Art appreciation going high tech

Withers was selected recently as one of 13 IU faculty members to receive grants up to $15,000 in the second round of the Ameritech Fellowship Program.

Garland Elmore, associate vice president for teaching and learning information technologies at IU, said “the faculty selected as IU’s Ameritech Fellows will apply information technology to enhance teaching and learning in disciplines including history, education, biology and fine arts.”

Withers’ project will create an E-textbook and an E-workbook for art appreciation classes. “Current web-based technologies allow images, words, sound and three-dimensional modeling to be combined in the classroom,” Withers said.

The art history faculty, along with the faculty and students in computer graphics in the Purdue University School of Technology at South Bend will work to create the high-tech classroom materials.

The grant will result in the design of a Web site created for art appreciation and the purchase of special equipment for classroom instruction.

“The ultimate goal of this project is to facilitate student interaction with images and ideas in the classroom so they can more constructively understand their visual interaction with the world and more productively communicate those experiences with others,” Withers said. “The site will be more than a repository of images,” Withers said.

Instructors will be able to display recent developments in digital and Web art along with presenting short videos of performance artists, artists in their studios and demonstrations of artistic techniques. Students also will be guided through virtual tours of museums, to walk through important architectural works or “walk around” a sculpture.

The art appreciation site will be developed and fine tuned during the next 12 months before it is implemented in the classroom in the spring semester of 2002.