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.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Scholar2Scholar Conference
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
New Ideas of Interaction
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?
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?
Sunday, February 3, 2008
next best thing to being there?
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......
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......
Sunday, January 20, 2008
PowerPoint: Is This Really The Answer?
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.
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.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Size Matters: Pozzo's St. Ignatius in Glory
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.....
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Digital Museums: Met is Tops
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?
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?
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