It was not your ordinary job interview. Michael Viveiros '08 (East Greenwich, R.I.) was chatting with his counselor in the Career Center and mentioned he had some experience with computer-based presentations. He was subsequently hired by the center to produce podcasts for their Web site.
Viveiros later introduced the Career Center project to Associate Professor of Art History Steve Goldberg, who was immediately intrigued by the potential for podcasts in the classroom. This summer, Viveiros has an Emerson Grant to collaborate with Goldberg as the two develop podcasts for teaching Asian art and history to high school students.
A podcast is a digital audio-visual presentation which can be placed on the Internet and downloaded onto a personal computer, an MP3 player such as an iPod or burned onto a CD. For anyone with a computer, the technology for creating and listening to a podcast is, according to Viveiros, "virtually omnipresent and cheap" but vastly underused.
Both Viveiros and Goldberg have strong feelings about the current high school education system. We are taught, Viveiros explained, in a fashion which is very much linear: the source of information at one end of a vertical line and the student at the other. The world, however, has changed faster than the teaching style, and today's students grew up in a multimedia world that encourages them to look at their surroundings from a more complicated point of view. "As students, we are unsatisfied with a single angle," Viveiros added.
The introduction of technology into high school classrooms can often be an upsetting process, as educators grapple with unfamiliar equipment and students with dramatic changes in syllabi. But even armed with their high-tech, computer-based lecture aids, Viveiros and Goldberg hope to add an interactive aspect of learning (and teaching) to what is already in place. Viveiros speaks of "updating the floor plan;" of using his mini-lectures to promote academic self-motivation and a sense of the student's "ownership" of his or her education.
Viveiros and Goldberg hope to use this summer's work to prove that a podcast which presents the information in an interactive and interdisciplinary form is a teaching tool which can be easily created and inserted into pre-existing classroom curricula. They plan to make six podcasts about Chinese culture which use an interactive presentation of artifacts such as bowls and paintings to introduce key historical and philosophical concepts.
Viveiros, an Asian Studies major, will also produce a podcast based on his own research of the Chinese text "Journey to the West," a folktale which comments on the dynasty which preceded it. He plans to use art and the text as a lens for analyzing the dynastic cycle. This podcast will be a foundation for his senior thesis, which will be a comparison between the dynastic propaganda of imperial China and the Maoist propaganda of the Communist era.
Viveiros' research is funded by the Emerson Foundation Grant Program, which provide students with significant opportunities to work collaboratively with faculty mentors, researching an area of mutual interest. Recipients typically undertake some combination of fieldwork, laboratory investigation, library research and the development of teaching materials. A public presentation of their findings is required of all Emerson Scholars during the academic year.