Category Archive

This from the MacArthur Foundation outlines 11 new skills regarding media literacies.  Although the article is geared toward children, the skills seem quite useful for college-aged students and older adults (IMHO).

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving;

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery;

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes;

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content;

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details;

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities;

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal;

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources;

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities;

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information;

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office

“The Copyright Advisory Office is a new service based at Columbia University to address the relationship between copyright law and the research, teaching, and service activities of the university. Complex copyright issues arise as members of the university community create and use a rich variety of works. Under today’s law, copyright protection applies automatically to almost all writings, artworks, motion pictures, computer programs, and websites. Copyright protection extends to dance choreography, architectural designs, and even the flood of routine emails. Whenever we create or use any of these materials, we may stir copyright questions. One of the main objectives of this office is to help address these issues in a constructive and practical manner, and in the best interests of advancing the university’s teaching and research mission. This website will evolve and grow. Its overarching purpose is to provide information to the academic community in order to help faculty members, librarians, administrators, students, and others to learn and apply copyright principles of importance to their work.”

The three gallery ninjas are trying to figure out controlled vocabularies, authority lists, custom queries, etc. for cataloging works of art.  The Library of Congress has over 330,000 search terms for SUBJECT.  How in the world have they come up with so many?

A recent post from Lorne Oke on the NMC listserv (02July09) suggested that “the New Epistemology requires…the ability to find/collaborate/sift/sort/discern information rather than read/listen/memorize/mimic instruction. This is a very different skill set than what we are currently ‘teaching’ and assessing.  The real challenge will be to create systemic change that fosters a fundamental shift on the part of our teachers/faculty to adapt to this new paradigm.  Once our learning communities accept these realities, can we assist each other in embracing them?”

I’ve done a little repair work (finessing? is that a better word?) to the links for the image collections, so they should be functioning better now.

The link is now fixed, but all of the links to CONTENTdm collections need further refinement.  That bit of tweaking should happen fairly shortly, but you can access the image collections from the gallery web page at http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery.

The ninjas met with NYU Institute of Fine Arts visual resources staff this morning.  Wow.

Screen capture 06.27.09

The NEH offers several opportunities for St. Lawrence University to develop digital projects.  Good summer reading and writing!

Here is a possible new dummy for CONTENTdm records that don’t have digital image files associated with existing metadata.  What do you think?

Pilot project #3: West African textile collection

This project has been the most complex of the three pilot projects we’ve initiated in the last 18 months.  Some of the steps included professional photography and on-site interviews, and the next step will be to incorporate this digital online collection into various courses at SLU, including fine arts and those in African Studies.

Step #1

For two days in June 2008, Matt Bogosian ‘02 and his crew came to campus to photograph the West African textiles, assisted by Jose’ Domingo ‘09, Tsewang Lama ‘11, and Kevin Carvill ‘11.  The gallery was turned into a photo studio, and we borrowed John Larrance’s genie lift to have the textiles photographed from above.

Step #2

In July 2008, Stanzi McGlynn ‘10 met with Christopher Roy to discuss the history and meaning of the textiles.  The interview was recorded and later transcribed.  After Stanzi’s study abroad in Kenya in the spring of 2009, she will work this summer to add sections of the transcription to the CONTENTdm digital collection.  We plan to include portions of the interview to the online collection in the form of sound files.

Step #3

During the academic year 2008-09, Gallery ninjas Arline Wolfe and Carole Mathey have been cataloging and properly housing the textiles.

Step #4 and beyond

The textiles will be presented in an exhibition at the Gallery in the fall of 2009.  In the meantime, faculty and students can use the digital collection as a starting point to conduct their research.  Writing assignments will be designed to include short essays for exhibition text panels and as longer research papers.  From here on, Obiora Udechukwu in Fine Arts will be our primary source of expertise.

Carole Mathey, Amy Hauber, and Cathy Tedford attended the third Pictoplasma conference in Berlin last week–three full days of artists’ lectures, videos, exhibitions, and character walks.  We’ll have pictures and other responses soon.

In reading about Google’s current effort to digitize LIFE Magazine’s 10,000,000 photographs, I’ve wondered if we really need so many online resources like this.  Ten million photographs from LIFE’s archive?  How about five million?  How about one million?

I’ve recently seen several CONTENTdm institutional users featuring newspapers and journals numbering anywhere from 30,000 images/pages to 90,000 images/pages.  Goodness.

Recent multimedia work by SLU professor Christopher Watts opens February 16, 2009.  Check the Gallery’s Web site for more information about the exhibition.  Chris will present a performance using live interactive electronics, foregrounding process while asking the listener to think about the relationship between person and machine.  “Jack of all Trades” will premier in the Gallery at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, March 9, 2009.

Amy Hauber (FA) created a great blog about blogging.  Check it out!

IM-super-HO, Techfest was a little flat this year.  I wish I had seen more faculty examples of digital projects.  I was particularly impressed with Amy Hauber’s Digital Culture class blog (FA) and Marilyn Mayer’s class blog (BIO).  I was particularly impressed with so much information contained within each, and what a fantastic portfolio of/from/by each course.  MM’s blog link to come!!

As part of SLU’s Techfest 2009, Bart Harloe (University Librarian), Rhonda Courtney (Library Assistant), and Cathy Tedford (Gallery Director) will present a session on What’s Fair with Digital Images?  A list of references is available on SLU’s Digital Collections Web site.

Specific images from the Gallery’s CONTENTdm Web site will be presented, including:

• Wall Street, New York photograph by Paul Strand
• Altar inside the Norbulingka, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery photograph by Alison Wright
• My Squad, Quang Tri Province photograph by Patrick T. Stearns
• FOX News sticker by leeharveyinc.com

A selection of 63 Vietnam War-era photographs from the United States and Vietnam that are part of the University’s Permanent Collection will also be presented, as well as a larger selection of 211 photographs from the Permanent Collection.

The Richard F. Brush Art Gallery’s Web site now has a live link to our blog.  Thanks, Carole.

Carole and I are working on a new CONTENTdm collection that will document our rotating exhibitions, educational programs, and projects related to SLU’s Permanent Collection.  We’ll have a link on the Gallery’s Web site soon.

From the NY Times, Friday, November 28 article “Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Visiting.”