Smarthistory: The Blog

Khan Academy and the Google Art Project

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:01:00

You may have been wondering what Smarthistory has been up to since we joined Khan Academy in October. We’ve had to keep this hush-hush…but we can now announce that we have contributed more than 100 videos to the unbelievably great, second iteration of the Google Art Project.

We’ve made 90 Khan Academy videos expressly for version 2, which launched today, April 3rd, at the Musée d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago, and museums in many other countries. We’ve also contributed 26 pre-existing videos to the Art Project. Finally, we worked closely with Sandbox Studios to create an engaging introduction to looking at art. Our videos can be seen in the education section (the playlist is embedded at the bottom of the first page) and on the specific object “detail” pages.

We jumped at this opportunity because the Art Project has such enormous educational potential. It is critical to gather works of art from different institutions to tell the nuanced stories of art history. The Art Project brings together works of art from 151 museums in 40 countries within a cohesive visual environment. The high resolution images, powerful zoom function, “Museum View” (an interior version of “Street View”) and the ability to collect and annotate images, are all features that are ideal for teaching and learning.

Museums of art safeguard, make accessible, and interpret our shared cultural history even as they help to define the civic aspirations of their communities. Museums have always been defined by place, although traveling exhibitions and, more recently, museum websites have helped to “jail break” the art. André Malraux famously identified this new ability to see across institutional collections in his essay, the “Museum Without Walls.”

For a “Museum Without Walls” is coming into being, and…it will carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art…which the “real” museums offer us within their walls.

——André Malraux, The Voices of Silence

As always, all Smarthistory.khanacademy.org content is free and open. If you’re an art historian, museum educator, or curator, and you’re interested in contributing to the work we’re doing, please contact us.

We especially want to thank Colleen Brogan and Rachel Ropeik for coming through in a pinch and for their uncanny ability to make complex ideas clear.

The University of Illinois, Springfield, is running a Massively Open Online Course – a MOOC (organized by Ray Schroeder). If you’ve never heard of a MOOC, read Marc Parry’s article in the Wired Campus blog. This MOOC is  “devoted to examining the state of online education and where e-learning is heading.”

What I’ve been wondering for a while (and even commented on a blog post on elearnspace, but my comment wasn’t posted), is why the the presenters are so overwhelmingly male.

Here’s the list:

Ray Schroeder (UIS) Moderator
Bruce Chaloux (SREB)
Bob Hansen (UPCEA)
Witt Salley (MoDLA)
Karen Swan (UIS) Moderator
Phil Ice (APUS)
Ben Arbaugh (UWOSH)
Michael Cheney (UIS) Moderator
Alexandra Pickett (SUNY)
Bethany Bovard (NMSU)
Nic Bongers (Oakland U.)
Glenda Morgan (UIUC) Moderator
David Middleton (Seton Hall U.)
Patricia McGee (U. Texas San Antonio)
Cable Green (Creative Commons)
Larry Ragan (PSU World Campus)
Jeff Newell (IL Com College Board)
Shari McCurdy Smith (UIS) Moderator
George Siemens (Athabasca)
Jason Rhode (NIU)
Shari McCurdy Smith (UIS) Moderator
Karen Vignare (MSU)
Linda C. Smith (UIUC)
Curt Bonk (IU)
Bruce Chaloux (SREB)
Seb Schmoller (ALT UK)

By my count, that’s 7 women to 18 men.

Geez and I thought education was woman’s work…

Two good friends of mine started up a project called SmartHistory (smarthistory.org), that just may be the most “open” organization I know of.

“Smarthistory.org is a free and open, not-for-profit, art history textbook. We use multimedia to deliver unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art. We are seeking contributors—especially for canonical non-Western material and other survey topics not yet covered. We welcome comments, feedback and corrections.” The site has won some pretty impressive accolades:

- Webby Award: Best Education Website
- PC Magazine, Top 100 Websites
- Gold Award, AVICOM, International Council of Museums (ICOM)
- Mindshare Award, for history, 2nd place
- Exploratorium, Ten Cool Websites
- Communication Arts magazine webpick of the week

In addition to several articles:

- The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘Smarthistory’ Rethinks the Art-History Textbook Online
- The Huffington Post: Smarthistory
- EdTech Digest: Taking a Close Look at Smarthistory
- Communication Arts: Webpick of the Week
- 2010 Horizon Report

I think this project embodies many of the attributes I think are necessary to Open,

- reuse: their work is available through the Open Educational Resources Commons and Creative Commons licensed.

- collaboration: decision-making is influenced by and emerges from the community

- self-organization: they accept content from anyone on anything (open participation), and anyone can take on any role (open organization)

- transparency: all of their activities are exposed, e.g. projects and funding, (open access)

- openness: the direction for development is based on the interests and activities of the contributors and community

What is interesting, is that Smarthistory is eating their own open dog food with financing too. They have recently started up a Kickstarter campaign (http://kck.st/hhRyA6) to raise money for ongoing production/support costs. I like the idea of this approach, which to me resembles a meritocracy–where value (in this case an Art History text) is directly determined by the community (i.e. Art educators, students and institutions). Ideally (and I mean, “in an ideal manner”), if an open project can mature through the contribution of content, code, intellectual property, etc., why can’t it mature through donations? This allows me, a non-art historian without content to contribute, who does not have the time/skill to support their production, to be a “developer.” I think this is much different than seeking partners and sponsorships, who may direct development away from the interests of the community. Smarthistory adheres to the philosophy that the value/relevance/quality of the project is directly determined by the commitment of the community. For me I am wondering if this level of openness should be something I include in my own definition.

Patrick

P.S. you can become a developer to at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/360446359/smarthistory-art-history-conversation

Patrick Masson
Chief Technology Officer, UMassOnline

Originally posted on the Openness listserv at Educause

As some of our readers may have already noticed, we launched a Kickstarter campaign yesterday to raise $10,000 to help us create 100 more videos for Smarthistory.org. This will make Smarthistory a truly viable, free alternative to the traditional and very expensive art history textbook. If you haven’t watched the video, or looked at our page on Kickstarter, take a moment to do that—it explains everything.

The OER community is understandably focused on the issue of sustainability. Smarthistory is already a very sustainable project since we designed it to have minimal ongoing costs; our back-end is an open-source content management system, and all of the content on the site are voluntarily contributions. Yesterday Philipp Schmidt, of Peer to Peer University, wrote a blog post about the possibilities of using Kickstarter to help support the OER (open educational resources) and OCW (open courseware) communities. It will be interesting to see if Kickstarter is a viable means of support for open education initiatives like Smarthistory.

From inception, we have sought to be a synthetic resource that pushes beyond institutional boundaries—in terms of the collections we draw from, our academic contributors, and the students we serve. It’s interesting to us that, in addition to simply being a means to raise funds, Kickstarter is also a measure of our project’s value for others, or at least the translation of that value into monetary terms. For us there is an interesting paradox, since the bulk of the people we serve—college students—are perhaps the least likely to support us with donations, since they are less likely to have the financial means to do so. So far, donations have come instead from informal users, the education/technology community, and our supporters.

We need your help to make this work. Here are some things you can do:

1. Go to the Kickstarter site and watch our short video—it explains everything
2) Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to spread the word about our campaign
3) Write a blog post about us
4) Interview us for your blog
5) Visit Smarthistory.org

Needless to say, if you can help us reach a wider community, we’d be indebted. Thanks again.