Real Life @ Brandeisposts by students, faculty, and staff
Expanded Cell Phone Tour of the Rose Art Museum
30 Oct 2009, 6:26AM
Last night we rolled out our expanded Rose Art Museum cell phone, in conjunction with the opening of the Museum's new exhibition, showcasing works from the permanent collection.I'm very pleased with the work the students have done in scripting and recording the prompts. Some were scholarly, others were hilarious. The students all came up with ingenious ways to get across intellectually stimulating interpretations of the paintings without boring their audience.
As a teacher, I'm fascinated by how the exercise of composing for a cell phone tour has impelled my students to engage so thoughtfully and rigorously with major art works: many spent extended periods looking at the works, until a light bulb, clicked as it were; in all cases they came up with original readings and figured out original ways to communicate their excitement to the listeners. The discipline of writing two minute segments for an audio tour, as opposed to writing conventional lengthy academic papers, encouraged the students to craft pithy and deeply insightful commentaries. The knowledge that they are responsible to a larger audience, far beyond the classroom, seems to have inspired them to produce academic work above and beyond the call of duty. Speaking for myself, in the various prompts I recorded, I found myself discovering new aspects of works that I had thought I knew well; like any faculty member, I found the challenge of limiting myself to two minutes to be painful, but it was also exciting to discover how much one can evoke in a brief passage. And I'm just delighted that our international students have found creative way to compose imaginative and critical segments in multiple languages, grappling with important problems in linguistic and cultural translation.
Yesterday morning, we moved on to the next phase of the project. We hosted over 35 adult students from the Waltham Family School, one of our most important community partners, at the Museum, in preparation for their phase of this project. The women, nearly all of them recent immigrants to the States, came up with marvelous original readings of many art works, which will be the basis of their recorded segments (in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Laotian and Cantonese). We had wonderful help from the Spanish language students of my colleague Scott Gravina and the Creole-speaking students of Jane Hale, along with wonderful interpreting work by Anthropology grad student Carlos Martinez Ruiz, so everyone was able to participate in the conversations. (One wonderful thing about teaching at Rose is the way so one many different classes and students from across campus pitch in to help out on community projects) We still have to figure out precisely how the recording with the WFS students will work; we're not sure if they will script their commentaries or just speak extemporaneously into the microphone; in any event, we hope to have this multilingual community audio tour up by mid-November!
For anyone who wants to listen to the tour, just call (781) 253-3398 and then press the designated number followed by the pound (#) sign. There is a listing of the "prompts" (as these audio segments are called) at:
As a teacher, I'm fascinated by how the exercise of composing for a cell phone tour has impelled my students to engage so thoughtfully and rigorously with major art works: many spent extended periods looking at the works, until a light bulb, clicked as it were; in all cases they came up with original readings and figured out original ways to communicate their excitement to the listeners. The discipline of writing two minute segments for an audio tour, as opposed to writing conventional lengthy academic papers, encouraged the students to craft pithy and deeply insightful commentaries. The knowledge that they are responsible to a larger audience, far beyond the classroom, seems to have inspired them to produce academic work above and beyond the call of duty. Speaking for myself, in the various prompts I recorded, I found myself discovering new aspects of works that I had thought I knew well; like any faculty member, I found the challenge of limiting myself to two minutes to be painful, but it was also exciting to discover how much one can evoke in a brief passage. And I'm just delighted that our international students have found creative way to compose imaginative and critical segments in multiple languages, grappling with important problems in linguistic and cultural translation.
Yesterday morning, we moved on to the next phase of the project. We hosted over 35 adult students from the Waltham Family School, one of our most important community partners, at the Museum, in preparation for their phase of this project. The women, nearly all of them recent immigrants to the States, came up with marvelous original readings of many art works, which will be the basis of their recorded segments (in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Laotian and Cantonese). We had wonderful help from the Spanish language students of my colleague Scott Gravina and the Creole-speaking students of Jane Hale, along with wonderful interpreting work by Anthropology grad student Carlos Martinez Ruiz, so everyone was able to participate in the conversations. (One wonderful thing about teaching at Rose is the way so one many different classes and students from across campus pitch in to help out on community projects) We still have to figure out precisely how the recording with the WFS students will work; we're not sure if they will script their commentaries or just speak extemporaneously into the microphone; in any event, we hope to have this multilingual community audio tour up by mid-November!
For anyone who wants to listen to the tour, just call (781) 253-3398 and then press the designated number followed by the pound (#) sign. There is a listing of the "prompts" (as these audio segments are called) at:
You can listen to this from off campus, but of course it is most fun to visit the Rose in person and try out the tour.
We'd be extremely grateful for feedback and suggestions on improving the tour!
tags: academics, studentlife