Smarthistory: The Blog

Steven and I blogged the post below on the official CAA blog for last week’s annual conference in LA. We raised what we thought was an important issue and a few people responded (one publicly) — but since the “comments” function was turned off on that blog, we thought we would re-post here, in case anyone had anything to say about it!

Couldn’t we rethink this a bit?

The CAA annual conference has been enormously successful for many years, and this year is no exception. It brings a vast number of artists and art historians together, and clearly there is enormous value to be derived from that — the networking and employment opportunities, and the serendipitous meeting with new and old colleagues.

However, for the most part, the core of the conference – the Program Sessions — follow a model that has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century. Papers are prepared in advance, read, and if the session is well structured, there might be an active question and answer period afterward, perhaps with a discussant leading the way. It seems that for most sessions, the vast majority of time is taken up with the reading of carefully prepared papers with significantly less time allotted to either a discussant or active Q&A.

Maybe this needs some rethinking as a format? We were hoping we could begin to spark a discussion via this blog to solicit new models, perhaps some that might take advantage of new technologies? For example, what would happen if some papers were posted in advance in Commentpress – a format that allows for annotations on sections of text (this could be moderated, and open only to CAA members).Or, what about using Voicethread to extend conversations that began during a session? There may be numerous ways to employ technology to make our time together more valuable and to extend the session conversations beyond the sessions themselves.

The conversation about how best to do this might have taken place here on this blog, unfortunately at some point (and we just found this out), the comment function was intentionally disabled. This means that the format of this blog mirrors the principle format of the sessions themselves – something rather one-way, when it seems to us the point of us being is together is rather different…

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, 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?

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.