Interviews
Beyond the ACLS Report: An interview with John Unsworth
Cyberinfrastructure: Leveraging Change at our Institutions. An interview with James J. O'Donnell
Museums, Cataloging & Content Infrastructure: An Interview with Kenneth Hamma
Digital Image Interview Series: Henry Art
Digital Image Interview Series
Henry Art, Biology/Environmental Science, Williams College
Henry
Art, the Samuel Fessenden Clarke Professor of Biology at Williams
College, has been a member of the faculty since 1970. He has taught
courses in environmental studies, field botany, ecology and land use
planning, through the biology department and the environmental studies
program. His research includes long-term ecological studies of the
Hopkins Memorial Forest. Innovative use of images has been key to both
his teaching and research. In this interview, he is joined by Jonathan
Leamon, a member of Williams's Office for Instructional Technology.
Academic Commons: How have you used images in your teaching and how has digital technology come into play?
Art:
Images are key to the way I teach. For example, I've been teaching a
new course on the natural history of the Berkshires. We've set up a
website on the Williams CONTENTdm server with maps, video and images of
various physical sites that are used in the course, and we've now made
this available to the public:
Renaissance Women, Text Encoding and the Digital Humanities: An Interview with Julia Flanders
Digital Image Interview Series: Hank Glassman
Hank Glassman, Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies, Haverford College
Hank Glassman teaches Buddhism, Religion and Gender, East Asian Religions, Japanese Literature, Language, and History. Images have become increasingly important in his teaching on Japanese language, history, and culture and in his research on Japanese religions in the medieval period. He constantly struggles with how best to display images in his classes and how to help students engage them as texts.
Academic Commons: Tell me a little about your ambitions for using digital images and what the transition has been like.
Glassman: First, I've been at Haverford for six years and I have to say that for three of those years it was very much a struggle to bring digital images into the classroom. I was very dissatisfied with the options-software, hardware, and support; it was very difficult to get material scanned at the resolutions I requested and there was a real absence of a support system or of specialists able to manage digital images. But then everything changed and now I cannot complain. First we had MDID and now we're moving to ARTstor and we have a terrific level of support. I'm very pleased by the direction everything is going.
Digital Image Interview Series: Ann Burke
Ann C. Burke, Associate Professor of Biology, Wesleyan University
Ann Burke teaches evolutionary and developmental biology at Wesleyan University. Her image-intensive classes now also use animations and she looks forward to using 3-D images in the near-future. In 2005, she developed, with the Wesleyan University Learning Object Studio, an animation of the Body Wall Formation of the Chick Embryo, which has provided a useful link between her teaching and research.
Academic Commons: What would you say the chief impact has been in using digital images?
Burke: Because what I teach (anatomy, embryology, evolution) is extremely visual, I have always used a lot of images. Searching for images on the web, mostly using Google Images, really has changed things for me. Things that I wouldn't have done before because it was too much work, like digging out the exact picture I thought I wanted from the library but then might not use, is now no problem. Literally you can sit and Google just about anything you want and come up with an image and import it into PowerPoint and that's a tremendous boon. I used to have big books of slides accumulated at great expense of time and money and now they're in the closet. So I don't know whether it fundamentally changes anything, but it just makes it much easier, so I can do more.
Digital Image Interview Series: Robert Nelson
Robert Nelson, Robert Lehman Professor, History of Art, Yale University
Robert Nelson studies and teaches medieval art at Yale University. He came to Yale in 2005, after a long and distinguished career at the University of Chicago. It was there that he started teaching with digital images, and he has not looked back. He is co-curator of the exhibition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, on display at the Getty Museum through March 4, 2007.
Academic Commons: Let's start by asking about your own engagement with digital images.
Nelson: I'm very interested in this because I've written about the history of the slide lecture and so I'm actually quite interested in this transition.[1] The coming of slides transformed art history and I believe this will make not the same transition, the same revolution, but it's definitely going to make a big change.
Art history is frozen in a certain technological state. There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century. Whereas film went on to many other things - there were talking pictures, there were DVDs and many more manifestations, and now art history will move into that larger realm.
So how is it changing what you're doing in the classroom ?
Well it's changing many things. But first I'd like to say why I've made the switch. I told people when I first arrived here [2005] I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University. Come hell or high water, no matter what happens, I'm not going to show a slide at Yale University! So, I've completely made the switch. And the reason is that students learn much better. That is the most important reason.
The Social Life of Books: An Interview with Ben Vershbow
Ben Vershbow , a fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, is interviewed in this month's Library Journal in an article entitled "The Social Life of Books". In the interview, Vershbow does a nice job of highlighting many of the Institute's concerns and activities. Their work focuses on, as one might guess, the possible futures of the book. They divide their time between dissecting various experiments in electronic books, writing soon-to-be-released software for creating networked texts, devising grand new schemes for new types of publications, and in thoughtful worry over how corporations like Amazon and Google are taking the field in the wrong direction. Of particular interest to educators is the next/text project, which is exploring what networked textbooks might become.
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Ray Kurzweil in Ubiquity
The ACM online journal Ubiquity features an interview with futurist/genius/inventor Ray Kurzweil in the January 10-17, 2006, issue. The interview focuses on his new book The Singularity is Near, which includes statements like "We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010." Pulled out of context, such statements seem, well, hyperbolic, but the interview touches on some points crucial for teaching and learning. Consider, for example, this exchange about pattern recognition and think about how it might connect to the discussion about experts and novices in works such as Brandsford et al's How People Learn:
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- Visit http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v7i01_kurzweil.html
