smARThistory

Please visit: Smarthistory.org

2009-04-26T16:23:00.004-04:00

Please visit Smarthistory.org and Smarthistory.org/blog. This blog is closed. Thank you.

Smarthistory Wins Prestigious International Award

2008-10-18T15:10:00.002-04:00

AVICOM, the committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), responsible for audiovisual, image, sound and new technologies awarded Smarthistory the gold medal in the web category at its annual competition on October 17, 2008 in Ottawa. Please visit our terrific new website at Smarthistory.org.

smARThistory wrinkle

2008-05-19T14:58:00.006-04:00

Dear smARThistory community, as you know, we started our blog here at blogspot and eventually moved to smARThistory.org. The following is a rather long update on recent events. Until we are up and running again at smARThistory.org, please visit us at our temporary site, smARThistory.us and thanks for your good humor and patience. Part 1: the .Org/.Us Fiasco! There has been a flurry of activity behind the scenes at smARThistory over the past few months and Beth Harris and I can finally bring you up-to-date. As many of you know, we created the domain smARThistory.org a little over three years ago and grew our blog and web-book content to the point where we were visited well over 100,000 times from over 100 countries. Little did we know that our modest success made our domain, smARThistory.org, a target of nefarious web domain pirates. When our domain registration lapsed for a few days last spring due to an email mix up, the .org site was bought at auction by a man in Armenia for a sizable amount of money, based, we later learned, on the traffic we had generated. We immediately requested return of the domain and investigated the rules set forth by ICANN and other agencies. But in the end, the auction was legitimate and the mistake was ours so we had little recourse. To make matters worse, the new owner of the domain kept our content up on his site despite our repeated demands that he respect our work and copyrights. He also began to post unrelated commercial advertisements, something we have never done. We were able to get Google Adsense to remove their ads but the site links began to break almost immediately and we feared our viewers would assume we were responsible for this neglect. In response, we immediately opened smARThistory.us and hoped our viewers would somehow find us there. We also continued to negotiate for the return of the .org domain even as it changed hands again. As of this week, we have it (and now have it locked in for the next ten years) and we are both breathing easier. We hope to have smARThistory.org up and running again within a few weeks (.us will then be redirected to the .org site). We are only thankful that it is summer and hope that most of our readers are not in session and were not inconvenienced. For those who were, we offer our sincerest regrets and hope you will return. We think you will be very excited by what you find here this fall. Update Part 2: A Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant Means No Tan This Summer But A Great Website Redesign! Thanks to the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, smARThistory was awarded a $25,000 grant. This has allowed us to work with Lotte Meijer, our brilliant information architect and Mickey Mayo, our unbelievably insightful and creative web designer (and their respective teams). Below are excepts from the proposal: Background smARThistory.us is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook. We began smARThistory three years ago by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images. We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web’s interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect. In smARThistory, we have aimed for reliable content and a delivery model that is entertaining and occasionally even playful. Our podcasts and screen-casts are spontaneous conversations about works of art where we are not afraid to disagree with each other or art history orthodoxy. We have found that the unpredictable nature of discussion is far more compelling to our students (and the public) than a monologue. When students listen to shifts of meaning as we seek to understand each other, we model the experience we want our students to have—a willingness to encounter the unfamiliar and transform it in ways that make it meaningful to them. We believe that smARThistory is broadly applicable to our discipline and is a first step toward understanding how art history can fit into the new collaborative culture created by web 2.0 technologies. Following this project, we will begin a conversation with other art historians to discuss different models for our own discipline-specific collaboration. Aim of Grant We have delivered and organized the content of smARThistory using the free, open source application, Wordpress. Out-of-the-box, it has been a very useful tool in the initial stages of our project. Because Wordpress is open-source, the look, feel, and structure of the site is entirely customizable. Unfortunately, our expertise as art historians does not include the requisite programming skills. This grant will allow us to use the summer of 2008 to engage an accomplished web designer, an information architect who focuses on museum education, and a programmer to work with us in order to improve the site’s design and usability by: 1. Reorganization of the content along Art Historical pointers (Chronology, Style, Media etc) 2. Redesigning the information architecture of the entire site for consistency and ease of use 3. Visual Redesign of the entire site for better ‘at-a-glance’ navigation and access a. Redesign the Homepage template to improve clarity and visual attractiveness b. Added tagging/search functionality c. Establish a modular structure to the site that can support future expansion 4. Creating a more rational back-end structure that will readily accommodate future content growth and added functionality. In the fall and winter, when these objective have been met, we will publicize smARThistory in a coordinated roll-out to increase use and engage additional collaborators. We plan to attend the 2008-2009 annual conferences of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, the Visual Resource Association in Toronto, and Educause in Orlando where we intend to present papers on this project. Further, we will continue to work with ARTstor and the New Media Consortium to promote smARThistory among art historians and related organizations. Update: As it turns out, on the recommendation of dragan, our Swiss developer, we are likely going to use MODx instead of wordpress for the web-book because of its greater flexibility.

This blog has been replaced

2007-08-18T23:57:00.001-04:00

Please visit our new and improved blog at smARThistory.org We think the new blog is much improved. In fact, we have two projects going there. The regular blog and our new web-book project (still under construction). The web-book is our attempt at an online multi-media art history textbook. We were never particularly pleased with Janson & Co. We've transferred pretty much all the old material from this blog so you shouldn't have to come back here. Thanks for your interest.

Visit our New Blog

2006-04-06T19:26:00.000-04:00

We have a new wordpress blog that we will be using from now on: www.smARThistory.org/blog

Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein

2006-03-23T14:51:00.000-05:00

And here we discuss this famous portrait of Gertrude Stein at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Van Gogh's Starry Night at MoMA

2006-03-23T14:17:00.000-05:00

Here are our observations about this famous painting, and the crowds that continually surround it at the Museum of Modern Art.

Goya, Politics and the Power of Images

2006-03-17T18:02:00.000-05:00

My online students got into a heated discussion about how Enrico Scrovegni, the patron of Giotto's frescos in the Arena Chapel, asked Giotto to depict him handing the chapel to the angels and Virgin Mary in heaven -- thus implying a kind of virtuousness about himself, that the students felt to be a kind of potentially false representation. So, we made this vodcast about how images can be used to support specific political agendas, focusing on the famous painting by Goya, The Third of May, 1808. Warning: There are some difficult images in this video that may not be appropriate for all ages. This is currently working in internet explorer and firefox but seems to have a so far inexplicable problem in safari. Click here to watch.

Sick and tired of the silence!

2006-03-08T19:40:00.000-05:00

Well, if women have to be naked to get into the Met, what do they have to do to get parity in technology-related work? It seems nothing will work. Pretty much everytime I mention this problem to both male and female colleagues at SUNY -- I am met with an uncomfortable silence, as though they are all sitting there thinking "ugh, here she goes again." Recently two committees were announced up in Albany -- in the Office of SUNY Learning Environments -- regarding the future of the SUNY Learning Network. Now before I write anything else, I want to say that I care deeply about SLN. I am grateful to be part of that community -- colleagues like Michael Feldstein, Patrick Masson, Ken Udas, Rob Piorkowski (and the other MIDs), and Alexandra Pickett (and many others that I am not naming here), make my job so much more interesting and challenging, and they have taught me so much. Anyway, these two committees -- the Executive Committee (which is about to make some VERY important decisions about the future of SLN) and the Technology subcommittee -- are (approximately) 75% men. I said something about this inequity at a conference call -- and no one -- no one! -- said something that indicated that they were also concerned about the issue. To her credit, Alex told me that she would relay my concerns to the subcomittee, but that's as far as I got. What's up with that? Why the silence? Whe the defensiveness (sometimes I get "Don't look at me -- I didn't do anything")? All I am asking for is some awareness of the issue and some effort toward affirmative action -- taking conscious steps to fix this serious problem. Just some concern, is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

MemoryMiner

2006-03-01T21:10:00.000-05:00

I was reading the kind blog post comments by Suhas Deshpande about our vodcasts, and found another blog entry there (by Corey Timpson) about a program called MemoryMiner. This is a way-cool application for creating storyboards from digital photos by tagging them (or pieces of them), annotating them, dating them, and linking them to a map. Here is a quote from the website: MemoryMiner is the first in a series of products by GroupSmarts, a company founded in December 2004 by John C. Fox, a recognized pioneer in the field of networked Digital Asset Management. The central idea behind MemoryMiner is a belief that the most interesting records of modern society and culture exist in analog form, "trapped" in boxes of old photos, letters and the like. It is clearly intended to be a way to create a history of one's family -- using new and old family photos. The long-term goal is to connect these histories to eachother. But it seems to me that no one has thought about the enormous academic potential for it. Think about it -- you could upload images from a period in art history, tag sections of the image (Mary, Christ, St. John, etc.), date the image, annotate the image, attach media files (audio files, vodcasts), connect the image to a geographical location (Florence, Siena, Padua -- you get the idea), then you could sort the images by the tags, and by combinations of the tags -- and what's so cool is this is done graphhically within the program, so if you just want images of Mary, you drag a pic of Mary into the filter area, of if you want images where Christ appears together with St. John, you drag both of them into the filter area. You could follow an artist's oeuvre chronologically the way you follow the life of your grandmother. You could follow iconographic elements within the image. The thing is, this requires a "skin" in order to take the xml data and images to create a truly inteactive web page. I don't think these skins exist yet. But just think of the authoring possibilities for students and faculty. Wow.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

2006-02-28T20:58:00.000-05:00

I was delighted to learn, rather late last night, that smARThistory was mentioned twice in the past two days. It was mentioned in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday by David L. Wheeler, titled "It's Not Your Father's Art-History Intro: Professors Talk About How They Are Shaking Up Survey Courses." It is based on pedagogic issues raised at last week's College Art Association annual conference. Susan Ball, CAA's executive director is quoted as are a three other art historian. Then smartest is mentioned, In a separate session at the meeting -- "Teaching Art History Online"--... Two faculty members at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, told about "vodcasts," a solution to the competition between text and images on a computer screen. The two teachers record audio explanations of the artworks that play while the students are looking at the images. Samples can be found at http://www.smarthistory.blogspot.com The second mention was very generous indeed. It was written by Suhas Deshpande, Technology Assessment Analyst for the Canadian Heritage Information Network, in his blog Technology & Culture he wrote in part: smARThistory blog: effective podcasting and vodcasting "Art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker have an incredible art history blog that features highly effective podcasts and vodcasts... Their podcast on Cezanne (Cezanne Still Life at MoMA) is informative and provocative at the same time, owing to Beth Harris's avowed lack of admiration for Cezanne.... This site is a model for museums and art galleries who would like to use podcasts and vodcasts to feature content from their collections." Technology & Culture (www.thirdplanet.com) is a terrific edublog that touchs on numerous issues that I find particularly important and is well worth a visit.

Manet's Olympia: a New Vod-cast

2006-02-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

Click here to watch our latest vod-cast about Edouard Manet's famous and scandalous painting, Olympia (1865). It was made with Artstor's Offline Image Viewer and Camtasia.

My first attempt at a walking tour podcast

2006-02-12T00:39:00.000-05:00

Download this podcast to your MP3 player and listen in front of the buildings being discussed. Start at the northwest corner of 6th Avenue and West 10th Street. If possible, listen on a color iPod, that way you also get to see the pictures. If you don’t have one, don’t worry, all you need to do is listen as you stand before the actual buildings. click here

2006-02-09T09:42:00.000-05:00

Febru-wary: Cupertino, Syracuse, Boston This month is out of control. Last spring Beth and I decided to submit a paper to a panel on online teaching, largely based upon our then upcoming conference, to the College Art Association’s annual extravaganza. CAA is, after all, the single most important annual conference for studio art professors and art historians. Our paper on the digital repository as active learning environment was accepted and all was well. I could, in good conscience certainly leave my graduate contemporary art students and my architecture students to undertake an appropriate assignment for the one class I would miss and I was grateful that my third class, a survey of modern art, is taught entirely online. What I hadn’t anticipated was that two additional February Wednesdays and Thursdays would also pull me from the classroom. As mentioned in a previous post, our presentation on podcasting was especially well received last December at the SUNY TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) conference. Alexandra Pickett, who was in attendance, asked that we deliver that same paper at the MID/AC Summit that she was organizing for mid-February. Since this was scheduled to take place on a day I wasn’t teaching, I agreed. Little did I then know that my spring schedule would be changed. Finally, David Porush Director of Learning Environments and all things related to DL at SUNY announced that he wanted Beth and me to join him and several SUNY colleagues including Michael Feldstein at Apple Computer in Cupertino to meet with their senior VP for education and discuss possible projects. I like to think that our podcasting efforts have finally been recognized by the anointed inhabitants of Silicon Valley, but, in fact, I have no such evidence. Needless to say I said yes even before the date was set. That was a mistake. The date for the trip to Apple was set without my input and it finally dawned on me that I would be missing three consecutive classes. I have never done that before and take the interests of my students far to seriously to let such a thing happen. I was on the verge of bowing out of at least one of these February jaunts when I finally recognized that the problem was also at least part of the solution. I will emphatically NOT podcast my lectures. Course-casting seems to me to be by far the least desirable use of podcasting. To simply record an audio or even a video file of a professor chatting away and then foist this upon innocent students seems to me a kind of torture. Lectures may well have some real value in the classroom but to deprive students of the ability to interact is to kill that value. Perhaps there are emergency situations where a course-cast makes sense, Tulane might make a persuasive argument, but being taken out to dinner by Apple doesn’t quaify. So here is what I’m doing for my History of New York Architecture class. The first week that I am away Dr, Celia Bergoffen, a leading urban archeologist, will teach in my stead. But in the second week, I will have my students download, via Itunes or my website, a series of podcasts that I have already recorded of a multi-part architectural walking tour in the West Village, though I still have to edit the files and upload them. Next week I will be adding an additional segment with Dr. Mathew Postal, a leading architectural historian of New York who works for the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Together we will explore the cast iron district in SoHo. So what will happen, I hope, is that each student will listen to our discussion in front of the building we are discussing thus taking advantage of the ipod’s mobility while giving the students the greater flexibility than a group walking tour affords. To overcome the unidirectional limitation of the podcast, that is, I speak, they listen, I have required that each student take four digital photos while on their private walking tour and that these photos then be uploaded to Flickr where the students are to add indepth annotations and can ask questions. The following week, each is to roam the city and populate our flickr page with buildings and architectural details that they find compelling. I find this a very powerful teaching tool. I get to actually discover not just what, but how the students see. I will thus have a semester’s worth of student-generated material to work with. My fingers are crossed. I’ll let you know how all this goes. .

Mary Cassatt's The Cup of Tea

2006-02-06T19:36:00.000-05:00

Here's another podcast -- this time about The Cup of Tea (c. 1879)by the American artist Mary Cassatt which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We talk about the freedom of the brushwork and the lack of narrative structure, features which would have disturbed most viewers in the 1880s. Click here to download or listen with the player below.

What do we NEED to learn? And when should we get to learn what we WANT?

2006-01-30T19:58:00.000-05:00

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Meets Beatrice in Heaven, 1852 (an example of what I wasn't allowed to study) Here are some thoughts and questions that have come up in conversations with colleagues: ____________________ What happens if we course-cast and students stop going to class? Why is that necessarily a bad thing (especially if "class" is a lecture in a large lecture hall filled with students passively listenting)? Maybe it will force teachers to be better teachers -- teachers that make their students want to come to class. Perhaps this is yet another way that teachers will become more accountable to their students. ______________________ From: The iPod Took My Seat - Los Angeles Times: "teaching experts say Internet-era instructors have to change tactics to combat in-class boredom and absenteeism. [one instructor] said he is working to enliven his lectures with material and interaction that students can't get on the audio or video 'coursecasts'; he wants to move to a Socratic teaching method and foster more discussion, while using technology to relay more of the basic information." ___________________________ And here's George Siemens's comment on the article above -- fearless about the loss of student attendence: George Siemens: "Personally, I don't equate attendance with learning. By now, it should almost be a requirement that course content should be available online - I don't book with hotels or airlines that don't offer online self-service (not sure if there are too many out there that don't have this option). Why would I take a course where online content and discussions aren't available? And if resources are available online, what does the classroom offer that can't be found online? I could see labs and practical demonstrations, some case studies, group simulations requiring attendance. Beyond that, most of what happens in a university lecture is equal to watching a video recording. The only negative I see: sometimes classroom schedules can keep students motivated and on task (so they don't get too far behind)." _____________________________ I have to say I agree -- why would I take a course without online content, when others offer me that benefit? But is it true that a video of a lecture is equal to sitting in class? Surely this is only true for large lecture courses with a hundred students or so -- surely a classroom run by a teacher who makes her class interactive offers more. Right? And isn't course-casting just using a new medium (well, new in that it is cheap, easy to use and mobile)to do the same old thing? What can we do with pod-casting that would re-think how we teach? And again -- back to the theme of my last post -- what will learning look like in the future? If students have more control of their learning, they will choose what they want to study. [Boy, would I have liked that. I was definitely the square peg in a round hole as both a graduate and undergraduate student in the US (in London, my Masters degree was very specialized and I was oh so much happier). I always wanted to study topics that were not in the canon of art history, and I wanted to approach the material from an interdisciplinary perspective. This was simply unheard of, and I was finally "allowed" to do it only in the most limited way. Who knows what direction my studies would have taken if these inclinations were indulged. And I see it with my daughter too, in fifth grade. Here's someone who already has interests and inclinations, but there is nothing really in the curriculum to nourish those interests.] On the other hand, perhaps not all students can or should be allowed to choose all their own courses, or perhaps only at a certain age, and after a certain amount of education? Maybe we still need a "core curriculum" so we can turn out citizens who are critical thinkers. So, is the core curriculum absolutely necessary for everyone -- and must it be the same for virtually all students? If students are given their choice of what to study, will they only choose what they know, and not challenge themselves to think critically. _____________________ Below is a passage from David Warlick's blog that is close to what I have been envisaging. What if we required only a "shallow" core curriculum and then let students take more control of their own learning (with the guidance of an instructor of course). Warlick also emphasizes (quite rightly I think) the uniformity of what we do: From Two Cents Worth "This is why I believe that our standards should be made much more shallow. Schooling should be responsible for assure that every student knows only that knowledge and those skills that create a productive context for the lives of all students. As a society, we must have a common sense of where, when, what, how, and why we live; and how our environment affects us and how we affect our environment. Schooling should also assure that each student has the basic literacy skills appropriate to the contemporary information environment. Students should spend a predominant amount of their time making themselves experts in areas of knowledge and experience that are especially interesting to them, and then sharing their gained knowledge and experience with other students. We go from a curriculum model that looks like a hall way that students move down, being saturated by a robust set of knowledge array of disciplines, with little integration of subject areas..to a curriculum model that that looks more like a sphere with the student in the middle."

The University of the Future

2006-01-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

I am reading Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace, by Leonard Mlodinow (2001). In a chapter entitled "The Legacy of the Rotten Romans," Mlodinow writes about Charlemagne attempting to revive the intellectual tradition of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and then moves on through the middle ages, discussing the first universities. What struck me was this description of a 14th century university: "The concept of a college campus did not yet exist. Typically, a university had no buildings at all. Students lived in cooperative housing. Professors lectured in rented rooms, rooming houses, churches, even brothels. The classrooms, like the dwellings, were poorly lit and heated. Some universities employed a system that sounds, well, medieval: professors were paid directly by the students. At Bologna, students hired and fired professors, fined them for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions. If the lecture was not interesting, going to slow, too fast, or simply not loud enough, they would jeer or throw things." Perhaps this is not so medieval after all -- perhaps it gives us a sense of the university to come? Will the campus exist? In what form? Will the results of websites like "ratemyprofessors.com" be that we will be as accountable to our students as the medieval professor? Will their relationship to us be more direct? Less mediated by an academic administration? As life-long learners, will students pick and choose more freely from an academic menu of sorts -- to attain the skills and knowledge they are looking for? One online course here, another there... Perhaps instructors should be fined by their students for being boring, late or not answering questions! This model implies that students will tell us what they need to learn, instead of vice-versa. Hmmm....

Cezanne Still Life at MoMA

2005-12-20T21:55:00.000-05:00

Here's another podcast from yesterday's trip to MoMA -- about Cezanne's Still Life with Apples (1895-8). And like with the Malevich White on White, we ask what it is about Cezanne's paintings that make them great -- and that make his work such a critical linchpin between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Right click here to download the mp3.

Branching out to MoMA - Malevich Podcast

2005-12-19T21:06:00.000-05:00

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) Today, we continued creating podcasts / audioguides -- this time for works of art in the Museum of Modern Art. We tried hard to stay away from lecturing, which isn't always easy. MoMA encourages visitors to create their own audioguides and they post their audioguides on their website. It is interesting to compare our podcast (in the form of a conversation) with MoMA's approach. Right click here to download the mp3 or use the player below to listen.

A Roman copy of an ancient Greek Sculpture at the Met

2005-12-15T21:52:00.000-05:00

Here is our podcast of this Roman (marble) copy of an ancient Greek (bronze) sculpture by the famous artist Polykleitos. The original bronze was sculpted during the classical period. Polykleitos was interested in a "canon" of proportions that would dictate how the human body should be represented at its most perfect and harmonious. This harmony was found both in the position of the figure (in perfectly balanced contrapposto) and in the harmonious relationship of the parts to the whole. This is a good example of the ancient Greek interest, during the classical period, in the idealized, young, athletic male body. Statue of Diadoumenos (youth tying a fillet around his head), ca. 69–96 A.D. Right click here to download the MP3, or listen using the player below.

Our SUNY TLT Presentation in Summary

2005-12-07T22:24:00.000-05:00

We presented a paper this morning titled “Pod and Video-Casting: New Strategies for Teaching with Images” at the annual SUNY TLT conference. In it we traced our interest in pod and vodcasting and began to explore related pedogogic implications. Below are a few of the issues that we raised: We are intrigued by podcasts for several reasons: 1. We want to use a technology that is ubiquitous in our students’ lives 2. We are interested in the mobility afforded by this technology -- the idea of the "classroom without walls" 3. We suspect it may help solve problems that occur when teaching with images online -- and one problem in particular -- the way we ask students to divide their visual attention between text and image Michel Foucault articulated part of the problem when discussing Rene Magrette’s painting The Treachary of Images, "Either the text is ruled by the image… or the image is ruled by the text… What happens to the text of the book is that it becomes merely a commentary on the image… and what happens to the picture is that it is dominated by the text… What is essential is that [textual] signs and visual representations are never given at once. An order always hierarchizes them…." The image is of a pipe, but the text tells us that this is not in fact an actual pipe. And the text wins out -- this is not a pipe, it is only a representation of a pipe. The text is the authority, it has a certainty that the image – even in all its clarity and precision -- lacks. And this is a certainty that we are reassured by, never mind that the text is no less a representation than the image. Since Moses (laws in hand) confronted his brother Aaron (golden calf not quite in hand), the immutability of text has held far more authority than the image with its ambiguous meanings and myrid interpretations. From "stepinrazor" at Flickr Never is this more true than in a museum where viewers can spend more time looking at a wall label than at the object that they are presumably there to see. In museums, in textbooks, in any environment where text and image coexist, does the text overwhelm the process of seeing? Do we stop seeing when we read? Do we only see what we have read about? Do we look only for what we’ve read about? Too often we don’t trust our emotional or aesthetic responses. Perhaps it is the very ambiguity of the visual image that is threatening, and the authoritative text of the curator removes that ambiguity. It tells us, we incorrectly think, what the painting means. So given this hierarchy, how can we help students to trust their own responses to a work of art? How can we avoid situations where students rely on the “authority” of the text written by the curator or instructor and don’t trust their own experience or what they see and feel before the work of art. How can we help them to trust their own reading? David Weinberger’s essay "Knowledge in Transition” posits that, Educators…face a different set of challenges….Their authority is in question since we've learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing... and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that's what conversation – and knowledge – is about. As educators we know that we can do this to some extent by fostering a safe environment for discussion. But perhaps more importantly, what we need to do, as Weinberger suggests, is to teach students how to “be good conversationalists” since the internet has further eroded the notion that any single source can provide definitive information. Modeling conversations is precisely what we do in our podcasts and in our camtasia videos. In online art history courses that rely only on text and image, we ask students to awkwardly divide their visual attention between text and image. When students must read our lectures about an image, how can they then also closely examine that image? As Foucault noted, pairing text and image can discount the image, students read about the image and only then look to the image for what the text has already explained – the text remains the authority and the image is not explored in its own right. Re-introducing voice in our podcasts allows word and image to exist simultaneously in our students’ awareness without diminishing either by reclaiming aspects of the conversation in the traditional classroom environment that allows conversation to overlay the image. We hear and see simultaneously. Our eyes rest on the image while we listen to each other. So, what kinds of audio do we already have available to us that explore works of art? Well, we have the audio-guides produced by museums, too often narrated by terribly pretentious curators or museum directors (inevitably men) who read from a script and in a sense simply produce a spoken text. We were worried that the overbearing authority of the curatorial voice would undermine our students’ tentative trust in their own emerging interpretive skills. We were inspired to do our own audioguides by both Artmobs’ alternative audioguides of works of art in the Museum of Modern Art created by a professor from Marymount College with help from his students, and by the work of the contemporary artist Janet Cardiff, who has for several years been creating art that are audio files that her audience listen to as they move through the streets of London, New York or the halls of The Museum of Modern Art. In sharp distinction to the typical museum audioguide, we conceived of our podcasts and our Camtasia videos as unscripted spontaneous conversations that take place in front of a work of art and foster a sense of exploration and discovery. We worked hard to overcome our natural tendency – as instructors – to become the authority. We did this by exploring images that we were somewhat unfamiliar with and by raising questions that were not part of the standard art historical discourse. Our aim is to empower our students to take risks, ask questions, and to trust both their eyes and their own innate analytic abilities. What we emphatically did not want to do was to create canned lectures for our students. Responses from our online students have been overwhelmingly positive. Not only are they pleased to learn what our voices sound like, but they are also grateful to briefly leave the largely text-based environment of the online class.

New smARThistory website and Edublog award shortlist

2005-12-06T15:17:00.000-05:00

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.

Holbein vodcast

2005-12-02T14:56:00.000-05:00

Here is our second attempt to create a vodcast, in this case a conversation about a work of art, using Camtasia. Click here to listen and watch.

Edouard Manet's Boating (1874) at the Met

2005-11-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

Here is our podcast of the beautiful painting by Manet of a couple boating on the Seine in the suburban town of Argenteuil. Right click here to download or use the player below to listen.

modeling learning?

2005-11-27T18:47:00.000-05:00

"Educators therefore face a different set of challenges. Very different. Their authority is in question since we've learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing... and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that's what conversation – and knowledge – is about." From David Weinberger, "Knowledge in Transition: How access is changing the very Nature of Technology," in Interactive Educator, Autumn 2005 via Weblogg-ed Some thoughts today about conversations -- modeling conversations is what we were able to do in our podcasts and in our camtasia videos. And if teaching is more about modeling learning than about content delivery, and learning happens in conversations with many sources, then our podcasts and screencasts model learning in an important way...

Gustave Courbet's Young Ladies from the Village (1852) at the Met

2005-11-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

Here's a brief discussion of a seemingly ugly painting by Courbet of three young women distributing alms to a young peasant girl in rural France, exhibited at the salon of 1852. The Daumier print below, The Bourgeois at the Salon, points out the irony of the "high" art at the salon while also poking fun at the well-dressed man who makes a real effort to grapple with it. Right click here to download the mp3 or use the player below to listen to the podcast.

On Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea at the Met

2005-11-05T17:09:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help but add the quotes below to accompany our discussion of Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ovid's Metamorphosis: Pygmalion had seen them, spending their lives in wickedness, and, offended by the failings that nature gave the female heart, he lived as a bachelor, without a wife or partner for his bed. But, with wonderful skill, he carved a figure, brilliantly, out of snow-white ivory, no mortal woman, and fell in love with his own creation. He marvels: and passion, for this bodily image, consumes his heart. Often, he runs his hands over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. he kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it; and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs, and is afraid lest bruises appear from the pressure. The day of Venus’s festival came...when Pygmalion, having made his offering, stood by the altar, and said, shyly: “If you can grant all things, you gods, I wish as a bride to have...” and not daring to say “the girl of ivory” he said “one like my ivory girl.” Golden Venus, for she herself was present at the festival, knew what the prayer meant, and as a sign of the gods’ fondness for him, the flame flared three times, and shook its crown in the air. When he returned, he sought out the image of his girl, and leaning over the couch, kissed her. She felt warm: he pressed his lips to her again, and also touched her breast with his hand. The ivory yielded to his touch, and lost its hardness, altering under his fingers....The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but uncertain, and afraid he is wrong, reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand, again, and again. ____________________________ Claribel Alegría, “Galatea Before the Mirror”: my perfection isn’t mine you invented it I am only the mirror in which you preen yourself and for that very reason I despise you. _____________________________________ Simone de Beauvoir: When I started writing -- it wasn't exactly memoirs, but an essay on myself -- I realized that I needed first of all to situate myself as a woman. So first I studied what it meant to be a woman in the eyes of others, and that's why I talked about the myths of woman as seen by men; then I realized it was necessary to go deeper to the heart of reality, and that is why I studied physiology, history, and the evolution of the female condition." ___________________________ Right click here to download the podcast or use the player below.

Different kinds of images to teach art history -- from Flickr

2005-10-22T12:15:00.000-04:00

Masaccio's "Tribute Money",
originally uploaded by adamtart.

One of the issues that came up during our presentation in the CET yesterday was using Flickr in class -- I used the annotation feature in Flickr to have students comment on the works of art that we were studying. Steven is using it this semester in his NYC architecture class. Students, armed with digital cameras or cell phone cameras take pictures of the city that relate to the material they are studying. Used in this way, as Steven explained, the instructor gets to see what the students are seeing, what catches their eye, what interests them. It bring class into everyday life in the city -- and the city into class in a more meaningful way.

Another way of using Flickr images that we have been thinking about is using photos like this one -- taken of major art historical monuments (like the Brancacci Chapel featured here) from a specific (tourist) viewpoint. What is valuable here is that we have a sense of the moment -- of the way these works of art are experienced in the early 21st century. As art historians, we are used to discussing the art in class isolated from any context (a common criticism of the museum) -- on a black background, viewed from straight on -- most likely not a view of the work of art that anyone ever had! What we show in art history class is therefore analogous to the divine view of the middle ages -- a view that showed us the world in a way that human beings, with their single, moving viewpoint never see. Photos like this one make us think about a new way of teaching art history, one that emphasizes the bodily/experiential/contextual aspect of viewing.
I've been collecting these in "My Favorites."

Camtasia adventure

2005-10-21T21:26:00.000-04:00

My fortune cookie today was uncanny, “Old associates lead to new adventures.” It was discarded after a lunch celebrating a terrific collaborative effort between myself, Eric Feinblatt and Beth Harris. We met together just an hour or so prior to our scheduled presentation in FIT’s CET (Center for Excellence in Teaching—our technology lab for faculty development). We were scheduled to discuss uses of multimedia in teaching and we were prepared to discuss exploratory work we had done using a variety of tools in the context of our own courses. These tools include Flickr, podcasting (using Audacity), and some preliminary work done with Camtasia. But Beth, in a flash of brilliance, suggested that we combine Camtasia with ARTstor’s OIV (offline image viewer) to move beyond the podcasts we’d already created at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for our online courses. We quickly settled on Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning as our initial victim. This, because I will soon be covering it in my online course, and I have found this collage especially difficult to adequately convey to my students. In our podcasts, Beth and I had stood before a painting in the museum, IPod with mic attachment in hand, and offered our students a spontaneous conversation about the work of art. What resulted was an unscripted discussion with a wonderful sense of discovery as each of us prompted the other to look anew. So the three of us sat down and we were now able to go significantly further than we’d been able to in the museum. Thanks to the OIV, some forethought, and Google, we were able to significantly reinforce our discussion with collateral images. Further we were able to zoom in and record our mouse movements--used largely as a pointer. This is an important advantage over simply placing descriptive text near the image and hoping the student can connect the two. The result, like with the podcasts, was an easy give and take that was meant to model for our students, the ways they might begin to freely explore works of art. As the three of us went to lunch after the presentation, we mused that if we created a Camtasia file with subsidiary documentary material, our students or anyone with a video IPod could stand in front of a painting in a museum and not only hear our analysis but also see sketches, variations and other supporting materials, truly creating a classroom without walls. Click here for the Camtasia video

Small Tools / Big Ideas Conference at FIT

2005-10-17T16:11:00.000-04:00

Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to blog about our October 7th conference held at FIT. The premise of the conference was to understand the relationship between digital repositories -- specifically image repositories -- and the plethora of possible instructional tools that could make the repositories spaces for active learning. There were over 180 participants from more than 75 institutions across the country. Rachel Smith, from the New Media Consortium began the day with a keynote that reminded us that what we think of as technology is simply a normal part of our student's natural environment and that we, as educators, should not cling to a sense of its newness and artificiality, but allow what we think of as "technology" to become as invisible as it is to our students. The morning session, "Big Ideas," looked at a variety of different types of repositories. Barbara Taranto, Director of the Digital Library Program at the New York Public Library talked about the incredible success of that project which averages over half a million hits a day. The images on the digital gallery may be freely downloaded for personal, research and study purposes. Barbara lauded the variety of new and different contexts in which these images could now appear and pointed to the ways in which, on sites like Flickr, the images were sometimes stripped of their metadata and decontextualized. Barbara posed this as an issue, asking us to think about what happens to the meaning of an image, and the uses it might be put to, when it is removed from its context. In essence, she pointed out that this use of images, which is already rampant, could be further magnified as images become a kind of free currency disassociated from their sources and original uses. Using wikipedia as a model, Barbara suggested that informed communities could make it their responsibility to enhance the meaning of these untethered images. What fascinated us about Richard Baraniuk's (Director of the Connexions Project at Rice University), talk was not just the learning object repository and builder that allows faculty to, in essence, share learning objects that they've created, and reconfigure them as courses, but also, the way in which this was going to impact the textbook publishing industry. Rich mentioned Lulu -- and the idea that faculty could now self-publish these recombined learning objects (covered by creative commons licenses) and distribute them through Amazon. We were particularly impressed that Thomson publishing was on-hand as a sponsor to engage in a continuing dialogue about the future of textbook publishing. In fact, since we both teach art history online, and therefore have essentially written course texts, we are thinking about publishing via this new medium. Although faculty will draw from a variety of image repositories -- those that are institutional and those that are licensed (like Artstor), it is clear that they will continue to develop and maintain their own individual collections. The project Henry Pisciotta (Arts and Architecture Librarian at Pennsylvania State University and member of the Advisory Board of LionShare) talked about -- Lionshare -- allows faculty to share images among eachother and across institutions using peer-to-peer software that can authenticate users and allow for federated searches. Carl Jones and Ben Brophy, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries talked about the intersection between the repository that MIT developed, DSpace (which is not configured well for images) and Stellar, MIT's learning management system. We were particularly interested in their efforts because of SUNY's work with uploading images from two SUNY campuses into DSpace to create a pilot digital image repository that can be shared across the 64 campuses of the State University of New York. After eggplant parmesan and some collegial chit chat, we reconvened for the second panel, "Small Tools," moderated by Michael Feldstein. Our idea here was to discuss tools that are important to making the image repository a learning environment and also to emphasize the necessity for interoperability. In our opening remarks, we used the metaphor of the repository as a planet orbited by different tools, that could be used as needed by faculty. The tools we focused on were an image annotation tool developed by Columbia's Center of New Media Teaching Teaching and Learning (not currently available outside of the Columbia community), Tuft's VUE, SFMoMA'sPachyderm, and Scholar's Box. At the end of the day, in the roundtable, Carey Hatch, Assistant Provost for Library and Information Services at SUNY, asked the participant (representatives from FIT, Artstor, MDID, and Almagest) to talk about integrating these tools within a digital repository based on their real-world experiences.

A Picture Share!

2005-10-07T15:12:00.000-04:00

A Picture Share!,
originally uploaded by beth h..

Giotto's Epiphany (The Adoration of the Magi) at the Met

2005-09-18T20:57:00.000-04:00

Yet another podcast about a beautiful painting by the great trecento artist, Giotto. Click here to listen.

A podcast about an Ancient Greek Vase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2005-09-18T07:28:00.000-04:00

This next podcast is about the Attic red-figure painting of the fallen hero Sarpedon on an ancient Greek calyx-krater from the archaic period (ca. 515 B.C.), painted by Euphronios. We discuss the shift from black-figure painting to red-figure, and the gradual move away from the archaic style, which was influenced by the ancient Egyptians, to the more naturalistic style of the classical period. Right click here to download the Podcast or listen using the player below. My Odeo Channel (odeo/140a758b88e02a51)

Carlo Crivelli Podcast

2005-09-04T00:44:00.000-04:00

Here, in our second podcast attempt, we discuss one of the Carlo Crivelli's at the Met. Right click here to download the mp3 or listen with the player below.

podcast beta

2005-09-03T12:44:00.000-04:00

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Young Girls at the Piano, 1892 (Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art) This is our first attempt to publish a renegade museum audio guide, inspired by the folks at Marymount Manhattan College --http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/ Any opportunity to undermine the museum's deadly meta-narratives is enormously appealing and so we couldn't resist. We are particularly interested in the potential for podcasting in higher education, and specifically for distance learning. Please right click here to download the mp3 or listen to the podcast on the player below, and let us know what you think.

My first use of Flickr in class: Campin's Merode Altarpiece

2005-07-29T20:22:00.000-04:00

Central panel of the Merode Altarpiece by Campin, originally uploaded by beth h..

Here's my first use of Flickr in my online Survey of Art History class. Students added comments and most importantly, added their own annotations to this image and other details of the Merode Altarpiece. A successful experiment -- but difficult to keep track of student work (some students didn't follow my instructions to choose a username that I would recognize), and of course one or two students just had trouble using Flickr. But all in all, I think they enjoyed it.