New smARThistory website and Edublog award shortlist

While this blog may hopefully have some value in its natural additive or sequential form, it may also be useful to offer a more static companion website. The smARThistory website includes a floorplan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and locates the works of art that are the subjects of our podcasts. Our intent is that these podcasts are uploaded to mp3 players and then played in front of the original object. This takes advantage of the mobility of this technology and truly breaks down the walls of the classroom, but to what advantage? Surely, primary to the technology that we all take for granted is the infinite reproducibility of text and image. Is it perversely archaic to return to the singular historical object? Or, is there value to be had from marrying the two? Just prior to the opening address of the annual SUNY TLT conference, Michael Feldstein, Assistant Director of Blended Learning for SUNY Learning Environments and author of the superb blog, E-literate, leaned over and said, “congratulations!” I was, as is often the case, confused. Michael kindly explained that this blog has made the Edublog 2005 Awards Short List for blog for best Audio and/or Visual Blog. Yikes! Please feel free to vote for us! We will post the outline of our talk tomorrow on pod- and vod-casting just as soon as it is written.