Academic Technology

Culture and Belief 51: Making the Middle Ages focuses on the cultural and historical context of five objects (things, texts, and manuscripts) that students unpack through lectures and projects. The course offers students “a great adventure into the unknown,” an opportunity to unlock their own talents while exploring the cultures and beliefs of medieval Europe.

The goals in Professor Daniel Smail’s PITF proposal for this course included:

• Preparing a photo-sharing program that Professor Smail could access easily in class
• Generating a means that would allow students to map out the radiation of saintly cults in later medieval Europe
• Developing a resource for students to produce an electronic collection of objects
• Modifying Professor Smail’s “Collaborative Research Tool” for this course so that students could practice text markup and engage in an ungraded collaborative project

ATG staff and PITFs created a Tumblr page for the course where students posted photos, videos, and comments on what seemed “medieval” to them; made a class map using WorldMap so that students could each add a layer mapping a saintly cult or pilgrimage; built a collective virtual gallery on Zeega; and set up a course wiki for the “Collaborative Research Tool.”

To see the full extent of the materials developed for this course, check out the course iSite and Tumblr page.

In the fall of 2012, two language courses — French C and Modern Hebrew — worked with ATG to make multimedia rich flashcards, replacing the traditional paper model with a digital version that would offer additional tools and appeal to different learning styles.

The goals of this project were to add “culturally representative ” images to the cards, to include audio of a native speaker saying the word, to indicate with color coding if a word was masculine or feminine, to embed short video clips in the cards, and to create cards that were easily edited and organized by teaching staff.

The cards help with teaching and learning both inside and outside the classroom, from the basic challenge of preparing a new vocabulary list to the more complex task of practicing communication. The content that has been added to the cards acts as a springboard for discussion.

The flashcard tool that ATG staff developed for French and Hebrew has since been used by many other courses in the languages, sciences and art history. It was built with HTML, CSS, and XML.

For more examples, see the French C iSite or the Modern Hebrew iSite.

Dr. Kit’s History Lab was created as an online resource center for students working on digital scholarship projects for Dr. Tomoko Kitagawa’s fall 2011 courses (Japanese History 146: Kyoto and East Asian Studies 131: Math and History in East Asia). Students use this website to find campus resources, see example videos, and follow step-by-step guides for creating the media elements of their projects. Not only do students get a better sense of project expectations and how to achieve high quality work, but they also feel less intimidated by the new technology that many were working with for the first time. 

ATG staff developed a comprehensive website to serve as the main resource for students’ digital scholarship projects; created custom tutorial guides and videos for movie editing and audio recording; provided example videos for students to model their assignments after; and supplied information on resources available both on campus and on the web.

After the first semester of doing these multimedia assignments, ATG staff made short videos of students talking about their experiences. Other faculty members can now get a better sense of whether this is the type of assignment that would fit into their teaching.

The tools and technologies used for this project included:

• iMovie and Final Cut
• GarageBand and Audacity
• Course iSites
• Video and audio recording equipment
• Green screen recording in the ATG and MPC studios

Learn more at Dr. Kit’s History Lab.

Landmarks in World Art and Architecture covers art through the ages and across the globe, from ancient Mesopotamia and China, to Precolumbian America, to early modern Japan and modern Europe and the United States. Members of the History of Art and Architecture faculty each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise. For fall 2012, the faculty decided to teach the course chronologically for the first time in order to give students a deeper understanding of the historic currencies in play, and to frame the discussion around ideas of art and revolution — intellectual, scientific, and political.

There were two main goals for this ATG project. The first goal was to create a map for the website that linked works of art discussed in class to specific places and periods in world history, enabling students to explore the broad cross-currencies of art and revolution at different times and places. The second goal was to build a list of objects in and around campus (with the help of staff at the Harvard Art Museum) and introduce those works on the course website. Students would then select a specific work of art from the object lists and blog about it based on weekly assignments over the course of the semester.

The course PITF created a layer in WorldMap to display key works of study within a geographical context and created object lists of works of art and architecture around Cambridge and Boston. In addition, the use of the iSite Flashcard tool allowed the teaching staff to post specific works from each lecture that the students were responsible for on the exam.

See the course website for specific examples and more information.

“Shanghai: A Cultural History” excavates the cultural and historical memories of Shanghai.  With the goal of rendering legible this city’s multiple layers, the course covers topics such as the Shanghai’s literary and cinematic representations, architecture and urban spaces, rural migrants and foreign expatriates, everyday life and consumer culture, and Shanghai in wartime and under Socialism.

Project goals:

• Creating an online repository of historical maps and other mapping resources for students to reference when doing their own mapping assignments
• Developing simple mapping tools that students can use to create itineraries and time-traveling tours, to geographically reference historical photos, films, and other visual artifacts, and to map scenes from the novels and stories read in class
• Creating English subtitles for the 1964 movie Sentinels Under the Neon Lights and producing a DVD of this film for class use. This film has never been available with English subtitles (and has probably never been taught in any undergraduate course before) and is one of the few resources available to teach the most under-discussed historical period of Shanghai history, the revolutionary years.

Project accomplishments:

• Discovered numerous historical maps of Shanghai in library collections and produced high-resolution electronic scans suitable for use in research, geo-referencing, or importing into more extensive project formats like Google Earth or WorldMap
• Implemented a Google Map on the course website with which the students and instructor could geographically visualize the weekly topics, and which was then exported into Google Earth at the end of the semester as a comprehensive visualization of the material covered over the semester.
• Created English subtitles for the film Sentinels Under the Neon Lights, and produced a high-quality DVD (with menus, chapter markers, and optional subtitle tracks) of the film for class and library use.

Tools and technologies used:

• Course iSites
• Google Maps
• Sublime subtitling software, DVD Studio Pro

Check out the course website to learn more.

The goal for ATG staff for the “China: Traditions and Transformations” iSite was to help students sort, classify, and visualize important events in Chinese history and learn some basic vocabulary pertaining to Chinese history.

ATG staff created an interactive syllabus and audio-rich pronunciation guide, and migrated a previous timeline of Chinese history to a timemap on the course iSite. The interactive timemap puts events discussed in the course in chronological and geographic perspective, enabling students to commit milestones to memory much more quickly. The pronunciation guide has filters for course week, tag, or alphabet, as well as the option to view all glossary entries at once by clicking on the Google Spreadsheet (GSS) in the footer.

The timemap and pronunciation guide were made possible with Google Maps, Nick Rabinowitz’ Timemap Library, and developer tools including GSS-API and jQuery.

Details are available on the course iSite.

The fall 2011 course “United States in the World 32: The World’s Religions in Multicultural America” explored the dynamic religious landscape of the US with special focus on Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions in the most recent period of post-1965 immigration. Students in this course examined the negotiations between civic, constitutional, ethical, and theological issues through the lens of specific cases and controversies.

The goal for educational technology was to bring the “sites of encounter” at the heart of the case studies to life. ATG staff produced a multilayer GIS map of the multi-faith landscape of 10 American cities with the help of WorldMap. They also used iSites resources to edit 20 video clips, to scan and optimize 30 slides comprising various religious traditions, and to redesign the case studies section of the website.

More information is available on the course iSite.

In the fall of 2012, students in 2^nd year Modern Hebrew piloted an iPad project that combined all their handouts, worksheets, exercises and review materials into a digital format. The goal was to allow students to review materials anywhere at any time, take self-correcting quizzes, review material that could be updated instantly by course staff, bring text files to life with native speakers and pop-up definitions, and make for a much more interactive and enriching experience.

ATG staff created an interactive iBook, an online flashcard interface, and an enhanced mobile-ready course website. The also oversaw the purchase and distribution of loaner iPads for this pilot.

Students reported the following benefits from this project:

• Spent more time reviewing the documents then they have in the past with paper formats
• Increased comprehension by listening to native speakers
• Digital flashcards were used more often and with greater impact that paper ones they would have had to create themselves
• Greatly increased their typing proficiency, as the keyboard layout on the iPad can be instantly change to Hebrew, something impossible on a laptop
• Were able to take quizzes that self-corrected instantly
• The organization of the materials is superior to what existed as paper handouts
• Having the added advantage of being able to use the iPad in many other ways (for email, web browsing, installing other apps)
• Liked the “green” aspect of the large amount of paper handouts that they now didn’t have to get

More on this project can be read about in this Harvard Crimson article.

Learn more about how Professor Dan Smail uses 3D models of museum objects in his course, Making the Middle Ages.

For History of Art and Architecture 172w, students were able to locate objects in local collections for their term research projects more efficiently using digital maps, guides, and photo collections.