PEDAGOGICAL OBJECTIVE

Professor Brenneis’ use of a course blog allowed students to curate, share, connect, and explore multimedia artifacts and resources from a wide variety of resources. Students then synthesized individual artifacts into a thematic digital exhibit on the topic of their choice.

ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY TOOL

Wordpress is a platform, hosted by Amherst, to create blogs for courses and academic projects. 

Featured Faculty:

Sara Brenneis
Sara Brenneis

EUROPEAN STUDIES, SPANISH, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES

 

 

About the Project

blog screenshot

The Blog

In the Fall 2018 course Art as Protest in Spain and Latin America, students added multiple artifacts (images, videos, music, literature, etc) to the course blog as “posts” over the course of the semester.

blog screenshot

Artifacts

These artifacts generally related to a theme and/or geographic area each student chose to explore and were accompanied by a short analysis by the student as well as “exhibit label” metadata (guided by staff at the Mead Art Museum). At the end of the semester students wrote a retrospective essay tying the objects together and exploring their theme more deeply.

music and media

Exhibit

The semester concluded with a final in-person multimedia retrospective exhibit featuring digital slideshows of the images, videos, and songs curated by the students. This gave students an opportunity to view their content outside of the context of the website and give their classmates’ work focused attention and critique.

Campus Partners

Research and Instruction Librarians guided students through the process of identifying, researching and correctly citing the source of their artifacts.
Mead Art Museum staff provided guidance on formulating the museum-style labels for the artifacts on the website and in the final in-class exhibit.

Conference Presentation

ATS staff members Jaya Kannan and Asha Kinney presented on this project at the October 2019 conference of the New England Regional Association for Language Learning Technology.

How to...

Published Spring 2020 by Academic Technology Services