This post was co-written yesterday by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
We find it both disconcerting and wonderful to see so many of our own kind here at CAA. The artists and art historians were out in force this morning – groggy and in search of coffee. Somehow the Starbucks in West Hall was dark, while what felt like half a city away – at the other end of the convention center — there was a Starbucks adjacent to the Lawn Care convention. Why this should be, no one seemed to know. But we all managed to find our way, coffee in hand, to the first sessions.
As it happened, ours was the first paper in the first set of sessions. Despite the fact that our own paper was about teacher-created web content (www.smarthistory.org), we are always very interested to hear about projects involving student-created content. One of the most successful examples presented in this session was Marjorie Och’s students’ online Venice exhibition. It includes an annotated Google map, a timeline, and a lovely interface on many different topics related to Venetian art and culture. It shows what can be accomplished with minimal – nearly invisible technology – a simple Wordpress installation. What made this site so successful was the professor’s ability to structure a project that was well-suited to the abilities and interests of her upper level students in a seminar course. One of the most interesting outcomes of her project – and indeed one of the most important results of using Web 2.0 technology — is when the classroom meets the “real” world. In this case, a London advertising firm took issue with the students’ critique of their lifestyle ads that largely obscured Venetian architectural facades undergoing restoration.
Alan Moore terrific last talk, “Toward a Global Local Art History: Wiki to the Rescue” focused on a project he designed where his students mapped the local art ecosystems in Tampa and Atlanta using a wiki.
Overall, the papers in this session chronicled the challenges and difficulties in using Web 2.0 successfully in the classroom. Two things were clear to us. One — that art historians are actively engaged in exploring new technologies in their teaching with projects that are far more ambitious in their pedagogic goals and more technically sophisticated than just a few years ago. Two – that this is indeed a time of tremendous flux and experimentation in teaching and learning. It is critical that we all share our experiences, our successes and failures, since best practices are still being determined.
