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June 8, 2010
Department Chairing getting in the way of blogging
Sorry about the gap - I'm a busy catherd lately.
I did something fun last weekend for Reunion, though, and it went well enough that I'm considering how it will work in Rome in the Spring.
I volunteered to teach an Alum College class (I do it about every other year). This time I took them on a walking tour of a different set of Gothic Revival buildings on campus - Blackwell House and McCormick House, two of the William Smith Dorms. Blackwell was designed by Richard Upjohn for William Douglas, who then hired him for St John's Chapel a few years later. McCormick is an interesting, kind of wacky bit of carpenter gothic - a post-1851 building on 1806 foundations (despite the plaque that says 1830 - I worry sometimes about those giving people wrong impressions).
The fun part was that I was able to show the participants drawings (plans and style elements) and comparative views from other buildings on an iPad! I got a loaner from the Information Technology folks at the Library. I uploaded some pictures (and gosh, everyone's right, the "just like an iPhone" file handling is clunky! Apple had better straighten THAT out) and showed them round.
You see, one of the problems about teaching on the hoof is that we art historians can't reach for a comparison - we're stuck with what students can see with their own two eyes. Sometimes you're lucky and there's a poster near the door with a building plan. However, most of the time the best we can do is xeroxes and the worst we can do is gesture - because many of our students can't deduce a plan from what they see (that's a mix of some spatial ability and a experience - most art historians have at least some of the former and a lot of the latter, but can count on neither in a random class).
The iPad let me show plans pretty effectively to a small group (6?). I'm not sure how it will be with a group of 20. Also, color photographs, though they are lovely on the screen, were not contrasty enough for the folks to see as clearly. Black and white photos (I had an aerial view of the Hill from the 1940s) and drawings worked fine, though.
Here's to Rome 2011 - I'll be experimenting! Um - I'll be experimenting with MY iPad, after mid-June.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at June 8, 2010 6:54 AM
Comments
That sounds like fun.
I'm trying to put together a travel class for next year going around to colonial sites in the Southeast. I had two sort of sketched out. One would look at the strategic situation in the SE leading to the foundation of South Carolina and Georgia. We'd go to St. Augustine, Brunswick, Savannah, and Charleston, as well as to a site in Alabama where they've excavated a late seventeenth-century French fort. The second would follow Cornwallis from Charleston to Yorktown.
One of my colleagues and I have also talked about doing a George Rogers Clark trip -- maybe we could get our Farrier friend to come along.
As for chair duties, I'm in the middle of MF'ing year-end assessment stuff. And can I get anyone to get me their reports? Noooooooooo.
Growl.
Posted by: Lucius Septimius at June 8, 2010 9:13 AM