemed to be the only one that really offered fresh thinking. Their focus on object-based analysis might just be what other members of the panel could introduce as a model in their own courses to better engage students with objects beyond wikis and the like.

The Age Of The Ginormous Survey Textbook Is Finally Over?

2008-10-29T15:11:00.004-05:00

PART I - THE SURVEY TEXT

Could it be that age of the ginormous survey textbook is finally over? Surely the signs have been mounting. Only the most tired-tenured-tethered-to-the-lectern bunch could have failed to notice how expensive textbooks have become. (More on this in part II of my posts on the survey text.) Across the board prices have skyrocketed often for hurried, uninspiring new editions, from Janson, Gardner, and Stokstad et al. More astonishing is the lack of foresight on the part of big book publishers when it comes to integrating technology and education. For many of us, the internet has been an indispensable part of academic life for years now and we have been left wanting new tools to marry our mastery of the Web 2.0 world, useful in countless ways in our personal lives, with our professional lives.

Once upon a CAA meeting, I was ~~unlucky~~ fortunate to be part of a focus group on web technology in the headquarters of big publisher. I was really looking forward to the event in the hopes of sneaking a peek at the next great thing, only to be underwhelmed with yet one more online database of images. The saddest note of the afternoon was struck at the end of the meeting when they paraded in one of their techies, obviously the youngest employee they could locate, who proudly displayed art images from their new database saved as (proprietary) flashcards on his iPod. This highlighted for me the true lack of understanding as to what students need, and more pointedly the lack of fresh ideas to see beyond the printed book. The publishers treat technology like add-ons, shiny gadgets designed to dazzle.

We all remember our first love, mine an 8th edition Gardners - yikes. The story of the great survey text is a long one and while it may seem difficult to imagine art history without one, the time is now. We at Dithering About applaud the great work of the good folks at smarthistory.org to usher in the age of the online textbook. True to the spirit of collaborative learning, the smarthistory.org text promises to be a game changer. More than just links to images, it features thoughtful analysis through use of video, screencasts, podcasts, et al. In other words it plays to the strengths of the web. It reaches out to students of different learning styles and welcomes other scholars into the conversation. We are grateful for this bold step and have feel the shift happening.

I see this as a heroic first step, yet there is much more work to be done. I must admit my intital reaction is to wonder if a web-text can ever fully replace the survey textbook or might it act as a complement to some new incarnation of the survey? (Then again, I do read novels on my iPhone.) My concern stems from how I use the textbook in my survey courses. For me it acts not simply as a repository of images and facts, but as the authoritative voice in the room that I use to line up new theoretical information, e.g. "Stokstad writes this..." or "Janson claims..." Perhaps the smarthistory text, or something like it, might eventually be expanded to incorporate other established theoretical voices in an attempt to broaden the conversation.

So it goes with all great innovations come fresh challenges. We stand in awe, ponder, and get back to work.

(In part two I will deal with what is pushing the high price of textbooks.)

how can computers help us?

2008-09-09T12:35:00.003-05:00

A student asked me in class today why historians can't simply feed the symbols of an undeciphered language into a computer and have it translated into English for them. I'm sure that scholars of Linear A wish this were possible!

Computers are helping decipher aspects of Minoan culture in another way, though. The article below describes an exciting collaboration between a computer scientist and historians attempting to piece together fresco fragments at Akrotiri.

Perfect fit --Computer experts at Princeton are helping archaeologists reassemble fragments of an ancient Greek fresco

Scholar2Scholar Conference

2008-04-17T08:42:00.002-05:00

I attended the Scholar2Scholar conference at Drexel University yesterday: "How Web 2.0 is changing scholarly communication." Open source and open access were the words of the day. The keynote address, by Drexel chemistry professor Jean-Claude Bradley, had to do with "open notebook science," in which he makes his laboratory data immediately available for anyone to examine and critique or reproduce via a number of free and public online tools -- blogs, wikis, GoogleDocs, etc. A vocal attendee encouraged all faculty to get out from behind the barriers of course management software to make their knowledge and information freely available.

Bureaucracy and legal wrangling that this would necessitate aside, all this made me wonder how these things can be applied to art history instruction -- it's not as though we're working in a lab with these slides! But I've already created a GoogleGroup for my students for open discussion, and am hoping to get their input in using more publicly available sites, and social networks for learning about art history.

New Ideas of Interaction

2008-02-13T08:38:00.006-05:00

One of the major goals in preparing for my Spring semester was to reconsider my syllabi, testing and quizzing activities, and homework in my courses. I was involved in an online faculty workshop in the Fall that was focused on one of the hot topics of recent Professional Development... "Classroom Assessment." Though the course lacked a bit of stylistic sophistication, the material and discussion with colleagues was highly beneficial in reconsidering my approach in the classroom.

I continue to use our in-house digital image system for the majority of class meetings - I find that this helps me to avoid the rut of simply reusing Powerpoint presentations made from last year (and the static quality of PPT as mentioned in an earlier post by my colleague Brian). However, I have also made a conscious effort to include "specialty" lectures that focus on one particular moment, idea, event. And, in these lectures, I try to make sure to use other forms of media - the internet, videos on demand, or highly specialized and more dynamic Powerpoint presentations.

Though Powerpoint may not be ideal as a teaching tool (for me) in the classroom, I find it a very good medium for exams. When I think of my undergraduate exams - the purr of the projector at the back of the room, the nerves that would begin to pulse when you saw the professor head to the machine to advance the slides, and the knowledge that if you missed the exam, the make-up was likely to be a brain-wracking set of essay questions (after all, you can't expect that busy professor to sit with you for an hour and go through all of those slides again!), I realize how much Powerpoint has changed this process. With it's self-timing mode, we no longer have to "watch the clock," we no longer have to worry about burnt out projector bulbs or slide jams, and the rouble of make-up exams is made simple.

For a make-up, we can place a student in front of an office computer and Powerpoint can "administer" for us. There's no concern about the availability of a room with a projector or the dreaded essay make-up. Maybe they're too easy to give?

next best thing to being there?

2008-02-03T21:29:00.000-05:00

As art history instructors we've long been struggling with the shortcomings of using the two-dimensional reproduction to stand in for "the real thing." This was true of optical slides, and remains true of digital slides as well. And it's especially true of photographs of architecture, where it's nearly impossible to get a sense of the space and the scale of the work.

But new technologies, especially those online, can change all this, and offer us and our students new and better views of these places.

Check out this fantastic interactive tour of Sant' Andrea, which offers 360-degree views of the facade, and numerous interior spaces. If this isn't the future of art history, it should be!

How about virtually entering a reproduction of a space, built to scale? The Sistine Chapel on Vassar Island in Second Life does just this. If you're in SL, click on the link to teleport. More on art history in Second Life soon......

PowerPoint: Is This Really The Answer?

2008-01-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

Certainly I have used PowerPoint for conferences and special talks (and I continue to do so, grumbling all the while), but for day to day teaching I find PowerPoint to be more trouble than it is worth, especially when you consider that teachers must not only acquire images (or relevant content), but then also edit it all to work within PowerPoint. It would be ideal were teachers allowed to spend prep-time actually preparing lesson plans and shaping the intellectual content of their coursework, rather than negotiating PowerPoint.

Still another drawback with PowerPoint is that as a classroom presentation tool, it becomes little more than a digital slide projector. It's serial format allows teachers to only access images in the order in which they have been saved in the slide deck - which is impractical in a dynamic learning environment.

Let's be honest, teachers continue to use PowerPoint simply because it is available. I don't know anyone who claims to enjoy using it. It certainly appears clumsy compared to many of the latest more nimble Web 2.0 technology solutions that people have become accustomed to using online. Having said that there are still those who continue to find fresh inspiration with PowerPoint. In Japan they even hold PowerPoint competitions.

I get around PowerPoint by teaching with an in-house database of art images, which essentially interfaces like a website. From the beginning I chose not to use PowerPoint and I believe now more than ever that this was a wise choice as I see my colleagues wrestle the beast. Many confess to hard drives cluttered with folders of slide shows and images that were created for specific courses, but are often impractical to migrate from course to course. Then there are the most stubborn colleagues who use the same slide deck for every course and somehow make it work.

So while the trend toward larger online shared databases of images, like ARTstor, which is quickly becoming the standard, might solve the problem of a ready supply of quality images, the problem of presentation software remains. ARTstor's lackluster Offline Image Viewer - OIV - is unfortunately a PowerPoint-like interface that is not a significant move forward. So we wait.

Size Matters: Pozzo's St. Ignatius in Glory

2007-12-01T20:40:00.000-05:00

A digital photography studio in Italy (HAL9000) has posted a 9.9 GIGApixel image of Andrea Pozzo's St. Ignatius in Glory. Wow. Zoom in to see individual brushstrokes. This is what I've been waiting for! We need to teach from the good stuff.....

Digital Museums: Met is Tops

2007-10-20T06:50:00.000-05:00

Without a doubt, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City has one of the best museum websites. As a dedicated educational institution, their website has been at the forefront of the collection of digital images and of usable facts. Lately, they have been working on improving their search engines in order to make these images more accessible to the individual that may know that Van Gogh painted an image of the night sky, but may not know that it is called "Starry Night" or that it was painted in 1889.

Tags and labels seem to be the next step in their process. Rather than having to search for "Starry Night," one could search using tags; sometimes up to 1,000 tags per image, according to the New York Times. Would these same search parameters work in the classroom? Clearly, the base of knowledge in an Art History classroom is such that a professor would know the name of an artist or artwork, but what about other faculty who wish to utilize the database? Humanities faculty who need to teach Classical Roman Art, or the biologist who wants to use images of human figures throughout time to discuss body image?

In addition, though we, as Art Historians, think of these database systems as functions for art images, what about including things like scientific drawings, video clips, podcasts, etc.? The utilization of tags (a process that we have begun to investigate in our own database) seems like the most ideal way to make a system user friendly to the largest audience. Now the hard part...the tags themselves! It's easy for me to apply tags to Van Gogh, because I know where he should go...Impressionism, 19th century, French, Expressionism, etc. But now we have to also think like the non-art historian. How would someone else search for this work? Is this even something that we should do, or is this were the public forum comes in? Allow anyone using the database to add their own tags, thus making the system increasingly easy to utilize?

Social Tagging of Art in Philly

2007-07-15T19:42:00.000-05:00

Re: Sarah's post below....

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has just created a user-generated database of search terms for the works in its collection. Online users can tag objects, and these tags will organize and categorize the content for future web users. I believe this wiki-motivated, cream-floats-to-the-top approach can take us far in this e-world!

Techno-Tut: The Golden Age?

2007-06-27T16:13:00.001-05:00

We were lucky enough to have the King Tut blockbuster come through Philadelphia. There was much hype in the paper (for whatever that’s worth) about the integration of technology used throughout the exhibit, so I took my class to the show with high hopes of seeing something fresh and edgy. Word was this was to be a 21st century art exhibit that would not be such an educational bore (I assume like all the others?) It may be worth noting that the designers of the event are a production team whose last gig was putting on shows for Janet Jackson - I was certainly not expecting lasers or wardrobe malfunctions, but was prepared to be dazzled.

Your first experience of the show is more Disneyland than Educational – those lucky enough to have a $30+ ticket in hand are shuffled through a series of roped chutes and ramps until the gatekeeper permits exactly fifty bodies to pass into the exhibit at one time. Shuttled into a dark room you are greeted by security personnel, rather than by an Egyptian scholar or educator – you know the “educational bore” type. The security person treats you like you are waiting to go into the fun house, they do some shtick, ask you to turn off your mobile phones, runs down a list of rules and finally cue a three-minute introductory video on three plasma screens high on the far wall narrated by Omar Sharif! I have nothing against the man, but it had a hokey theme park feel that set a bad tone for the exhibition.

The show was populated by room upon room of traditional-looking museum cases replete with Tut artifacts, more anthropological than art historical. The introductory text projected on the walls between the rooms was interesting but there really was no evidence of anything resembling a technological display until the final room of the show where the body of Tut was projected in Hologram on a broad surface made to resemble a sarcophagus. I tried to be amazed as the Hologram displayed one after another projected layers of King Tut from the outer coffin to the body itself, but effect was so underwhelming I found that many people overlooked the display all together.

Overall, coupled with the disappointment of not seeing the death mask Death Mask that seemed to be displayed on all of the posters (it was actually a close up of a 6” coffinette that happened to look just like the mask), the show was a bit of a yawner and certainly not the 21st century groundbreaking show I have been waiting for.

Museum 2.0: Brooklyn and Beyond

2007-05-23T10:24:00.001-05:00

I went to the Brooklyn Museum over the weekend to see Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, newly installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It was impressive and beautiful, as I had imagined it would be.

In the helpful little booklet that described each place setting and the woman to whom it was dedicated were the codes for the cell phone audio content. After dialing the gallery telephone number, the code provides access to audio that further explains each setting with comments by the artist, or a curator from the museum.

Cell phone tours are a fairly new concept, although the underlying purpose is nothing particularly different from traditional audio tours. But what is new is that visitors can also leave comments for each piece, and the museum plans to incorporate in some way these comments into future broadcasts.

This makes me wonder: where does the museum stand in the web 2.0 world of user-designed content? Can we (should we) take this idea further? Where is the appropriate place for a "playlist" or "rate this work"? Users who like Richard Diebenkorn also chose Mark Rothko..... Based on your artists' ratings, we recommend the work of Helen Frankenthaler.... In what ways can this approach be helpful?

CAA and Digital Images

2007-02-25T19:05:00.000-05:00

At CAA in NYC a few weeks back, I attended a panel sponsored by the Visual Resources Association entitled "Practical Tips for the Classroom Instructor: Get What You Want from Digital Tools." It was a wonderful panel. The presentations were provocative and full of useful information, but what was perhaps most interesting was the reaction from the audience in attendance. It was glaringly obvious from the question and answer session how unprepared teachers seem for the digital revolution. There was a string of discussion-stopping questions like, "so if I want to digitize my slides where do I begin?"

Christine Sundt, a visual resource consultant on the panel, seemed to be speaking directly to this disconnect between those who are deep in the water and those still left standing on the shore when she said, "teachers should consider leaving the acquiring and manipulating of digital images to professionals." This is a striking comment. Does it represnt a new elitism or rather it is an honest appeal to the need to establish a standard of quality in digital images?

Of course, the question hangs like fire, where will the images come from? Are we to return to the publishing companies who are of late offering high quality images with new textbooks or pushed to licensing deals with the likes of Saskia?

in and out of the classroom

2007-02-20T11:45:00.001-05:00

All this digital technology also enables us to teach/reach our students outside the classroom. They can watch an enhanced podcast on their iPods, or get daily emails with art history news. And these art history learners might not even be our own students. Christopher Witcombe, who has mainted the Art History Resources on the Web site for years, has begun a series of "Art History in Just a Minute" video podcasts. The Last Supper episode has been downloaded more that 20,000 since December 2006, and the Mona Lisa episode was viewed 300 times in the first 30 minutes it was available. How far can we reach?

Pixel Power: Has Anything Really Changed?

2007-01-22T11:34:00.000-05:00

I love it all -- podcasts, rss, digital slides -- never met a wiki I didn't like. But do these things change the way we teach? Should they? I really value my interactions with my students, and I don't want any jpegs or gigabytes getting between us. What I think digital technology can do -- and what it is best at -- is to change the way our students learn.

Still a Place for Slide???

2007-01-22T07:49:00.000-05:00

Along with the ongoing discussion of the logistics of transferring images to databases (an issue that is striking hard at all colleges and universities in the US and the world), I also wonder about the persistence of the slide as a necessity. Should they be kept? Should they be whittled down to a smaller, more imperative collection? Will they, and should they, ever be completely discarded?

I must admit to being somewhat old fashioned in respect to this, firmly believing that we should, for the foreseeable future, have at least a small, essential collection of slides on hand. While the availability of the digital image grows, it is still currently on shaky footing. The issue of copyright notwithstanding, there are the issues of collecting images, quality control of images, and consistent upgrading that must be done. While we are certainly witnessing the end of slide use as many of us knew it, I'm not sure that the time has come to completely abandon the slide as a backup to technology!

What's a Slide Projector Anyhow?

2007-01-13T12:05:00.000-05:00

Teaching the Arts has changed forever in this digital age. This will be a space to discuss fresh ideas for the use of digital images and technology primarily in the classroom. We intend to discern a path forward to a new standard for the projection of digital images, presentations, and any other technological marvel that can improve our abiltiy to communicate to students in the classroom - and have fun doing it.
Welcome change. Join us as we go dithering about...