Here’s a link to a web-based project in visual studies developed together with a course at MIT entitled Visualizing Cultures. The following is a brief excerpt from the website:
What is Visualizing Cultures?
Using new technologies, Visualizing Cultures weds images and commentary to illuminate social and cultural history in innovative ways. A narrative “Core Exhibit” not only gives the historical significance of the images, but also addresses issues such as genre and medium. Each unit comes with a comprehensive curriculum and carefully annotated digital archive of images from public and private sources.
The current units address topics relating to modern Japan; future units will deal with other countries and cultures as well.
Visualizing Cultures is published on MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW), which makes MIT course materials freely and openly available on the web. All materials on OCW have been cleared for copyright, so both the images and narratives may be used in and out of the classroom.
Categories: Web/Tech
Tagged: visualstudies
Here’s a brief item on what could be a very useful tool for sharing comments and annotating texts with students.
Categories: Resources · Web/Tech
Kevin Wiliarty at Academic Commons has a useful intro to Laura Cohen’s post on “2.0 scholarship”. Wiliarty discusses a number of additional social software resources worth investigating including SlideShare, Scribd, Zoho, and ThinkFree.
Categories: Resources · Web/Tech
Ingenious programmers at UNC have found a way to make accessible on the web all those course materials tucked away securely in the Blackboard environment. That’s a welcome move.
When I began using BB this year, I stopped putting all my syllabi and course handouts on my website simply because it was another step in addition to putting all those materials into BB. If bFree can do the job for me, I’m interested. I benefit tremendously from seeing and often adapting materials posted to the web by colleagues at other institutions. I’ve been posting mine for several years and have always made them available with only a thin Creative Commons string attached.
As MIT and others have demonstrated, we have a lot to gain by providing free access to our course materials.
bFree may solve one problem. But we’re all still waiting for the innovation that will make the discussion area of Blackboard both easier to read and use. Who’s working on that? Not BB, it seems.
Here’s a brief report on bFree from our friends over at Academic Commons.
Categories: Uncategorized