Now that the Fall semester has ended, I’ve started to reflect on what types of in-class activities worked well and which ones failed or simply need tweaking. In the end, I realize that activities that are successful might eventually work less well depending on the time of the semester. For this reason, I can’t stress enough how important it is… Read more →
Category: LKE’s Blog
Teaching the Large Lecture Course: Some Reflections
This fall semester I am teaching a large lecture course on the Western Humanities. I have around 240 students for a 90-minute class that covers caves through cathedrals (basically, 40,000 BCE–1350 CE). We cover history, philosophy, literature, art history, theater history, music history, and more. It is daunting to think of covering so much material in a relatively short period… Read more →
Creating Application Activities: Team Based Learning for Art Historians
Creating meaningful and interesting application activities in a team-based learning art history class can be challenging. Some activities will come to you in a single “Aha!” moment, others will take hours of drafting, thinking, and reworking. Then, when you are in the classroom, some activities will work well, while those you think are brilliant and insightful might fail. So… Read more →
Peer Evaluations: Team-Based Learning for Art Historians
[This post has been long in the making…] An important component of team-based learning, or TBL, is the peer evaluations. While TBL has many similarities to the “flipped classroom,” one of the main differences is that TBL factors peer evaluations into students’ final grades. There are plenty of good sources that discuss the process of peer evaluations, so I will… Read more →
Team-Based Learning in Art History: Pros and Cons
In the past year, I’ve become passionate about team-based learning, or TBL. TBL was an attractive pedagogical approach that seemed to go beyond simply flipping the classroom. My home institution decided more than a year ago to offer intensive training in TBL for faculty interested in new teaching methods. While I was writing my book manuscript, I decided I would… Read more →
Incorporating Digital Art History into the Curriculum
As the beginning of the semester rapidly approaches (and the summer sadly ends), I find myself trying to incorporate new digital tools into my three courses. After the GMU/Getty institute in Digital Art History ended, I began changing my syllabi to include more digital tools and projects. I have to remind myself not to overload students with all the wonderful… Read more →
Day 8: Dirty Laundry and the Potential for Public Art History
Is public art history possible? What does it look like? How can we convey the political nature of art better to people (anyone)? How do we overcome certain perceptions people have about art history? How do we translate our personal interests and disciplinary ideas and trends for a broader audience? Do we need to do this at all? These were… Read more →
Day 7: The Power of Visualization
I am indebted to Spencer for teaching us his formulas for some of our data. I am not the most skilled person with Excel. For my work on the Sacred Heart, I’ve always wanted to make a chart like the above of the percentages of Sacred Heart texts published in different countries in the eighteenth century. I probably should have… Read more →
Day 6: Mining Data
I had high hopes for the applicability of data mining to my current/future project and my long-term research on the Sacred Heart. I’ll largely discuss my research on the Sacred Heart because I’m familiar with the material, having worked with it/on it for the past decade. I thought it would be useful to have a “safety” to see how well… Read more →
Day 5: Geospatial Art History & the Art of Mapping Hipsterdom
Digital Art History bootcamp ended on a high note (for me) as we delved into mapping and visualizing change over time. Before the institute started, I possessed little knowledge of mapping but knew it would be useful for my project. For example, I want to be able to show the areas affected by epidemics in sixteenth-century Mexico alongside those locations… Read more →
Day 4: Drinking from the Firehose?
Confession: There was a moment on 7/11/14 when I felt like I was drinking from the firehose. While the embedded video below doesn’t entirely capture the feeling, it does allow me to showcase my newfound digital abilities: I left today’s institute meeting feeling like a giddy child, one who has boxes of chocolates and sugary candies and who doesn’t even know… Read more →
Day 3: Omeka and Scalar and Drupal, Oh My!
Today we chose one of three CMS platforms with which to play, adapting to the new environments and it quirks. I chose Scalar because I wanted to have multimedia content on my site, and it seemed this CMS was the best option. While it took me longer to adjust to the platform than I expected, once I “figured out” how… Read more →
