Smarthistory: The Blog

Today Shana Lindsay and I made four 5-minute videos using Jing about four different photographers. The videos are also available at the smARThistory site.

Click here to watch a video about Diane Arbus’ Boy with a Toy Grenade (1962).

Click here to watch a video of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris (1932).

Click here to watch a video about William Eggleston’s Red ceiling, or Greenwood, Mississippi (1973).

Click here to watch a video about Sherri Levine’s (Untitled) After Edward Weston (1981).

I was asked to give a couple of presentations at FIT on Second Life. But instead of talking myself, I invited Elaine Polvinen from Buffalo State College, and she had two Second Life contacts that we invited to join us as well, Nyla and Shenlei Winkler. Here’s a blog all about this.

When I taught the High Renaissance a few weeks ago, I took my students into Second Life to see the Vassar recreation of the Sistine Chapel. They were very excited to see Second Life (95% of them had not heard of it) and they had lots of questions about it. I didn’t stay in the virtual Sistine Chapel for more than a few minutes, it seemed a little difficult to teach the chapel from there, instead of with static images.

Click here to see a slideshow of photos of the Chapel in SL.

I suppose there must be more creative ways to use it in teaching — where the students visit themselves, but I am not really sure how to create a learning activity around it. We also looked at youtube tourist videos from the inside of the chapel (see example below), as well as the Vatican Museum’s site which is quite good.

I am pretty sure I am the only art historian in the department to use the internet live in the classroom (instead of ARTstor’s Off line Image Viewer) and I am also teaching art history (all but one of my classes) in the computer lab (anyone else out there doing that?). The students get on ARtstor at the same time as me, and can follow along, and zoom in and out etc. As a result, they are getting very familiar with using ARTstor, and not simply using it to see my image groups when it is time for the test or something. In fact, I think the students in the Survey course that I am teaching, which does NOT meet in the lab, probably never consult ARTstor at all. Why would they? 90% of the images I teach are readily available in google. My sense is that some students are emailing and not paying attention, but would they be paying attention in the classroom? The vast majority are following along diligently in ARTstor, zooming in on the image and engaging with it and at least being more active than they would be in the classroom. Once in a while, they will also look things up on the internet that come up in class.

One time, I had them pick the name of an artist out of a hat, find an image by that artist and then describe it as carefully as they could, then they swapped their descriptions with another student who had to try to picture the image in their heads and ask questions. Then they got to see each other’s images. It was a fun activity and taught them a lot I think about how difficult close description is — but also (and this was the key point) that close description would bring them closer to understanding the meanings of the work of art. It would have been a pain to do this in the classroom with reproductions that they would have had to hide from each other.

My students in the Modern Art sections are making web pages using Wetpaint. When they are done I will ask their permission to link to them here. And in my survey course, students are working in groups on multimedia final projects. We’ll see how those turn out.

 Student using ARTstor in class [0:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download