Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 531 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a podcast I had a very hard time naming because I feel like I can’t do this topic justice, multimedia magic, integrating triple I f into your teaching toolkit with Christopher Gilman and Adelmar Ramirez.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:32]:

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Oh, today we are in for such a treat with today’s guests and the topic that they are bringing. First off, Christopher Gilman is the digital curriculum program coordinator at the University of California Los Angeles Library. He supports student and faculty engagement with digital collections as you’ll hear about in this interview and oversees instructional design in the digital library program, promoting innovation through the Canvas learning management system and integrated tools and platforms. Chris is a founding co director of the IIIF, International Image Interoperability Framework Community Group for education and works with collaborators worldwide on systems and practices for integrating digital collections and triple I f compatible technologies into instruction. Doctor Gilman has a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures and has worked in comparable roles in K through 12 liberal arts and R1 institutions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:11]:

Also joining me today is Adelmar Ramirez. He has a bachelor’s in psychology and a master’s in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He also holds a PhD in Hispanic languages and literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. And we’re gonna hear more about Adamaar’s background as we listen to this episode. Christopher Gilman and Adelmar Ramirez, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Christopher Gilman [00:02:43]:

Thank you.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:43]:

Christopher Gilman is the digital curriculum program coordinator at the UCL library. He supports student and faculty engagement with digital collections and oversees instructional design in the digital library program, promoting innovation through the Canvas learning management system and integrated tools and platform. And, Christopher, before we hear more about Adelmar as our means of introduction, I’d love to have you introduce us to the International Image Operability Framework briefly and talk about your interest in it.

Christopher Gilman [00:03:21]:

So the first thing that anybody needs to know about the International Image Interoperability Framework is that it goes by triple I s. And this is an acronym. It can sound very technical, and some people are reasonably acronym averse. But IIIF is an acronym. It implies many things. It has many connotations, and it’s also an icon. It’s cute. It has 3 little eyes that are blue and red, and it does things if you click on it.

Christopher Gilman [00:04:00]:

So believe me, it’s it’s worth knowing and worth sort of accepting among other things as IIIF. I I think if if there’s really one thing to take away about IIIF, it is that the world’s special collections and archives and museum vaults are suddenly opened up for all of us. And they’re great for scholars and people who are used to going in and out of those doors and carefully protected rooms and so forth, but we can all use it. And it’s not the easiest thing to find, but once you get a taste for it, once you have zoomed in and out and looked at high resolution imagery of an illuminated manuscript or a Cuban cinema poster or something like that, then you you get used to how exciting, how valuable the these things can be. And the work that we’ve essentially been doing is to bring this into the classroom in an as easy a way as possible so that 1st year students coming into college get welcomed into those very rarefied spheres right away. It’s super exciting.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:05:27]:

I am I already and, of course, I I was curious from the moment of the first email, but I’m so curious, but I don’t wanna neglect, of course. Adammar, you’re the first person of your of your partnership here, your collaboration who contacted me, and I’m so excited for us to just learn a little bit about you. So Ademar Ramirez has a bachelor’s in psychology and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He holds a PhD in Hispanic languages and literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. And this is where you take over and tell us more about some of your work, some of your writing, some of your research, and buckle up everybody because you’re about to if what Chris said intrigued you, I suspect you’re about to be even more intrigued.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:06:17]:

Oh, thank you. Well, I teach Spanish and Latin American literature at Good College. And on the side, I like to write poetry. I have published 2 books, one called Porada de temporada or out of season and the other one, presta nombres or front men. And I think that poetry, I have a perfect application of a triple I f in the classroom, that combines also poetry. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Baba’s poetry. It started in France, and it’s very simple. And, actually, not long ago, you in this podcast, you were talking about micro lectures.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:06:56]:

And so I found a video of Twist Twist and Saia, who’s a French poet, who explains in 30 seconds the instructions of how to create this poem, and it’s very simple. You take, newspaper, a pair of scissors. You choose an article. You cut the article, cut the words, put them in a bag, shake them gently, and pull the words. And as they are in order, you write and copy cautiously, and and that’s your code. And so I included this micro lecture in Canvas, and then I have the step by step process of how to create a poem like this. And then using a triple f cropping tool, which is just a tool for cutting these words from a newspaper, Thankfully, the UCLA digital library has a collection of newspapers digitalized, and so students can look at these papers, basically, cut these words with this tool and then create their poem. And after they create the poem, this is where annotation gets social.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:08:03]:

They react to each other’s poems, what they liked about it, what they would like to see in a portrait boat. And something that in this way, I also saw in other of your podcast that there was the idea of keeping the classroom. Right? So taking the idea of changing lecture in person to online activities. And I think that IIIF can be a cohesive tool for micro lectures, for lab activities, for social annotation, and have all of that work in organically in in the classroom. And I think that our responsibility as professors in the 21st center century is to engage students more. I think that when we share with students the affordances of, they they engage. Poetry is always a topic that students are reluctant to read because it’s difficult to understand the intentions of the author. But when it gets hands on, when it gets playful, I think that they enjoy it the most.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:12]:

Earlier, Chris, you mentioned about the ways the the phrase that you used was the world’s image collections are suddenly opened up for all of us. 2 things come to mind when you say that. 1 is more inclusivity and and equity in our teaching. A second thing that came up for me just had to do with access, which, of course, these things are so inter interwoven with each other. I just went and celebrated a dear friend’s graduation. He just finished his PhD. His research his name’s, by the way, doctor. That feels good to say.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:09:48]:

Doctor Steven Moore just finished his PhD in history from the University of California Riverside. And here’s where I’m gonna get really clumsy, and if Steven ever listens to this, my deepest apologies. His dissertation isn’t something around folk music and history, and I I’m not doing it justice. But it it was a long time in coming, just like so many of our doctoral journeys can be. One of the reasons that was a long time in coming, and here’s where I’m also gonna be clumsy and sure have my facts not quite straight, but was there was this global pandemic that prevented him from being able to travel to some of the sites where the folk music archives were stored. So I would love to have both of you spend a few minutes expanding our imagination in two ways. I need help because I have, for the most part, taught at smaller institutions that could only I we can’t even sometimes I I should speak for myself. I I can’t even imagine some of the things that exist out there in the world.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:10:52]:

It feel it feels almost too good to be true. So rather than, I think, some of us get bogged down with technologically, how would we do this? And for me, so much of my thinking and and my work is, that’s not often the problem. We think it’s the problem, and that holds us back, but the actual problem is having our imaginations expanded. So I’d love to have both of you share whatever comes to mind for just how incredible it is, what is available to anyone and everyone. You don’t have to have special keys to get in the door. You don’t have to have the money or the wherewithal to be able to travel to these different places and have access to get inside. Chris, you said to get inside those rooms. So a few examples from each of you would be helpful of, like, did you know that this repository exists of this kind of a thing just to help expand our imagination? And then on the 2nd piece, related piece to that, helping expand our imagination around just the the ways in in which once you know that you don’t have to have the magical keys to get in there, what can you do with this stuff? And you are you both already started to do it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:02]:

I mean, but let’s just continue on that vein. So what are some amazing things that are out there that some of us might have no idea is available to any of us? We don’t have to have the special credentials. And then once we realize that, what are some cool things we could do with this stuff?

Christopher Gilman [00:12:19]:

So, first, I’d I’d like to say thank you for appreciating the the long dissertation slog. I if it weren’t for my very late stage experience trying to finish up a PhD, I never would have gotten into this business in the first place.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:36]:

Mhmm.

Christopher Gilman [00:12:36]:

This is roughly 25 years ago at USC. I’m a Slavist by training, so I have a PhD in Slavic languages and and literatures. But sort of as a keep keep you on board gesture, my professor offered me a TAship in a general education course on Russian thought and civilization. And that was the first time I realized so our our job in the in the in the course was to integrate multimedia into into the course to look at things like Russian icons and old, publications and maps and other kinds of things relevant to, this very broad topic. And it was the first time that I saw that that a subject as arcane as Russian thought and civilization is actually approachable if you emphasize visuality as opposed to language. And many students are intimidated by language barrier, by Cyrillic, and other kinds of things, but the the visual culture and material culture were extraordinarily rich. And that that has led to essentially this 25 year career doing the same thing, trying to get multimedia that is visual imagery, other kinds of things integrated into mainstream mainstream curriculum. The just a little bit about IIIF, so as not to get in in the weeds about it technically, but there is a key term in it, which is interoperability.

Christopher Gilman [00:14:14]:

And that is the set of agreements or standards by which institutions around the world offer their image based content. That means that if you access linked content from the Cambridge University Library, the Getty, Harvard, Library of Congress, our own UCLA, or other other kinds, you can work on them together. And if you learn a few tricks, like some that Adelmar just mentioned about, for example, effectively cropping images or sharing them, then you can do it with any of that content, and you can mix and match it together. You can do comparative studies. You can do it at the highest possible level of scholarly inquiry, or you can just have fun with it. You can make ransom letters out of bits and pieces cut from cut from newspapers and and manuscripts. So it’s it’s a it’s a ton of fun. It’s very exciting.

Christopher Gilman [00:15:16]:

And I I guess I would emphasize maybe one more thing that Anilmar mentioned, which is hands on. This is very much thinking with your hands. Every step that you make, every button that you click is an operation. It’s not inherently digital. It is the same kinds of things that you might do if you were allowed with a pair of scissors to go into an archive and cut out an illumination from a manuscript and stick it in a I don’t don’t recommend this, but this is what happened. This is where IIIF came from. It was that people cut and paste and share and sell and resell and and so forth. So the hands on is kind of fundamentally central to all of it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:16:04]:

Adama, what’s coming to mind for you?

Adelmar Ramirez [00:16:06]:

Yes. I wanted to mention that I also teach in a very small college. It’s 2,000 students in Maryland. And one of the reactions of one of my students was, first of kind of incredibility of thinking I have access to the collections of Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, UCLA, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Museum. So all of these collections are available for free. And I think that in a in a time where competition in the market is high. I think that having the web skills, writing for web design, creating these, transferable skills like annotation. Students, besides the content of the course, they have these transferable skills that they can apply them to other courses.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:16:59]:

I wanted you you mentioned about which collections are most intriguing to us. For me, there’s many, but one is the Florentine Codex, and Chris can talk more in-depth about the weeds of the project. What I what I like and what I love about that collection is that I don’t know if you knew, but when the Spanish when the Spaniards arrived to Mexico, they found, these codices or codex, and they burned them all because they thought they were false gods. And they didn’t know that besides talking about gods, they were the basis of telling dogs. They had philosophies, and most of that information from the Aztec environment, the Mexica, it was bleeding. We don’t have access to that anymore. But the good thing is that the Florentine Codex, which is from the 16th century, it was digitalized, I think, in part by UCLA and the Getty Museum. It’s for free.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:18:03]:

It’s in the Getty Museum website. And what I love about it is that because it has abilities, you can tune in to the engravings of the page, which was now actually a page, maybe bark or a cactus fiber. But, side by side, you can also have, transcription in Spanish and English because you can do, some so assuming to certain words, it has been transcribed all twelve books of the codex. So we can see at least that surviving piece of history thanks to this amazing technology. The the immediate application for the classroom, I think the Getty Museum, besides creating this digitalized copy of the codex, they also are thinking about some activities for the especially for the k twelve programs, but also I think that some of them can be easily applying in transcription or translation programs in university.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:19:05]:

The other day, I and this may have been unwise, but the other day, I I hardly ever do this, but I believe it was The Washington Post had a feature where you could put your birth date in, and it would show you what was on the headlines of the newspaper on the Washington Post. And so I did it. I try I say I didn’t know if it was wise for privacy reasons. That’s probably obvious to you, but I I felt victim to, like, I would be kind of intrigued. And as you were describing earlier, I’m I I was very intrigued by the newspaper headlines, and I’m also, of course, intrigued by my continued work to want to guide, facilitate, support, empathize with our faculty who are just attempting to grapple with all the implications of the continued emergence of artificial intelligence. And I am really working as a leader, as a as a facilitator to be wanting to be effective at facilitating discussions that have so much heat and so much energy, and that that I would want people to feel respected and regarded for all the different perspectives you might have. So I’m right now trying to design a card sorting activity for our faculty gathering, and I’m I’m having so much fun talking with people about it. But as you started talking about this idea of the newspaper clippings or just clippings from different things, I I would like to have you just sort of walk me through.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:27]:

Say, I wanna take my imagination that you just sparked in me. I have a blog. It’s it’s on WordPress, and I might like to go and do some clipping myself of old newspaper articles. Because one of the other I’m kinda mixing my metaphors here. I apologize, but I love people who try to say nothing is new under the sun. So this is not the first time that AI did not just get invented in November of 2020 2. This has been happening a long time, or people that say, oh my gosh, our devices are terrible. They’re horrible.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:20:57]:

We should throw them all into the sea because they’ve wreaked all this havoc in terms of our attention spans. And then you see the New York Times headline from I forgot what decade it was where they were terrified that newspapers were doing that too. It’s newspapers were distracting everyone on the public transportation. So if I wanted to go gather newspaper clippings related to there’s nothing new under the sun about a particular topic, and I wanted to create a collage, and then I wanted that collage to be on my WordPress. What would be some steps to do that? Like, you would need to first go find a collection that has newspaper clippings, and then you’d clip them. I’m assuming and by the way, I’ll stop talking just a second. I’m assuming I have to point back to the source. I can’t just go grab a screenshot, and I could, but that would be not not living up to the promise of what these tools can help us do.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:48]:

So kinda talk me through this, like, okay, you wanna collect headings, but you still wanna make use of this. How how does somebody go about doing that?

Christopher Gilman [00:21:56]:

So probably one of the most challenging things that the IIIF community has faced is search. So if you know that you are looking for certain kinds of things, you may or may not be able to do what people are used to doing, type in Google, and and hope to get that response. In order really to understand IIIF and how to use it, the first thing you need to do is browse a lot. Mhmm. The IIIF dot io site has lots of lists of contributing institutions and consortium members and so forth that that have online collections, digital collections. And it really helps to get lost in those first and see what you can find. And then poke around and look at some of the usual types of places. The Library of Congress, of course, has a lot of of of material, and different university libraries have various collections.

Christopher Gilman [00:23:07]:

They may or may not be available in IIIF. We should note also the Internet archive also has recently shifted to the IIIF standard. So its content also is available for this type of clipping and sharing and pasting.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:23:24]:

You may also go to Google, actually. And let’s say that you’re interested in giraffes. You can put giraffes in quotation marks and then type and and caps and then triple f in quotation marks. And it’s gonna show you some resources, maybe not all of them, but you can start there. It’s an it’s an easy way to look for these materials.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:23:47]:

You have both just pointed out. 1st, thank you for the technical ways we might do this. I wanna stress for people, we so often think search is the answer to everything. Browsing, discoverability is actually I mean, I I’m certainly not an expert in this, but the number of times that we think what we want is search. And so many times, we don’t know what we’re looking for. So I love this emphasis of, okay, browse, browse, browse, and so that would be a step for anyone. If you, like me, are listening, and this is an entirely new world to you, browse, browse, browse. That’s our step.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:24:18]:

And maybe that’s where we end. I mean, like, this is if you’re listening, this is all brand new. There’s a whole world, the world is your oyster, browse, browse, browse. Once I’ve browsed, then I wanna start using these things and I want to use them, if I’m understanding it right, I kinda wanna use them out of context, or I wanna use them in my context, but I want these things to point to each other. So now help us understand if I’m gonna that’s the whole beauty of it. How am I gonna use something that I found in the library of congress in my class, in my learning management system, and then how do they talk to each other?

Christopher Gilman [00:24:52]:

So that’s where you get back to that cute little IIIF, icon. Typically, if a, collection has IIIF under the hood, it will display that somewhere, sometimes very discreetly in the metadata information under this item that you’re you’re looking for. If you click that button, some things might happen. It might ask you if you would like to view this in a IIIF compatible viewer, and there are several of those. Universal Viewer is 1. Mirador is is another. These are very widely used standard viewing platforms. Mirador is is particularly good for comparative viewing.

Christopher Gilman [00:25:39]:

So you can look at multiple items drawn from multiple sources in the same place at the same time. Sometimes they have a drag and drop operation. Sometimes if you click on that IIIF logo, what you get is a page of what’s called a manifest. It’s a lot of code on a page. So don’t freak out. That page might be interesting to you if you’ve done this before, but the basic operation is that you copy the URL for that page, and then you use that to load the content into a viewer, a cropping tool, or any other IIIF compatible device, and magically, that content will then appear. You can set you can modify the URL by a set of really easily learned steps. You can set that I only wanna look at one little portion of this, the foot on this photograph, for example.

Christopher Gilman [00:26:43]:

You can rotate it. You can make it black and white. You can make it bitonal, so it’s just a sketch. All of these are little things that you can do if you modify that that URL, and it always works because it’s standardized according to this set of agreements between institutions.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:04]:

So there’s one final layer here. And that I mean, my gosh, I feel like I’m, again, so grateful that you contacted me because there’s so much here that I never knew about and that I’m certain so many don’t as well. The final layer, not just me using it in a particular class and being able to focus in on that foot. Oh my gosh. I can think of all the ways to use this within a particular class, but then there is the element of annotation that I may discover, I think, what other people might be saying about the foot on this image. What can you tell us about now more meta conversations that happen around some of these collections using the standard.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:27:49]:

Well, I think that what you were talking about, the food and the, notation. For me, I start my classes telling students that we’re gonna write a book together, and I see their faces of being scared. But I think that the the the important thing about IIIF is that it changes the way that student can pursue research. So they start by with an annotation and, actually, an annotation that sometimes it’s a question. Maybe they don’t understand why these two people are in a painting or why they are dressed like that. And so what I do is that I ask them to collect these questions and other patients, and from there, they develop their final research project. So an addition I think that, at least in my field, the literature is always based on closed reading. And so I think that with IIIF, it changes the focus.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:28:45]:

Instead of being close reading, it becomes close viewing and also viewing as a kind of, research inquiry. And I think that for some students, I have this experience where students say, in other classes, they get an assignment. Okay. You find a project, let’s say, of 10 pages or 20 pages, and they get to the last week and they don’t know what they’re gonna grant about, With Tripwire, they know because since week 2, they start working with this annotation, with this technical, and it’s just a matter of putting everything together. And so it becomes the less stressful time. In finals, they know what execute do they have acquired this their skills during the semester, and so they feel like I have in my classes, there is a lot of readings, there is a lot of activities, which could have been a very dense, stressful time. It just becomes a moment of clarity and metacognition as well because in in the end, it’s not only mind read, but they will also look at each other’s pitches and evaluate themselves. They give each other feedback.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:29:56]:

So, also, it becomes, group activity. I don’t know. I’m I’m really in love with this. So if you are interested, I I really recommend you either conducting us or just booking for more 2 by f related content.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:30:11]:

One quick question on this. Where does this annotation live? Now I I I you’ve so much helped me be able to perceive what you’re sharing, but where is this happening? Is this within the learning management system somewhere through IIIF or some other?

Christopher Gilman [00:30:25]:

So that’s the $1,000,000 question, and it and it gets to the heart technically and historically of what an annotation is. Historically, annotations are valuable because you can see what readers have thought about books that they’ve owned over the centuries, either contemporaneous with the when they were written or over the time since. So it’s in a sense, an annotation is an utterance that belongs to a reader, not to an an an author. So the IIIF community and consortium have thought about annotation quite a bit. They use web based standards to define what annotations are, but the real question is where are they stored. In some cases, annotations are stored along with the original items in a repository. So at the Getty, for example, at or at a at a library. These are annotations that are created by scholars and experts that enhance the original collections.

Christopher Gilman [00:31:29]:

Adelmar made reference to the digital Florentine codex at the Getty Research Institute. This is a digital edition with an extraordinary it’s recently launched. It’s an extraordinary example of how old material can be enhanced through contemporary scholarship, transcriptions, translations, etcetera. All of that is a kind of annotation. The other kind of annotation that we’ve that we’ve made active use of and are very excited about is annotations that are effectively held within a learning management system. So these are password protected. They occur in the classroom environment, in this case, in Canvas, the learning management system, and the students can speak openly among themselves. Everybody is required to annotate a certain number of times.

Christopher Gilman [00:32:21]:

They’re given guidance on what is an annotation and basic standards of plausibility. That is you don’t have to be right. You don’t have to be the best annotation. It just has to fall within a range of this is what I see, this is how I interpret it. And that sharing, it’s it’s extraordinary. It’s a 1,000 eyes looking at at an image, and suddenly students are not only looking at the same thing at the more or less the same time, but they see and read what each other has to say about it. And we all learn from that kind of collective viewing. That annotation is kind of in a privileged environment.

Christopher Gilman [00:33:03]:

So the annotations can can be held in various kinds of places, but underneath is one basic proficiency. It’s always your observations. It’s your voice. It’s it’s your interpretation, and that’s what you share with other people.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:33:20]:

This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations because I have to discipline myself because this probably shouldn’t be a 4 hour, episode even though I want it to be because I’m so excited about all this stuff. But, alright, here we go. I have 3 recommendations. The first recommendation I wanna share is a piece by someone who was new to me, Adrian Cotterell. I apologize, Adrian, if I’ve pronounced your name wrong in the small chance that you are listening here. A piece on his website about teacher directed artificial intelligence, and this is, part 1 of a multipart post called ignoring our ignorance. And he talks about, for those who are familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s work, Daniel Kahneman’s famous for having talked about system 1 thinking and system 2 thinking. And so system 1 is our fast, automatic, intuitive thinking, and system 2 is more deliberate, effortful, and requires conscious met, mental effort.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:23]:

And so this post is all about how chat GPT is not magic. It is based on probabilities. It’s a probability machine, and it’s missing system 2. The system 2, again, being the deliberate, effortful that requires mental effort and attention, and I’m gonna quote him here. What we have is a cocktail of ignorance, both in the machine and in the human. So this post is just a beautiful look using some of Daniel Kahneman’s work, pushing back a little bit on what artificial intelligence was designed to do, is capable of doing, versus what some of us, lean into thinking that it doesn’t. So, my other two pieces are very, very related to each other also from Adrian. He has a post about interaction fiction prompts and then interaction fit fiction with chat gbt.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:35:18]:

Otherwise, friends, known as choose your own adventure. So I have such good memories of being a little girl and reading choose your own adventures, and I don’t know if any of you can relate to this. I would try to read ahead, skip around to all the pages, and I could just picture my whole tangle of fingers in the pages of the book because I wanted to know all of the possible futures. And before I until I knew all the possible future, how could I possibly know which page I wanted to turn to? So I’ve been intrigued by interaction fiction, but it’s not something I have, been very adept at doing. I know there are tools out there, open source tools that allow us to do it, but when I’ve gotten in there, it just feels so much, Chris, back to what you were saying earlier. I get in there, and I’m instantly confronted with a coding language I don’t understand, and I so I get lots of self deprecating. I’m not a coder person, so the idea of having an artificial intelligence tool to help me be able speaking of scaffolding, to scaffold some of this. If I could get closer to success with interact interactive fiction or choose your own adventure, I think then I would be able to release my reliance on artificial intelligence and then be able to do more of it by hand.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:36:34]:

So I I’m gonna encourage anyone, if you’re interested in choose your own adventure, and you wanna experiment a little bit with how artificial intelligence may help you build some skills around this, this is certainly something I’m planning on doing. And, what a fun couple of posts to really help scaffold our learning along this journey of of how we might do this. I’m so grateful for learning about his his blog, and I’m I’m gonna be in there. I’m subscribing to the RSS feed. I am so excited about continuing to learn. So, Chris, I’m gonna pass it over to you for whatever you have to recommend next.

Christopher Gilman [00:37:06]:

I’d like to recommend a, special site in the Cambridge University Digital Library on, Vesalius’ epitome, which was a short version, a condensed version that, preceded his, on the fabric of the human body or the anatomy. This, it’s a it’s a lovely site. It has the original epitome with all of the detailed illustrations of the human anatomy. They’re very creepy and highly detailed, stunningly beautiful and funny in IIIF, and it also includes a video to describe what it is. It has some text, and it has a 3 d scan of a particular open fold so you can zoom in, zoom out, explore, rotate, etcetera. What it does is it underscores that this is not just an image, a 2 d thing, or a series of images, but it’s an object. It’s an object of inquiry, and it it’s sort of a pun in in that sense. Vesalius’ anatomy was really the beginning of autopsy or seeing for oneself and not taking somebody else’s written word for it.

Christopher Gilman [00:38:27]:

Opening up the human body, cutting in, exploring, and using your hands as a as a means of learning or or producing knowledge. Also, just as a as a nod to our UCLA special collections librarian, Russell Johnson, who introduced me and some colleagues and Chien-Ling Liu Zeleny, a professor at the history of medicine at UCLA. We have explored and found this to be sort of endlessly enchanting, and students absolutely love it. They can’t believe how detailed, how accurate, or how interesting things could be that were produced that many centuries, ago. But I think it gives a good summary of all the different kinds of things that are happening in the IIIF world and adjacent areas in 3 d and other kinds of content that you can make directly available in your class simply by embedding it on a Canvas page in your learning in your learning management system.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:39:31]:

I know that Adalmar also has has recommendations, but I just have to tell listeners, you need to go click on this link in the show notes. And even just zooming in and zooming out, I am so zoomed in. And as you just said, I know that I’m repeating exactly what Chris just said, but I can’t help it. It is blowing my mind how detailed this is. I I don’t even understand how this is possible. That unbelievable. Unbelievable. So oh my gosh.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:40:00]:

So, yes, everyone’s gonna need to go click and do some zooming. Zooming in, zooming out. What a great way to get started here with this. So, thank you so much, Chris. Ademar, what do you have to recommend for us?

Adelmar Ramirez [00:40:10]:

Sure. 1st, I have a book of poetry written by one of my mentors, Rosa and Bella. I started with Jew. I know that with poetry, as I mentioned, there’s always this hesitation to read it because it might be too complex. But this collection of poems, I gotta tell you, there’s no such difficulty. It’s very emotional, but also I think it’s they’re all prose poetry, so there’s no enjambment or anything. And it’s one of the best poetry books I’ve ever read, and I don’t say that because I was analyzed my mentor. I really recommend that book.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:40:51]:

And now that I was gonna recommend something else, but I wanted to change my recommendation, and I will I wanted to change it for a content in 2 by f as well that is called The Ambassadors by Holbein, and it’s, one of the examples that we, shared in our classes because it’s one of the most powerful ones in my perception. Because, again, it focuses, on all of the details that you can pay attention to. But there’s one thing about that piece is that there’s in the middle, there’s, like, as much Like, if you if you watch it in 2.f, you don’t understand what it is. It just look like smudge. But when you look at the actual physical object, it’s a school. And and so, again, we have been talking about triple a for, like, the invention of technology and what so but triple f is not to say forget about physical objects. Actually, on the contrary, triple I f might help you approach physical objects and learn about physical objects under a new light. So this is not to say just focus on technology.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:42:09]:

I think this is to say technology is here to help you. You were talking about the artificial intelligence. Again, 2.5, we have built many activities in which the the, objective is to compare. How how do you feel when you see, painting at a museum, versus how do you approach an object in digital form. And so I’m I’m also gonna, share with you the the link to this meeting, the ambassador style, Hans Holbein. And, again, I think this is also a good approach to first understand what is to fire because, again, in abstract terms, it’s difficult to imagine how does closed viewing look like. So, again, if you have one example, you can understand all the possibilities that you can achieve with it.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:42:59]:

Boyd, thank you so much for that last example too because the other thing you just I’m finding all these connections, but so much conversation on this podcast has come up around, yes, on one hand, we want equitable teaching practices. And so if a student isn’t able to visit the museum for any one of a number of reasons, does the family member become ill? Is there is there some other geographical constraints or something like that? But then at on the other hand, faculty want to be heard and say, we are buried. We are experiencing so much trauma. We’re not you you keep piling more and more things on us. It’s too hard. So what you just described, the hard work has been done by other people. And so if you are gonna take that trip to the museum and you wanted there to be an alternative experience for someone who wasn’t able to join you, can this be some smaller steps than they might feel in your mind right now to be able to offer that to students without just burdening yourself even more with it. So what a what a gorgeous way to end our conversation.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:06]:

Thank you so much to both of you. Can can we just agree this is just the start of a beautiful relationship? Can we can we just say that? Because I don’t I don’t at all feel done, getting to speak with both of you. Can we can we do a little pinky swear that that, this is just the beginning? Because thank you. You’ve introduced me, and I’m sure to so many listeners to an entire world that’s filling my mind with possibility. Thank you both so much.

Adelmar Ramirez [00:44:29]:

Thank you.

Christopher Gilman [00:44:30]:

Thank you for having us.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:44:33]:

Thanks once again to Adelmar Ramirez and Chris Gilman for joining me on today’s episode. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. If you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly emails from Teaching in Higher Ed, I had so much fun putting together the show notes for today’s episode. You’re gonna wanna get them in your inbox so you don’t have to remember to download them. Head over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll get that weekly email in your inbox.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:45:13]:

Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.