Art Detectives

Mr. Torres is a secondary social studies teacher in a fairly remote school district. His school has been slow to adopt technologies, and broadband Internet access has only become available in the last two years.

This year, Mr. Torres has both tablet computers and laptop carts available. He is determined to use them to solve a problem that he has had in his World History class, since the adoption of the districts' new curriculum three years ago: the role of art in history and culture. This standard requires that Mr. Torres teach the students what art can tell historians about the beliefs, mores, and social characteristics of a culture, and the value that artifacts can bring to understanding cultures in the absence of written language.

Mr. Torres has always considered himself more of an academic than an artistic type, so this unit has been difficult to teach. But he recently read an interesting article in one of his professional journals about "The Art Historian as Detective." That has given him an idea. He begins to implement that idea by creating five team sites as "virtual rooms" in Google Groups. For each of these sites, he gathers a set of images depicting artifacts for a lesser-known ancient culture. There are literally hundreds of universities and museums around the globe offering thousands of images from ancient cultures, many of which present the art of those cultures.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, he finds multiple examples of the artwork of an ancient South American culture, Valdivia. He supplements these images with artifacts depicted at Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo (UEES) in Ecuador. At Fordham University, Mr. Torres finds links to a collection of artifacts from the Kassites, an ancient Mesopotamian culture. He is amazed at the resources available to populate his team sites and is careful to ensure that he either links to the images appropriately or obtains permission for their use.

One of the concerns that Mr. Torres has, as he envisions the project, is solved by the arrival of the tablet computers. Simply looking at a picture on a laptop seemed a poor substitute for actually handling and examining an art object. Using one of the tablets, though, Mr. Torres is amazed at how scrolling, pinching, and zooming result in an experience much more like handling a real artifact. These tools allow students to investigate a small image up close, giving that same sense of discovery that was often achieved with a sharp eye and a magnifying glass by archeologists.

Working in Google Groups, once the virtual rooms are prepared, Mr. Torres assigns a group of students to each room. The students can access these rooms from laptops or from tablets and phones using Google Docs Mobile. In each room is the stated challenge:

"You are a professional archeologist, part of a crack team often called in by governments to investigate mysterious artifacts discovered in their nation. Your field team has just returned a set of artifacts, mostly works of ancient art, which they cannot identify. Your mission is to learn as much about the culture as possible simply by examining the art and 'reading' the characteristics of that culture from the characters and activities depicted in the images. Use the work areas provided in your group space to organize your artifacts and notes by: societal structure, livelihoods, food, sports/entertainment, and myths/beliefs. Your final project will be a Prezi presentation that will report your conjectures as to the characteristics of your society in each of these areas, along with the evidence upon which those conjectures are based."

Mr. Torres recommends to the students that they begin their exploration on the classroom tablets. At the outset of the activity, many seem less than interested. But as they begin to make insights into the images, the excitement builds.

"Zoom in on that black thing behind the guy in a dress," shouts one student, "I think that thing is a plow! That would mean farming!"

"They must have had domesticated animals," says another. "There is a bull standing behind him and it has some kind of rope or chain on its back."

Soon all of the groups are buzzing with analytical discoveries.

Students turn to the laptops to complete their presentations. The Prezi presentations are beyond what Mr. Torres expected. The students seem so serious about their findings and they use the special effects in Prezi to surprise the class as they had been surprised when they made the finding.

After all the presentations are completed, Mr. Torres provides each group with the name of their culture and invites them to research the accuracy of their reading of the artifacts on the classroom tablets. He has never seen the class so engrossed in what would normally have been considered "boring Internet research."

The grade for each student consists of a personal essay each has been asked to write describing the culture; a group score for the quality of the presentation, using a multimedia presentation rubric that Mr. Torres actually adapted from an MBA program Website; and a score for the accuracy of their characterization of the society based on a rubric with scores for each of the characteristics defined in the group space. Mr. Torres smiles when he overhears one of the students proclaim that he wants to be an archeologist in the future.

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