Teaching with Images — Tools and Resources
October 25th, 2008
1) ARTstor Your institution must subscribe.
ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. As of January 2008, approximately 95% of ARTstor’s collections are available for download at 1024 pixels on the long side, while the remaining 5% may be downloaded at 400 pixels on the long side.
In addition, as part of the Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) initiative, select images within ARTstor may be downloaded free-of-charge at very high resolutions for noncommercial use in scholarly publications.
2) NYPL Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 600,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
3) Wikimedia
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to all. Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.
4) Flickr Commons
Search by tag.
The power of Flickr groups.
The power of the contextualized image.
IMAGE LIBRARY DATABASES WITH TEACHING TOOLS
1) Luna, Insight: A commercial solution
The Insight® Software Suite’s award winning features empower users to build, manage and share digital collections of any size. Unique to Insight is a rich toolset for working with images, text, audio and video files, PDFs, etc. Complete catalog data accompanies every image, allowing for quick and easy searches across one or many collections.
2) Almagest: Another open source solution — this one developed by Princeton.
3) MDID: An open source solution developed by James Madison University — the application we used for FITDIL (the FIT Digital Image Library)
1) JING
Jing works with Screencast – set up an account there to upload your videos and get links and embed codes.
Click here for Diane Arbus Video made with Jing
Here’s a Jing video embedded in a blog:
An example of an image captured and annotated with Jing:
2) SKITCH
Here’s an example of an image captured an annotated with Skitch:
3) Finetuna
Upload an image or grab a screenshot, annotate it, and email it. Also has a firefox plug-in.
4) Flickr annotations
Merode Altarpiece
Midterm Project
Image Collections
1) Flickr
Click here for an example of teaching with Flickr
Click here for another (more recent) example of teaching with Flickr
2) Voicethread
Click here to try it – click “Sign In or Register” (it’s very quick to set up an account)
Click here for an example of teacher-created content with Voicethread
Click here for another example — using Voicethread for teacher-created content
Click here for student-created content on Voicethread
3) Cozimo
With Cozimo you can collaborate and review images and videos — together in real-time or on your own time. Get feedback from clients and colleagues instantly. Cozimo is the faster, better, simpler way to work.
Cozimo also has a Wordpress plugin — click here to see and try.
5) ProofHQ
ProofHQ is a smarter, easier way to manage review and approval of designs, artwork and documents. It is an online collaboration, proofing and approval tool built specifically for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.
6) Thinkature
With Thinkature, you can create a collaborative workspace and invite coworkers, friends, and colleagues to join you in just seconds. Once inside your workspace, you can communicate by chatting, drawing, creating cards, and adding content from around the Internet. It’s all synchronous, too – no need to hit reload or get an editing lock.
1) Tag Galaxy
2) Oskope
3) picitup
4) PicLens
5) Imagery
6) Cyclops
1) Dipity (Timeline Creator)
Smarthistory in Dipity
2) Fotki – (photo-storage)
An example
Another example
3) Mead Map (concept mapping)
Eastman House
National Gallery of Art
Beyond the Blog: Smarthistory Redesign Launched!
October 19th, 2008
About the Web-Book
As many of you undoubtedly already know, in addition to this blog, a couple of years ago we created a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. The redesign, launched on October 15, was funded by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. It allows users to browse more than one hundred audio and video conversations about works of art by time period, style, or artist, or by scrolling through an image browser created to look like an art history textbook. We were hard at work on it all summer!
A lot of effort went into the new design to maximize its clarity and value and we are extremely grateful to our fantastic international team for their dedication, foresight, and ultimately for their belief in this project. Lotte Meijer (Holland), our brilliant information architect (she specializes in museum education technologies) and Mickey Mayo (NY), our unbelievably insightful, creative web designer were both a pleasure to work with as were our wonderful developers Dragan Nikolic (Zurich) and Matt Haenlin (Boston). In short, the site is gorgeous because of Mickey, it works and makes sense because of Lotte, and it exists thanks to Dragan and Matt. On Dragan’s recommendation — and thanks to Lotte’s desire to make the site everything we envisioned and more, we used MODx instead of wordpress (both are open source) because of its greater flexibility. We had originally organized the contents of the Smarthistory site using Wordpress (we still use it for this blog) — customized for us quite a bit by Joseph Ugoretz — who created it on the back end and keeps it going. But in the end, wordpress is really blogging software and proved imperfect for our expanding needs.
The new site can be found at www.smarthistory.org
About this Blog
Our objectives for the Smarthistory blog have changed over time. In 2005, this blog was all we had and so we posted everything here. However, as the amount of content grew, the blog became a place for us to post about relevant activities and especially about our thoughts and discoveries regarding image—based teaching and technology and art in Second Life. We hope you find it valuable and we encourage your comments—they help us to know whether we are on the right track.
Beth & Steven
Smarthistory.org Redesigned, Wins Prestigious International Award
October 19th, 2008
We spent Thursday and Friday in Gatineau/Ottawa at the Université du Québec en Outaouais attending the Festival International de l’Audiovisuel & du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine (Fiamp) organized by AVICOM, ICOM’s International Committee for Audiovisual, Image, Sound and New Technologies (ICOM stands for the International Council of Museums). Anyway, Fiamp is an international event and was attended by top museum education and technology professionals from numerous countries including Australia, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, Hungary, the US, etc. The annual festival features two components, the conference and a competition.
The conference was really terrific, and our thanks go to the organizers — Eric Langlois, Marie-Françoise Delval, Alain Massé and Nada Guzin Lukic. We know what hard work is involved in organizing a conference — and this one in two languages!
We presented a paper on the Smarthistory web redesign and entered the competition somewhat resigned to the idea that our humble efforts would be easily overshadowed by the extraordinary work being done by large museums and their crack web teams. The paper went well enough—many people came up to us over the next day and a half commenting on the design and the content. In fact, more than one person explained that they had spent the evening exploring our work—always lovely to hear. There were many strong papers but we think three really stood out:
Dr. Angelina Russo from the Swinburne University, Melbourne delivered “Transformation in Cultural and Scientific Communication: Creating New Museum Audiences with Social Media. We were struck by her emphasis on the importance of demystifying the museum, its holdings, and especially its processes. She talked about how to take the museum from conversation to collaboration (something we also need to do with Smarthistory) — and the co-creation of knowledge (“distributed innovation in the creation and dissemination of cultural content”). We will be spending some time on the Ning site she created on the Museum 3.0, which asks “What will the museum of the future be like?”
Dr. Ross Parry of the University of Leicester offered, “The Museum Reprogrammed: How Computing Became the Metonym (Rather then the Antonym) of the Modern Museum.” Dr. Parry is a historian of the technology of the museum and offered a very thoughtful analysis of this past as well as a possible future and delivered really thoughtful closing remarks, summarizing the main themes that emerged during the conference.
Nancy Proctor who heads new media initiatives at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art read “Beyond the Two-Minute Stop: Soundtracks, Soundbites, and the Future of Mobile Interpretation for Museums.” Nancy began her talk with the important insight — It’s Not the Technology. As we all know, the technology is an important tool, but it’s how we teach, how we reach out to our audiences that is critical. Nancy gave one example that really moved us — of how, in one particular Tate Modern audioguide, listeners reported that what they enjoyed most was the fact that they were asked their opinion. This is an important fact to keep in mind. Nancy’s insightful understanding of past and current practice was extremely valuable.
When the conference was over, the prizes were awarded. We had entered the web category and the competitions’ work was extraordinarily beautiful. Three honorable mentions, three bronze, and three silver winners were announced and then Smarthistory was named the sole winner of the gold, the highest award in the the web category. We still don’t fully believe we won despite the lovely plaque, but we are honored and gratified. Our thanks to the FIAMP organizers, AVICOM and ICOM.
Beth & Steven
