Smarthistory: The Blog

Last week, Beth and I delivered a paper on the future of higher education at an experimental conference in ScienceSim, an Open Sim virtual world supported by Intel. The conference went off quite well thanks to Shenlei Winkler, its thoughtful and extremely capable organizer. We titled our presentation “The Future of Education: what will open, three-dimensional learning look like?” One of our leitmotifs concerned the pressures faced by universities, some of which are giving away their lectures in the form of video (see Academic Earth, Lecture Fox at Yale, Stanford to Go, etc.) even as tuition is raised to unsustainable levels.

We pointed out that since the 1970s, colleges and universities have produced far more Ph.Ds than the academy could possibly absorb and that because of the greater reliance on adjunct faculty, this trend has continued. In the days since the conference, and quite independently, a discussion thread has developed on the listserv, Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians (CAAH) titled, “On the joys and desperation of art history.” It has been heartrending to hear the struggles of young academics and older, now wiser adjuncts that never did land a tenure-track job. One issue that both the listserv thread and our conference paper have in common are the implications of “Plan B;” the alternate career paths taken out of necessity.

These highly trained professionals have taken jobs in libraries, museums, and other centers of learning beyond the university. At the same time, Web 2.0 technology has created the opportunity for publishing, learning and collaboration anywhere and has empowered these wayward academics. The demographic force of these Ph.D.s coupled with technology, and other pressures is enough to ensure change. Perhaps academia has assured its own creative destruction. Here is my contribution to CAAH:

As nearly everyone has acknowledged, the implications of the trends we are discussing in “On the joys and desperation of art history” are extremely important to the future of our discipline and the humanities as a whole. I want to ask these questions in a slightly different way. What are the implications of a generation of Ph.D.s that find alternate careers in libraries, museums, and other, non-traditional research and teaching environments? Many of the highly trained art historians who work outside of the university will find ways to join together their training and their new careers and they will “teach” and “research” in ways that may not have developed within the academy. We see the education departments of museums now hiring Ph.D.s and being quickly transformed and we see libraries taking on increasingly public roles in research and education (all of this aided by advances in technology). Maybe we should not mourn the loss of the academy of the 20th century but rather focus our collective attention on embracing and supporting this broader universe of scholars.

Perhaps this is too optimistic, but we worry that simply chasing the jobs of the last century will not allow our discipline to survive the next.

Here is the slide show from the conference:

Its been about a year since we launched the latest iteration of Smarthistory.org and I thought I’d post some of the usage statistics gathered via Google Analytics. Over the past year there have been 426,135 visits to Smarthistory with 993,419 page views from 196 countries and territories. We know that our users are students, teachers, museum visitors, creative professionals, travelers, and other informal learners.

Here are the top 25 college and university users based on institutional network visits (most frequent first):
1. Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
2. Harvard University
3. Columbia University
4. University of Florida
5. New York University
6. University of Wisconsin
7. Savannah College of Art and Design
8. University of Georgia
9. University of Rhode Island
10. University of California at Berkeley
11. California State University Network
12. University of Bristol
13. Brigham Young University
14. Rochester Institute of Technology
15. Northern Arizona University
16. Yale University
17. Syracuse University
18. Rutgers University
19. Pratt Institute
20. University of California Los Angeles
21. University of Texas at Austin
22. Art Institutes International
23. University of Missouri-Columbia
24. Penn State
25. University of Colorado

Thank you so much for your interest and support. If you haven’t done so already, please take our very brief survey and help us make Smarthistory.org better.

Last week I had the pleasure of talking about Smarthistory.org’s conversational technique with 15 teachers from public schools across the country. They had come to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the week-long Clarice Smith National Teacher Institute, held from August 3-7, 2009. Their objective was to learn how to use art to teach across the curriculum, and our New Media team’s role was to give them some new technology skills for the classroom: blogging, podcasting, and incorporating multimedia into classroom powerpoint presentations.

[Link here to the slides]

But to underscore that the technology is but a vehicle for the content, I couldn’t resist talking a bit about interpretation and different approaches to audio content design as well. We looked at scripted content, which should be more like blog posts written for the ear than recorded versions of object labels; interviews with experts such as artists or curators – always a favorite with audiences; and ‘vox pops’ that incorporate visitors’ opinions, for example, as is common in SFMOMA’s Artcasts; and conversations about art, like SmartHistory.org’s.

To illustrate the conversational approach, I played Beth and Steven’s podcast about American artist Mary Cassatt’s 1894 Breakfast in Bed in the Huntington Library in California, and we talked about how the informal dialectic space models learning, inviting the listener to join the conversation and develop his or her own views of the artwork. Even the speakers’ early disagreement in the podcast about which town they were in serves to reinforce this useful information about the Huntington, while lightening the tone and lending the podcast an approachable atmosphere.

We also looked at the context in which listeners experience the audio content: are they moving through the museum, sitting in the classroom, or on a bus? Are they looking at an artwork or a high-quality image of it online, or is this mainly an audio experience? And is the best vehicle for the podcaster’s message a traditional audio tour ‘stop’ or ‘soundbite’, that focuses on a given artwork in-depth, or is it an overview of a gallery (like this one Beth & I experimented with at the IMA), exhibition or theme that immerses the listener in a ‘soundtrack’ to provide a higher level guide or general tools for understanding an artist, a collection, a period?

Whatever their tack, I recommended that the teachers start with the questions that come immediately to mind for their students when they confront the art under consideration. These will range from the empirical ‘what is this?’ to the philosophical ‘why is it important?’ questions, and will be inflected by the specific content and context of the art. Here are some we collected from visitors to the folk art section of our Luce Foundation Center, an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects in a compact space over three floors of the Museum’s west wing, where we are in the final stages of creating a cross-platform audio tour:

1. What makes folk art, ‘art’? How is folk art different from fine art? Why is it in museums?
2. Who makes folk art? What were the people who made it like?
3. What do the symbols mean?
4. Where does all this stuff come from?
5. What is it made of?
6. Why are fishing lures considered art?
7. What is up with the penguins?
8. Where did all these fish come from? One person or lots of people?
9. I’d like more information about the “memory” idea about the ceramics that have the stones and other objects. Could you give an example from one of these pieces?

The ‘leading with questions’ methodology could come straight out of a market research or customer service manual. By responding to what your listeners have foremost in their minds, you engage them in a mental dialogue that then opens up a space where other ‘key messages’ can be more easily received as well. You validate their questions and interests, so they are more likely to want to listen to what else you have to offer.

Of course the best way to learn is to teach, so another interesting use of audio in the classroom is having students create their own podcasts. The Education Department of the American Art Museum has a very popular student podcast program, in which high school students record their reflections on selected artworks in the collection. Through the process of creating a script about an artwork and listening to their own words, the students’ writing skills improve immeasurably, in addition to their visual arts literacy.

I am now relishing the vision of podcasting and the SmartHistory.org conversational technique being refined throughout American classrooms and engaging future generations more deeply with art through the students that the Clarice Smith teachers will touch. I hope they’ll be as generous in sharing their tips and best practice with the community of art educators as Steven and Beth have been with me!

About Nancy Proctor
Formerly Head of New Product Development at Antenna Audio, Nancy Proctor is now Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She also manages MuseumMobile.info and its wiki and podcast series on mobile interpretation content and technology for cultural sites. Nancy was recently appointed Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal.

Newspapers and wire services have been running stories about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students and even younger kids. The articles tend to cite California’s serious budget woes and the price and weight of the traditional textbook. Unfortunately, they are quite vague about what the digital texts will look like. At Smarthistory.org, we hope that California and others look beyond the familiar organizational structure of the textbook and its analogue finding aids. Open textbooks ought to take advantage of the web’s inherent strengths and allow users to organize material in numerous ways while pointing outward to high quality resources elsewhere on the web. Hopefully, these new resources will seamlessly incorporate multimedia allowing users to listen, read, watch and most importantly respond. Here is an opportunity to directly engage students, allowing them initiate or join conversations both in and outside the confines of the text. Hey, that sounds a bit like Smarthistory.org!

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks