smARThistory

Friday, April 25th was tech day at FIT and it was a huge success thanks to Beth Harris.

She had been advocating for a day to be set aside for the entire campus to explore new technologies for at least 4 years and yesterday she made it happen––really well. The emphasis was on immersive technologies and the entire program was relevant, thoughtful and really exciting. By my reckoning, nearly 300 faculty, students and administrators attended as well as many who came from outside FIT. This event raised the bar for us and showed conclusively that our faculty and students are hungry for technologies that will support their teaching, learning and research. We now have a critical task before us, namely putting into place an infrastructure that can support and foster creative uses of technology for our teaching and for our industries. But as in any institution, vested interests can hamper even critical strategic needs. Beth made the case yesterday in the strongest terms, now we need to follow through.

Conference program

Well, about two years ago Michael Feldstein suggested building a museum in Second Life for FIT, and I wish we had done it two years ago, but late is better than never. And it’s not quite a museum, but a room (thanks to some free builds from the NMC) on the FIT land with two video monitors, one plays 13 smARThistory videos, and the other is a single video poster. Many thanks to Bucky Barkley for his great and easy-to-use video players.

Now you can go into Second Life and have a seat and watch some smARThistory videos. We’re located at Teaching 2: 144, 198, 24

The VAM (Visual Art Management) senior class did a great job on their podcasts last week at the Courbet exhibition at the Meropolitan Museum of Art. Here they are. Great work guys!

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 1 [4:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 2 [3:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 3 [5:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 4 [4:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 5 [2:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 6 [6:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast Courbet Exhibition: 7 [6:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition: 8 [4:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Students at the Met after Podcasting [0:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Vam Students at the Met after Podcasting [2:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast - Courbet Exhibition 9 [8:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VAM Student Podcast -- Courbet Exhibition 11 [6:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Well, I have to say Cozimo is one cool tool. My students had the option to use it in one section, and their comments were nearly all very positive, and Keith Lynip, Director of UMOnline (University of Montana) saw it here and thought his faculty would be interested (he forwarded it to someone in the Media Arts department).

Here are some student comments:
I actually really like this form of posting. It’s very interactive and the viewer can physically see what I am trying to describe.

I liked this because we are able to talk about the painting more and understand it better.

So, the question is, why does higher ed not demand tools of this caliber from the Learning Management Systems we pay so much money for? Why isn’t something like this a plug-in for Blackboard or ANGEL? Why are we stuck with the clunkiest tools in education, while the rest of the world gets great tools like Cozimo, or Voicethread?

I wish ARTstor would develop social tools. I understand that they developed the Offline Image Viewer primarily because of copyright restrictions on the images. But hell, someone needs to develop social tools for talking about images for higher education!

I’ve been talking to Stuart Feldman of Cozimo, and he has been extraordinarily helpful and interested in seeing how Cozimo can help educators.

Here’s the interesting part. We discussed how to use it in my class, and the kinds of instructions I would need to give my students about setting up an account, and walking them through the tools. I was going to use it in the module that opened nearly two weeks ago, but the thought of sending out emails to the students, inviting each of them as a “contributor,” making sure they each set up an account. I didn’t have time to deal with that hurdle. So, I just set up a page right here on the blog using the WP plugin and announced it on the course home page in ANGEL — with a link.

So, here’s the thing, tools like this are great. But it’s so hard to ask students to set up yet another account, and deal with additional functionality we are not going to use. I realized how appealing the mashup is — bringing all the tools and information you want to a single place. It also made me think of the value of very simple tools, without a lot of bells and whistles. Cozimo (not the plug in, the site) has a very clean interface and is very user-friendly, but there is something wonderful about the simplicity of the plug-in.

What’s a teacher to do?

Loading Real-Time Interactive Collaboration Environment...ToolsChatCollaboratorsClearSync: OFF

ok — I am blown away by photo-synth. Maybe I’m just an image-whore? Read my post on the tdt blog about all of the above.

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

I was lucky enough to be invited to ARTstor for the day recently. They invited a handful of faculty to talk to them about how they use ARTstor, to try out the new version of ARTstor, and to talk about ARTstor’s future. As always, it’s great to talk to the hard-working and dedicated folks there, fighting to make images accessible and easy for us to use in the classroom. How can we thank them enough for fighting our battles for us?

I am always surprised at how few people use ARTstor live, instead preferring the Offline Image Viewer, which seems somewhat dead to me. It’s a great tool, don’t get me wrong, but having ARTstor live feels so much better to me. The images seem so much less static. Maybe its getting rid of that dead black background, and instead having the background of the web browser. Also, I think there is a tendency not to use the zooming feature while in the OIV.

It would be so great if ARTstor could devote more resources to building social tools into the image library. What if we could see what other instructors are using for comparison images? Or links to other related content, or discussions about teaching strategies around different images? After all, if the goal is to make us better teachers, perhaps ARTstor can help us open up our classrooms so we can learn from each other. Right now, using using digital image libraries remain a very isolated experience, much more isolating in fact, than the slide library was. Steven Zucker and I have written about this in a forthcoming publication.

Anyway, thanks ARTstor… we’re all very grateful.

Whew! Did this one by editing the audio in Garageband, then saving it in iTunes, converting it to an mp3, bringing that into Camtasia, and then using the zoom and pan feature which is a lot of fun.

Click below to watch the video of this painting at MoMA.

Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911 (MoMA) [9:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As many of you know, we have been working on creating a “sister” site to this blog—smARThistory.org/site. We hope to create a dynamic multimedia enhancement (or even substitute) for the static art history textbook. We think the big traditional textbooks, which try to create a one-size-fits-all solution but too often create a generalized narrative are simply too expensive and not very engaging. We are looking for art historians interested in contributing to the smARThistory site. We are less interested in original scholarship, than in effective teaching content which uses the more personal voice that we tend to use in the classroom. Collaborations are also welcome, as we have discovered that conversations are a remarkably effective way to teach students how to look at and analyze a work of art. If you are interested in contributing text and/or audio/video, please email beth_harris [at] gmail.com and drszucker [at] gmail.com with a brief C.V. and the topic to which you would like to contribute.

Beth Harris & Steven Zucker

An enhanced podcast about Barnett Newman’s Onement, I, 1948 (MoMA).

Newman, Onement I [5:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Click below for a video of Mark Rothko’s No. 3/No. 13, 1949 (MoMA)

Podcast Video [5:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download