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.

Digital Image Interview Series November, 2006
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.