vodcasts

Here, we combine Camtasia with ARTstor’s OIV (offline image viewer) to move beyond the podcasts we’d already created at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We quickly settled on Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning as our initial victim because we have found this collage especially difficult to adequately convey to the students in an online class.

In our podcasts, we had stood before a painting in the museum, IPod with microphone attachment in hand, and offered our students a spontaneous conversation about the work of art. What resulted was an unscripted discussion with a wonderful sense of discovery as each of us prompted the other to look anew. For our vodcasts, we wanted to maintain that idea of a spontaneous discussion. For the first two,  we talked with Eric Feinblatt in FIT's Center for Excellence in Teaching  and we found that we were able to go significantly further than we’d been able to in the museum. Thanks to the OIV, some forethought, and Google, we were able to significantly reinforce our discussion with collateral images not usually found in a slide library (a very important advantage). Further we were able to zoom in and record our mouse movements--used largely as a pointer. This is an important advantage over simply placing descriptive text near the image and hoping the student can connect the two. The result, like with the podcasts, was an easy give and take that was meant to model for our students, the ways they might begin to freely explore works of art.