As we rethink the factory-style model of education in our schools (students learning in a group at a standardized pace) empowered by the powerful technologies now at our disposal, we will naturally also think of  ways to better support the educational missions of museums.

Some recent discussions
The thoughts below were inspired by a number of recent blog posts:

Nina Simon’s Khan Academy and Online Free Choice Learning
Gretchen Jennings’s Museum Educators – What’s Next and a second post on the topic
Erin Branham’s First Steps to Embracing Digital Literacy for Musem Educators

Each of these raises important questions about the role of museums and museum education given the enormous changes taking place in both K-12 and higher education. Some of this discussion was prompted by the fall 2012 issue of Museum Education on the theme of Museum Education in Times of Radical Social Change (sadly locked away behind a pay-wall). But this conversation should extend beyond the education department, to the museum as a whole.

Joining the broader conversation
Museums need to join the conversations taking place about the future of education. Curators, educators, and administrators should be conversant with the debates and new models that are emerging. Erin’s post has a great list of to-do’s for museum staff. Here are few more suggestions:

1) Become familiar with copyright issues and use the most permissive Creative Commons licensing possible. Gretchen’s blog, Museum Commons, includes a quote from Lewis Hyde’s great book Common as Air at the very top of the page. Hyde’s book is an ideal starting place to understand the history of copyright and its role in furthering education (yes, furthering)! Most museum content has no licensing information, so it can be difficult to know what can be used and how.

2) Become familiar with the open textbook, open courseware, and open educational resource (OER) communities. There are OER portals including the OER Commons, and now that the educational power of OERs has been recognized, they have become an international imperative. You might also want to read UNESCO’s Paris OER Declaration. OERs make possible the dream of a free, accessible, high-quality education for all. Think for a moment about the enormity of the political and economic ramifications:

Imagine what our global economy will look like when the estimated 90% or more of earth’s inhabitants currently locked out of high-quality post-secondary education and job training opportunities finally get a fair shot.*

Of course, museums have been creating web resources that can be described as OERs in their accessibility (if not licensing), for quite some time. But because the OER community and the museum community are separate, museum resources are often ignored. Part of the problem is that museum web resources are often constructed to support the local and immediate needs of a museum’s programming.

As others have noted (including Nicholas Serota at the launch of v2 of the Google Art Project), museums are at a point where they can deepen their web content. Many have now successfully digitized at least part of their collections and put these images on the web together with basic metadata and extended wall labels. Sometimes artist biographies and glossaries are included. Now we can go deeper and add layers of additional content both introductory and scholarly.

Its also worth keeping in mind that states (most recently California), are passing legislation mandating the use of and/or providing for the creation of free and open textbooks. Could museums author new types of textbooks for the study of art history? What would such a resource look like in the age of Youtube? When we created Smarthistory.org, we asked this very question.

3) Become familiar with the new for-profit and not-for-profit players in the education space. We are witnessing an explosion of solutions attempting to counter the rising cost of college tuition and the lack of support for public schools. There are for-profits like Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, and not-for-profits like edX all offering MOOCs (massively open online courses). Khan Academy is a not-for-profit offering video, interactive exercises, badges, and a large and supportive learning community. There are organizations like Peer 2 Peer University and Skillshare that create a platform for learning, rather than content. There are sites that focus on creating social learning networks like Edmodo and OpenStudy. This landscape is growing at a dizzying rate and start-ups are launched every week. We suggest that you begin by creating an account at Khan Academy, explore the knowledge map, watch a few videos and become involved in the learning community. Enroll in a MOOC and spend some time on ItunesU and TEDed. Subscribe to the Edsurge newsletter.

4) Experiment with new tools for collaboration and publishing. This blog post was co-written simultaneously and remotely using Google Drive. Think also of the opportunities afforded by Google Hangout, the commenting and image annotation functions in Flickr or Imagediver, and resources like Voicethread and Youtube.

5) Think beyond your collection, the physical walls of your museum, and your location.  We recently wrote a blog post about this, Why the Google Art Project is Important, so we won’t reiterate that argument here.

6) Read blogs and journals outside of the museum field. Part of the problem, we think, is that the different communities that constitute the teaching and learning eco-system rarely speak with one another. Here are some suggestions (in addition to Michael Feldstein’s e-Literate):

Tina Barseghian, Mindshift
Cathy Davidson’s blog
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour and Stephen’s Web
ProfHacker
Will Richardson, Read. Write. Connect. Learn.
George Siemens, elearnspace

7) Empower content experts to become content creators. The success and broad use of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History shows just how important the museum’s voice can be beyond its own doors. But such content need not be part of a multi-million dollar endeavor. When curators and educators learn to use simple and inexpensive tools such as a hand-held microphone and Garageband they can produce and publish terrific content and they can do it cheaply, easily, and quickly. We have run workshops with curators, educators, conservators, and docents and found that while the media produced by a content expert may not be as polished as a scripted video produced by professional videographers, it can be far more engaging.

Throwing out the script
We’ve found that personal, direct, and intimate content that allows for both passion and expertise is wildly successful. We have found (and research confirms) that the hand-drawn and hand-held are often better than the slick and polished. For example, a hand-held photograph taken in a gallery full of visitors can often be better than a carefully lit professional shot, an authentic conversation held in front of a work of art is often more powerful than a scripted monologue or interview. This is because people want to understand art as they, and those around them, experience it—real, imperfect, and authentic. If we can bring these intimate experiences to people across the globe, why wouldn’t we?

Co-written by Beth Harris & Steven Zucker

*”Are open educational resources the key to global economic growth?” guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012

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…

We are hearing from new teachers nearly every week who are adopting Smarthistory.org and in the past 31 days (January 13 to February 12), our site has been visited 81,684 times by people in 154 countries. This map shows the percentage of new visitors around the world during the past month (darker = a higher percentage). Free and open education works thanks to our generous supporters.

Google Analytics map showing the percentage of new visitors to Smarthistory.org 1/13/11-2/12/11

As of a few minutes ago, 197 amazing people have pledged to Smarthistory and with 22 days to go, we only need to raise an additional $1,028 to make our goal. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, so this project is driving us a little crazy, and we look forward to breathing again when we cross the goal threshold.

First, a huge THANK YOU to all that share our vision for open educational resources (OERs) and for Smarthistory. We see a very bright future for education where problems with access diminish thanks to extremely high quality OERs. In our own field, we see a future where art museums, libraries, colleges and universities no longer produce content primarily for their own students and visitors but instead develop systems where resources are pooled to create more comprehensive resources for a much larger audience of learners.

In the meantime there is our little project, Smarthistory. We are already reaching across institutional boundaries to create historical narratives and hope the crowd-sourced funding model that Kickstarter has pioneered will be the engine for our growth. Maybe, if we are successful, other OERs will take this path.

Our focus now has to be meeting our $10,000 goal since Kickstarter is an all or nothing structure. We have had an amazing week and have already raised $4,455 toward our goal, but if we only raise, for example $9,000, the project doesn’t fund and Smarthistory get nothing.

Most of those reading this have already given and so this is preaching to the choir, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t end with an appeal, please encourage your friends and colleagues to watch our video and support the free and open education that Smarthistory.org offers. Thank you.

“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

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.

This important question may need a little rephrasing. The textbook is of course not a given, but rather, the result of a particular technology and a reflection of the needs and interests of a specific historical moment. The textbook promised the comprehensive treatment of its subject, accuracy, and a single, coherent, sequential structure.

The web has shown that these premises are limited and our students seem to know this. Perhaps this is because in their experience knowledge seems more expansive, intricate, dynamic, and cumulative and the very notion that a bound and static textbook that purports to be comprehensive is for them, inherently suspect. Diderot’s noble belief that his great Encyclopédie could contain the full extent of “each and every branch of human knowledge” was beautiful and wildly ambitious, but it was an expression of the mid-18th century Enlightenment.

Must we remain bound, even through metaphor, to the print textbook as a model? The economics of print technology required standardized editions that fail to reflect the fluidity of knowledge. We now have an incredible opportunity to invent an entirely new means with which to introduce and interact with a given discipline. Let’s leave the metaphor of the textbook behind us. Instead, open, networked learning should aggregate and respond to discovery and analysis in real time while drawing relevant materials from resources across a spectrum of disciplines. Further, we can include many more voices and create much more engaging models for learning.

Dr. Beth Harris and I created Smarthistory.org, a conversation-based multimedia art history web-book to begin to do exactly this.

Add your thoughts to the conversation over at the Next Generation blog.

Well, I was going to write a blog post about how there should be no such thing as an online textbook, because once we get rid of the textbook-iness of the textbook (good riddance!) and it’s on the web and is interactive, hyperlinked and contains rich media, why not just call it a website?  But it looks like I was beaten to the punch and a much better article than I would have written on this subject just appeared, “The Line between book and Internet will disappear” by Hugh McGuire.

Here’s his list of what ebooks (or think online textbooks) can NOT do:

• You cannot deep link into an ebook — say to a specific page or paragraph chapter or image or table
• Indeed you cannot really “link” to an ebook, only various access points to instances of that ebook, because there is no canonical “ebook” to link to … there is no permalink for a chapter, and no Uniform Resource Locator (url) for an ebook itself
• You (usually) cannot copy and paste text, the most obvious thing one might wish to do
• You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal, written in 1942 — even if they are from the same publisher

Now, how long should this state of affairs last?

Here’s more:

You cannot do any of these things, because we still consider that books — the information, words, and data inside of them — live outside of the Internet, even if they are of the e-flavor. You might be able to buy them on the Internet, but the stuff contained within them is not hooked in. Ebooks are an attempt to make it easier for people to buy and read books, without changing this fundamental fact, without letting ebooks become part of the Internet.

Steven Zucker and I have written about and have been following the recent debates about the price of textbooks, and recent innovations in offering textbooks digitally, including renting them, licensing them, printing them, reading them only online, etc. I’ve been collecting the articles at my Posterous site. It’s been fascinating to read about Xplana, Inkling, Flat World Knowledge, and Coursesmart.

We wonder not just about how to reduce the price of textbooks (or make them free), but how long it will take textbooks as a genre to die. Or perhaps they never will…? Should we write an e-textbook that makes use of Smarthistory as a companion site?

In art history, Pearson/Prentice Hall has been busy rethinking the delivery of textbooks. For Janson’s History of Art, you can purchase the hardcover, the paperback, the western edition, brief editions, or you can purchase the ebook as a complete volume or by chapter (along with the proprietary software needed to read it). Via Coursesmart, you can also rent either the bound book or the electronic version – which you can highlight and annotate. These books can also come with passwords for an online interactive website, like the one offered by Pearson called “My Art Kit.” It’s worth noting that this growing multitude of options is creating confusion even on the publishers’ websites and it’s no wonder that faculty rely on the publishers’ representatives or their college bookstore to navigate these options!

Then there’s the simultaneous development of open educational resources (OERs), and that’s the area we’ve been active in, though we remain open to collaborations. OER is a broad term, and OERs are defined as “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.” Open educational resources include everything from open courses, learning objects, open courseware, video courses (think: Academic Earth), and the initiatives in this area have been heavily funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. See also Dave Cormier’s blog post on the complexity of the notions of  freedom and open-ness of OERs.

[By the way we couldn't agree more with Dave that "being open need not be complicated, it doesn’t need to be organized, nor does it even need to be funded. It has to respond to a need that exists" - Smarthistory has received grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, but runs entirely independent from an institution of higher education, and depends on voluntary contributions, and has a very small and sustainable overhead since it uses an open source CMS.]

Here’s a great list of OER resources and definitions. By the way, museums have been producing OERs for years (usually called exhibition subsites), but we don’t call them that for some reason. And what happened to the “learning object”? Sometimes it seems half the problem is that we come up with these terms that include some things and not other things for absolutely no good reason.

But back to the issue with digital textbooks. Why do we need textbooks at all – especially in the Humanities? If Post-Modernism has taught us anything, it’s taught us that there is not a single narrative, that there is no canon, that nothing can be “comprehensive.” Knowledge is messy. Acquiring it should be a little messy too.

Next Gen: Learning Challenges is a partnership of leaders in education seeking to make students more successful. They asked us to contribute a post that engaged the organization’s four key challenges. Find it here.

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design held its annual exhibition design symposium at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills last week and inexplicably asked me to give the opening keynote address. The title was “Innovation in the Way We Learn, Interpret, and Share Information,” and you can get a nice sense of it on the SEGD blog.

Also, keep an eye out for Meg Florian, Smarthistory contributor extraordinaire and currently guest blogger over at Art:21.

SmarthistoryTravel focuses on curious, thoughtful travelers who want expert art analysis delivered in a casual and engaging style. The initial app in this series, “Rome: A First Look,” is now available in the iTunes App Store. We will launch a second app, “Rome: A Closer Look” later this summer. Additional apps that focus on art in other cities will follow. Proceeds from SmarthistoryTravel support Smarthistory, Inc., a not-for-profit organization. Enhance your travel experience and support Smarthistory at the same time!

Here’s our proposal for Open Ed 2010:

Smarthistory.org is a proven, sustainable, and inexpensive model for open educational resources in the Humanities. We will discuss lessons learned during the agile development process used to create this broadly adopted tool.

Smarthistory.org is a free and open, creative-commons licensed, multimedia web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement or substitute for the traditional art history textbook. For the past fifty years, introductory art history courses have nearly always been supported with a comprehensive textbook. These have grown unwieldy and prohibitively expensive; the standard art history textbook in the US now contains over 1100 pages and costs more than $150.

Begun in 2005, Smarthistory has grown in response to the needs of students, their professors, and informal learners. It delivers unscripted conversations between content-experts to engage students while using a form that is native to the web—multimedia. Subject-based pages combine image, video, maps, text, and high-quality links. Smarthistory was designed with multiple pathways to allow visitors to browse according to their needs and interests. Visitors can enter the site by artist, style, or time period and the home page contains an intuitive visual navigation that functions as an interactive timeline and is modeled on the chapters of a book.

Smarthistory does not seek replicate the format of the traditional textbook in an online environment. Instead, embedded videos use conversation to deliberately move away from the impersonal, monolithic voice of the typical textbook in-order to reveal disagreement, emotion, and the experience of looking. The listener remains engaged with both the content and the interaction of the speakers. These conversations model close looking and a willingness to encounter and engage the unfamiliar. Image-based disciplines can be difficult to teach in an online environment; but we have found, for example, that audio allows students to simultaneously focus on an image and commentary, in a way not possible with text. Smarthistory takes the inherent dialogic and multimedia nature of the web and uses it as a pedagogical method.

In 2009, Smarthistory won the Webby award for education, it has been cited for the past two years in the Horizon Report (published jointly by the Educause Learning Alliance and the New Media Consortium), and by organizations such as the International Council of Museums. Universities, libraries, and museums around the world direct their learners to the site. Smarthistory is aimed at undergraduate students, museum visitors, and other informal learners and was visited more than 450,000 times from more than 150 countries in 2009.

Smarthistory is an extendable Humanities framework that uses the open-source content management system MODx. It was inexpensive to create, and is easy to manage and update. Its chronological timeline/chapter-based format integrates new contributions into a single historical framework; an organizational structure applicable across the Humanities. This structure also allows many more content experts to be included than in a traditional text, and because the project is web-based, Smarthistory has grown iteratively and has quickly incorporated user comments and corrections. We invite other disciplines in the Humanities to adopt this framework and encourage those interested to contact us.

Arch of Constantine, 315 C.E., Rome

Speakers: Valentina Follo, Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

http://www.smarthistory.org/arch-of-constantine.html

Made with Smarthistory’s partner, ContextTravel.com

Of course, visit Smarthistory.org for many more!

I love it! It’s very much about his experience of standing in front of the church and entering it – and he speaks directly to us – trying to share that experience with us. He translates the name of the Church for us and explains why it has attracted worshipers for centuries (no, not Moses, but St. Peter’s chains). He talks about the lights going on and off and he shows all the tourists taking pictures. Now I’ve taught Michelangelo’s Moses for many years and never showed the outside of this church. In fact, I’ve never translated the name of the Church and explained the relic that is there. I teach Moses in the context of Michelangelo’s oeuvre and the patronage of Pope Julius II, as I imagine most art historians do. I talk about Julius II’s vision for Rome, for the Papacy and for himself. I show Michelangelo’s ambitious sketches for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and I show what the tomb looks like today – usually with an image like this one – tourist free of course. I talk about the High Renaissance approach to the body – as a vehicle for expressing the spiritual and emotional.

Went I was in Rome visiting San Pietro in Vincoli,  I was surprised by how the exterior of the church looked and by the pannini/snack cart permanently parked outside it to serve the throngs of tourists who came to see this Michelangelo masterpiece. I didn’t know where to find the monument within the church. I shot one video to show tourists, and a couple more of the outside of the church, and another one of entering the church and approaching the Tomb – will post those soon, though this one is up now on Smarthistory.  Perhaps what I like about zThirdTry’s video is that it shows me a different perspective – a tourist perspective, a tourist who is very interested in art – but who is also a religious person. I think that’s what is missing from the art history textbook – those different perspectives. So, I guess the questions are – do we agree those are important, and if so, what’s the best way to bring those in?

Here is her most recent dispatch:

Nothing I learned in graduate school or during years of study and teaching prepared me for Santa Maria del Popolo and the Caravaggios in the Cerasi Chapel. Nothing prepared me for the way the church is situated in an inconspicuous corner of the enormous Piazza del Popolo, or the woman begging on the steps, or the swirling frisbee-like souvenirs that light up when they are tossed high in the air that are being sold in the Piazza, or the traffic that streams by the church and its very worn steps and narrow door, or the people praying close to the altar, or the lights that go on and off in the chapel as tourists contribute Euros, or the way each chapel in the church looks so very different, or the way this particular chapel is just beside the altar, or how works of art from different periods combine in this one church, or the colors of the marble surrounding the paintings, or the way the paintings’ meaning is affected because they face each other in a narrow chapel—Paul blinded and chosen, Peter crucified.

Nothing I have seen in Rome has looked or felt the way I imagined it would. Flickr images of the church and Square and YouTube videos of the interior of the church help, sure—but not a lot. I’m a well-trained art historian. I understand the importance of looking at objects in the location they were made for. I value historical context. I appreciate the tools of visual analysis art history has given me. But Steven and I wonder if there is a way to teach these objects while still allowing them to be living objects in the world.

The following was co-written by us both:

Should we have been better prepared for Santa Maria del Popolo or the numerous other similar encounters throughout the city? What is art history’s responsibility to us and to its students in this regard? Should our discipline offer a more comprehensive and current context for the objects we study? In class, we often show paintings such as Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter—isolated, against a black background, as an object of empirical analysis—and too often as an example of a “style.” The caption in the book, or the entry on an image list we hand to our students does little or nothing to even suggest the range of factors that will affect our viewing experience in person.

Edward Said argued that the West depicted the “Orient” removed from history thus creating a timeless world—and by so doing, creating the comforting distance the West needed to compare itself and feel superior and justified. Perhaps it’s time to ask what it is that we that gain when we photograph frescoes from impossible angles, and without the worshipers, tourists, lights and noise that embed the work of art in a living city.

Art history’s form and methods were largely established in response to 18th and 19th century needs and interests. Many of these driving forces remain of course; there is still a thriving art market hungry for authenticity and other narratives that create value. As in centuries past, art’s history is still prized as an extraordinarily rich cultural strand and perhaps most importantly, our discipline has created a language and experience of seeing that is deeply enriching. However, our success has also lead to our failure. The nineteenth century empiricism that structured the discipline removes the experience—the emotion of the tourist and art history student (not to mention the pious then and now) and the sensual environment of many of these objects. As we all know, the discipline is no longer the sanctuary of an elite minority. Twenty-first century art history is taught to secondary and college students as a matter of course. It is no longer unusual for community college students to be asked to differentiate the work of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, ambitious high school students regularly enroll in advance placement art history classes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most-visited tourist attraction in New York. All of this suggests to us that perhaps it is time to re-examine the assumptions and conceits built into the art history survey and its methods of instruction. We know that thousands throng to visit works of art in situ the way the pious once made pilgrimage—so why not acknowledge this reality more openly in our survey classes and texts?

The ideological battles of the 1970s and 80s opened our discipline to numerous theoretical models and far broader historical contexts but our experience tells us that we have not gone far enough—especially in the classroom. We teach taxonomies infused with study of the period in which the artist created and rarely (if the circumstances are dramatic enough) we may discuss the later life of the object. For example, when the painting by Caravaggio, The Conversion of Paul is taught, its formal elements, available biographical information about the artist, patronage, and the broader context of Counter-Reformation Rome are all treated. In essence, we teach what we can of the meanings we believe this painting had at the start of the seventeenth century when it was produced. But what we don’t do is explicitly acknowledge to our students that the painting continues to accrue meaning and in fact exists in our present not simply as a canonical support of our construction of the Early Italian Baroque but as a real object, deeply embedded in the fabric of a living city and tourist industry now.

Can we develop a survey that treats art in its historical context while also situating it in our contemporary experience? What would that look like for the Caravaggio? In addition to primary source materials and art historical analysis, perhaps we should make room for urban historians and environmental psychologists, for those who regularly worship in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the tourists who visit. We might include curated Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and details from Google Earth. Understanding the ways a painting is understood now, wouldn’t diminish Caravaggio’s achievement, but might provide a means for students and visitors to engage the art more deeply and personally. We understand the enormous importance of seeing works of art first-hand, but some of our students may never have that opportunity, can we give them some sense of the reality of the current life of the work we ask them to study?

The Cornaro Chapel was very different from the way I imagined it. No matter how many photos I have seen– nothing prepared me for the experience in person. The chapel itself was very shallow – I had always imagined one could enter it, and should enter it to experience it. But that’s not the case. In fact, it seemed that the ideal viewing location was from outside the space of the chapel proper. The images of the Cornaro family on either side reminded me of images of patrons on wings of altarpieces (ie. the Merode Altarpiece) – an association I had never had. The illusion of the clouds beneath Theresa was so much more real than I imagined. I felt like teaching this without seeing it first hand was far less than ideal. I was reminded of the obvious – of how works of art are so very singular, so very unique. Loving a work of art from afar, from reproductions – one can fall in love that way, but it’s a little like falling in love with something that’s at least partly a lie. The tragedy of loving works of art. The terrible need to see in person what you have fallen in love with, and the difficulty of managing that always. And the pressing absence always of what hasn’t been seen.

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.

* Makes use of the web – hyperlinks, multimedia, commenting, etc.
* Demonstrates an affordable development model
* Offers a reusable template for the humanities
* Demonstrates how to easily create multimedia
* Has an intuitive navigation – offering multiple paths for learners
* Teachers can link to pieces of content or download content
* Demonstrates how to create accessible, engaging content
* Modles effective image-based learning

See the image larger here