Coëtivy Master, Philosophy Presenting the Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius, c. 1460-75, Tempera colors, gold leaf, and gold paint on parchment, 17 x 6 cm (The J. Paul Getty Museum)

The Humanities “Crisis”—are museums and higher education doing all they can?

The preservation, transmission, and advancement of knowledge in the digital age are promoted by the unencumbered use and reuse of digitized content for research, teaching, learning, and creative activities. —Memo on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections, Yale University, 2011 This blunt (and for […]

Zaha Hadid, MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, 1998 - 2009 (opened 2010), Via Guido Reni, Rome.

Museums and Open Education

As we rethink the factory-style model of education in our schools (students learning in a group at a standardized pace) empowered by the powerful technologies now at our disposal, we will naturally also think of ways to better support the educational missions of museums. Some recent discussions The thoughts below were inspired by a number […]

Van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889 (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Why the Google Art Project is Important

Our schools and libraries are being radically re-imagined for the digital age, but what about our museums? The New York Public Library, for example, is bravely (and controversially) rethinking its Fifth Avenue flagship building. Last month, MIT and Harvard announced edX, a partnership to offer free online courses, and last fall, Stanford offered three massive […]

The Google Art Project and Smarthistory at Khan Academy

Khan Academy and the Google Art Project Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:01:00 You may have been wondering what Smarthistory has been up to since we joined Khan Academy in October. We’ve had to keep this hush-hush…but we can now announce that we have contributed more than 100 videos to the unbelievably great, second iteration of […]

On the Future of Art History (& the Humanities) Outside the Walls

Last week, Beth and I delivered a paper on the future of higher education at an experimental conference in ScienceSim, an Open Sim virtual world supported by Intel. The conference went off quite well thanks to Shenlei Winkler, its thoughtful and extremely capable organizer. We titled our presentation “The Future of Education: what will open, three-dimensional […]

Claude Monet, Waterlilies, 1914-15 (Portland Art Museum)

Smarthistory at the Portland Art Museum

This post was co-written by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was […]