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:

Digital Image Interview Series
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 (November 2006)
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.