海角视频

College students have long felt the burden of textbooks鈥攖heir weight, price tag, and time consumption. Since last spring, 海角视频 art history professor Alexander Carpenter has simplified the lives of his students by integrating Smarthistory.org, a non-profit, multimedia art history 鈥渨eb-book,鈥� into his lesson plans. This web resource combines the text and images of traditional textbooks with new features, like discussion video clips, to dynamically and engagingly supplement鈥攐r even replace鈥攁rt survey course textbooks.

Now PUC students have gotten involved with the project directly, making their own impact on this increasingly popular web resource.

Smarthistory.org and the classroom meet as Carpenter requires students to watch the site鈥檚 discussion video clips and respond to a number of questions in preparation for upcoming lectures. 鈥淚鈥檝e noticed that students seem to come to class better prepared,鈥� he says. 鈥淸And] I think the questions are more engaging than what I had [students answering] before.鈥�

Carpenter enjoys the flexibility offered by the website because he does not believe students retain information from long reading assignments as well as they could from multimedia sources. 鈥淎s a student, I really didn鈥檛 like when teachers would assign a lot of [reading] because I felt like I didn鈥檛 know where to begin. I didn鈥檛 know where to end. I didn鈥檛 know what was going to be emphasized,鈥� explains Carpenter. 鈥淪o, I have dedicated myself to trying not to do that 鈥� I prefer very focused, small assignments. That鈥檚 what I like about this.鈥�

Carpenter reports that students consistently respond positively to the web-book. 鈥淭hey are excited not to spend 80 bucks,鈥� he shares. 鈥淚 still give them some things to read, but [on the website] they get to listen to two fun, chatty people who are well educated, talking about art and art history.鈥� Carpenter finds that a primary benefit of this process is that students are able to hear individuals other than their professor use the terms, names, grammar, and language of art as they critique and appreciate it.

The students have responded so well, in fact, that the people behind Smarthistory.org have taken notice. Last quarter a representative of the website contacted Carpenter to inform him that PUC is the website鈥檚 biggest user, and asked if PUC students would help the website pilot a new project. PUC is now the first college to have students record and upload videos of their own to Smarthistory.org鈥檚 YouTube page. On this supplementary site, students in Carpenter鈥檚 History of American Art classes discuss works by American artists and designers like Georgia O鈥橩eefe, Frank Gehry, George Inness, and Andy Warhol.

鈥淎fter using the website for classes and watching their videos, it was cool to be one of those people, discussing a work of art that I had chosen and was excited about,鈥� says design/fine arts major Amador Jaojoco, who recorded a video discussing a piece by Southern California artist Greg Miller. 鈥淚t was really fun to act as a mentor and apply what I had learned about art.鈥�

Watch the videos by PUC students at .