Teaching with Digital Images
David Hirsch, Associate Director and Senior Course Developer, and Gabriel Rossi, Instructional Technologist, from the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation, introduced several innovative ways their group can assist faculty in presenting digital images to audiences through in-house tools the CMI2 has developed.
Hirsch began by noting the limitations of current technologies including Classes v2 and PowerPoint. He went on to state that Classes v2 only acts as a repository for images, lacks any kind of structure for organization, and has no method for adding metadata or annotation. Although PowerPoint has more advantages to displaying digital images, it still requires faculty to learn the fundamentals of the software.
The goal of the CMI2 has primarily been pulling images that faculty can “use on the fly,” providing a more dimensional approach, making it accessible for students to use and interact with, while making it easy for faculty to curate. In essence, the CMI2 wants to “lower the technology bar” for ease of use and in an effort to minimize support.
Hirsch and Rossi went on to show four specific examples of faculty they have worked with in developing customized projects to fit their needs.
The CMI2 worked with Professor Edward Kamens to develop a contextual presentation tool. Using this tool, Professor Kamens could pull images from the Visual Resource Collection (VRC), add custom metadata tags, as well as curate and present weekly class lessons where students can access via a web browser.
The tool used to accomplish Professor Kamens’ goal is called metaGallery©, which allows users to capture and import images from a Firefox browser (with the assistance of a plug-in), add or modify metadata, and save them to a common image library called a gallery. Once in the gallery, the images can be given descriptor tags and placed into custom collections. The process gives the user start-to-finish control and the flexibility to organize images into a custom template for a specific course lecture or class assignment all within the same tool. One limitation of the metaGallery© tool, admitted Hirsch, is that there is no way to integrate data into a user activity.
That is not to say the CMI2 does not develop interactive sites. The group worked closely with Stephen Stearns from the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology (EEB) to produce the Galapagos Island Project which provides a photo gallery, audio clips, and video clips for a truly interactive experience. The site also provides each student a personal journal to accompany a three-week assignment in which the students view the site, write a question, and pose that question to his/her peers for review. The exercise is intended for the students to come away with a revised question to continue future research. Hirsch described the site as an example of how various learning contexts are integrated into one place.
For more information about the Galapagos Island Project, please refer to this site: http://www.yaletomorrow.yale.edu/news/stearnsgalapagos.html
The third example given by Hirsch and Rossi was a project web page for the Film Studies Department. In this class project, the faculty member provided images to students who then curated the images and wrote a narratives based on the selected images. Once the students had completed the project and published the narrative, the faculty or teaching assistant could easily access the assignments for grading. In a word, the site promoted ease of creation, organization and dissemination.
The last example given was a project the CMI2 created for the School of Art. This project involved curating art exhibits and worked similarly to the metaGallery© tool. The students were asked to create a collection of images from a repository, then to create and arrange virtual galleries with annotations, and finally to defend their projects. The site allowed the students to contextualize the galleries with the annotations and augment existing faculty metadata in a very simple format that focused on the content as opposed to the technology.
Hirsch concluded the session by announcing a new project in development similar to metaGallery© that will be launched near the end of October. They are working closely with Karen Kupiec (Manager Web, Workstation, & Digital Consulting Services) and the VRC to allow faculty to share images and collections with students in a “digital commons” area.
Questions were taken from the audience at the end of the presentation:
1. Does the metaGallery© pull metadata from other sources (Library of Congress, e.g.)?
No, because there are no standards in place. This could potentially happen if standards are formulated, but most metadata was developed by journalists, not educators or librarians
Side note:
Hopefully metaGallery© will make images less dependent upon local copies which poses problems if an image is updated. The CMI would like to create partnerships within University to standardize metadata, but it is somewhat difficult from outside sources.
Also, ArtStore images would be difficult to import.
2. Can metaGallery© handle On-line or virtual exhibitions?
The problem is that the technical overhead is quite high because the software/technology can get in the way or degrade the contextual data.
3. What is the name of the Windows-only image gallery?
It is called 3-D Image PhotoAlbum.
4. Can metaGallery© be static for Exhibition purposes?
Yes. It can be customized to the users’ needs.
Sakai developers are creating a tool called ImageGallery© that will be integrated into Classed v2.
Contact information
david.hirsch@yale.edu
gabriel.rossi@yale.edu
