bavatuesdays

I discovered a program today that fits many of the class needs for HISP 463, and it begins with my favorite four letters: FREE!!! While setting up a scanner in the Simpson Library at UMW (which will be used to digitize the pictorial archives), Tim Newman, from Simpson Library, suggested I look into having the students use Irfanview. Now, I have seen the little icon that looks like roadkill, but I never really associated it with the program irfanview. But I am sure that’s just me because according to Cnet– it is one of the most popular programs out there (over 10 million downloads recorded on their site).

That being the case, this program is a solid that the students can then download on their own (did I mention for free!) and use it on their own computers. And while acknowledging that this program cannot replace many of the more complex functions of Photoshop, it does have all the basic options of standard imaging software such as Photoshop Elements. For me, however, the real selling point is what Tim Newman explained to me at length: this program has the ability to write exif and IPTC file information directly to the image making it ideal for cataloging these files for the centennial. And, finally, guess what? – it is a PC program which means I do have to “eat crow” after today’s Windows bashing during the staff meeting and admit that perhaps the Windows is good for one thing, well two if you count Picasa2.

The Library of Virginia’s Digital Image Archives have some really interesting photos online, check this one out of the student group called the MWC Calvary – and this one as well (there are many, many more like it). These may prove extremely useful for the students in the Historic Preservation Museum Lab class that are in the midst of researching and collecting archival documents for an online museum about the landscape and building history of the UMW/MWC (one tributary that has been generated from this already is student activities – and viola look what’s online). Moreover, additional information is available about the picture through the catalog, for example the second image has the following summary description in the record:

Subject: Photograph documents some of the various activities of the cavalry at Mary Washington College which at this time, was exclusively a women’s college. Pictured is Sergeant Nancy Mosher of Mendham, New Jersey getting a kiss from her horse “Susan Flagg.

Additionally, here is another image of the Mendel Museum that used to be in Trinkle Hall of MWC during the 1940s, and this image has 4 additional images that were all connected to the following article:

Subject: The September 1942 edition of the “The Commonwealth,” (Published by the Virginia State Chamber of Commerce), used this series of photograph to illustrate the essay “A Museum to Gregor Mendel” by Eileen Kramer Dodd, Professor of Psychology at Mary Washington College, (see: volume 9, number 9, pages 9- 12)

Needless, to say the images in the digital library may prove an extremely rich avenue for the online portion of the exhibit. Now we have to look into permissions, specifically what is the Library of Virginia’s licensing policy for an online exhibit. It’s extremely helpful how images and texts are directly linked in this archive giving the researcher a specific context to frame their information – now that is something UMW should consider when digitizing the library’s archival holdings

While discussing the limits and possibilites of the current external web hosting experiment at UMW with my colleagues this morning, the issues of narrative and instructional technology once again emerged as a useful way of framing the ongoing conversation about the role of technology within the classroom, as well as the university setting more generally. Issues of scaling the model of bluehost for an enterprise like UMW is a complex and interesting one that will certainly re-emerge on this blog. But I want to take a minute to mull over the generative uses of employing the term narrative as a conceptual lens to foreground the possibilities of “technologies” (to echo Dr William J. Frawley’s talk at UMW today) as a human process of collectively creating and sharing ideas through an intricate and nuanced series of connections.

With such a definition, what happens when we create and share may not take on the resonance of such singular works as Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Paradise Lost, for such visions gained their place in the canon by the fact that they could speak to certain populations about the far and wide connections they trained and shaped into a grand narrative of Western cultures.

Yet, how is this grand narrative changing within our small (and much less poetic) world of instructional technology? In fact, what is the contemporary status of grand narratives more generally, for their source of power and humanity are often rooted just as deeply in principles of empire, difference, conquest, and other forms of discourse that open these works up to questions that further engender multiple ways of reading, interpreting, critiquing and, quite often, revaluing a given culture’s narrative source of identity. Yet, the process and act of narrativizing our world are the limits of possibilities – for it is through narratives that we can begin to rework, reframe, reconsider and reconstruct the values that we consider dear within a given historical context.

All this to say, the power of stories has not necessarily been lost on me when thinking in overarching questions about the narrative construction of cultures and the power to connect through thematic similiarities, while closely tracing difference. Yet, just yesterday I was listening to Joni Wilson, the landscape facilites manager, discuss the importance of having landscape architects at UMW frame their vision for the campus in terms of a narrative so that the legacy of that vision can be both maintained and reworked – an idea which, given its particlular context of the facilities plant, suggested the power and protean possibilities of this word within our milieu – for we all depend on narratives. While many questions remain – Joni Wilson gave me a big one to consider yesterday – how do I envision instructional technology narratively?