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| Posted 11.17.06 |
Report Shows Impact of Digital Imaging on College Teaching, Learning
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Digital images are changing the way professors
teach at colleges and universities, but often only after the huge expense of
personal time and resources, according to a new study titled “Using Digital
Images in Teaching and Learning,” published on Academic Commons, a Web
journal that Wesleyan’s Michael Roy helps to edit.
 The
study, commissioned by Wesleyan University and the National Institute for
Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), suggests ways of how the teaching
profession as a whole can harness these new resources in a more efficient
manner.
“The big story here is that we’ve still got a long way to go before we
realize all of the educational and scholarly possibilities afforded by
digital images in particular, and new media in general,” says Michael Roy,
director of Academic Computing Services, Digital Projects and Academic
Commons founder. Roy is pictured at left.
“Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning” details the results of an
intensive study of digital image use by more than 400 faculty at 33 liberal
arts colleges and universities in the Northeast. The report makes a set of
recommendations for optimizing the deployment of digital images on campus.
Wesleyan and NITLE undertook the study in 2005 in response to questions
about how digital image use might be changing teaching practices in higher
education.
The impact on teaching is at the heart of the study. One third of
participating faculty reported digital images had changed their teaching
greatly. Those teaching image-based subjects found that having
anytime/anyplace accessibility to a “vast variety of images from a variety
of sources,” has given them greater flexibility and creativity in the
classroom. With new access to images provided by the Web and other sources,
faculty teaching non-image-based subjects are often using images for the
first time or using substantially more, and are more likely to build them
into the core substance of their teaching. New relationships to images
stimulate ideas about visual thinking and visual learning that are
themselves changing approaches to teaching.
“Faculty, however, often feel like lone pioneers in their transition to
using digital images as because support, resources and infrastructure at
local and national levels in many cases are not sufficiently in place to
allow them to use these new resources to their full potential,” Roy
explains. “In addition to the pedagogical interest of the report, related
issues of image supply, support and infrastructure make up much of its
fabric.”
Key findings include:
1. Tools and services are badly needed to assist faculty organize,
integrate, catalog and manage their personal collections. Most faculty use
images from their personal digital image collections (91 percent), assembled
from many sources, rather than from licensed (30 percent), departmental (19
percent) or library collections (14 percent). Campuses should define and
enhance the relationship between individual faculty collections and emerging
institutional collections.
2. Available resources need to be made easier to find. Faculty are often
unaware of digital image resources on campus and as a consequence
expensively-produced, often licensed resources go underused. Similarly,
while faculty call for high-quality, dependable and free online databases of
images, these often do exist, but evidently need to be better publicized and
more easily discoverable.
3. Fair Use is vulnerable on many campuses. For several reasons, visual
resource curators and instructional technology departments are often
risk-averse and shy of exploring the possibilities for faculty to legally
use copyrighted digital images in their classrooms and on closed course
websites. Creating institutional copyright policy, with full community
participation and expert copyright legal advice, is an important first step
for campuses to be clear about legal responsibilities and the rights of
intellectual property users.
4. Image “literacy” skills need to be developed for optimum use of digital
images by teachers and students. As digital images become widely used, many
faculty need pedagogical support, especially for ideas and assistance in how
to use images most effectively, as well as for opportunities to share
pedagogical needs and discoveries with their peers. In addition, students
often fail to grasp the skills needed to work with images. Many need
training in image literacy (analyzing or reading images, including maps),
digital literacy (handling and manipulating image files), and image
composition (creating and communicating through images).
5. Transitioning to digital image resources affects every level of an
institution. Few appreciate the cross-institutional implications of creating
digital image resources and the production and presentation facilities
required to satisfactorily work with the new medium. Empowering and funding
cross-department, cross-functional groups to make coordinated, informed
decisions is one good way for laying the right foundations. Dedicated
imaging centers can highlight issues, focus decisions and bring disparate
parts of the campus together around the benefits that coordinated digital
image production and delivery can bring.
This report is rooted in the faculty experience of going digital, as shown
in 400 survey responses and 300 individual interviews with faculty and some
staff at 33 colleges and universities: 31 liberal arts colleges together
with Harvard and Yale Universities. Two-thirds of the survey respondents
worked in the arts and humanities, 27 percent in the sciences and 12 percent
in the social sciences. Faculty were self-selected.
The report is online at
http://www.academiccommons.org/imagereport. |
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