Building a museum of museums on the web

Last week on my teaching placement I delivered the lesson: 'Painting Techniques - Impressionism and Post Impressionism'.  Within this I delivered a PowerPoint I had put together, to aid my explanation of these art movements and the major artists and artworks associated with them.  
The class was engaged, enjoyed the presentation, were able to discuss the art movement with me and name additional artists and artworks within the movement.

This was all fine but it had its limits.  When I gave a demonstration on the painting techniques of Monet and Van Gogh I was not able to show on the PowerPoint nor on bing, clear images of the brushstrokes of the artists featured in my lesson.  I have since found the Amit Sood TED talk 'Building a museum of museums on the web'.

This TED talk has inspired me to use the Google Art Project in future lessons https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project and to look for on-line art education resources.  Perhaps Amit's point that this is to supplement the experience of going to a museum rather than replicate the experience is true (Sood, 2011).  It could be a way of engaging young people into visiting museums and galleries. As for the point I made earlier about wanting to see brushstrokes of Impressionist artists, Amit has the answer: 
"What if you want to see the brushstrokes?  And what if you want to see how Van Gogh actually created a masterpiece? You zoom in. You really go in." (Sood, 2011). While this would not be possible on web images with thousands of pixels on Google Art Project with around 10 billion pixels you can

These images are of Van Gogh's famous 'The Starry Night', they are screenshots of zooming further and further into the painting.  This is amazing, new, unique and go further into the painting than what we would be able to see in a museum, further than we would ever see. This is a really brilliant teaching aid and one I will be definitely using with my class soon.

Reference

Sood, A. (2011) 'Building a museum of museums on the web'. From transcript available at: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/amit_sood_building_a_museum_of_museums_on_the_web/transcript?language=en. [Accessed: 2nd December 2014]

Bibliography

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project. 

To Bing or not to Bing?

I began teaching from my own Scheme of Work on Friday 21 Nov.  I was asked by a student, during a class discussion and slide show on Impressionism, about further work by Van Gogh.  I had no extra slides on Van Gogh prepared so I 'Googled' him.  In fact as Pembrokeshire College computers do not use Google I actually I 'Bing'd' him.  

I always use Google at home and was happy surprised to find Bing superior to Google.  Superior in that the images were all relevant and there is an option to play images as a slide show, whilst keeping an eye on the images due to come up in the order of slides at the bottom.

Bing is owned by Microsoft and is a major competitor with Google and was launched in 2009.  In Bing's bid to become the main competitor of Google it announced in 2011 it would power Yahoo's organic results.

I had no idea that Bing had quietly been evolving but as Bing's Corporate Vice President, Mike Nichols says: "We continued testing our results [...] Bing was regularly beating Google in web search results quality. [...] It's time to break the Google habit – you deserve more from your search engine."(Nichols, 2012)

Well, needless to say I do deserve more from my search engine, so I rushed to "Bing it on"

This screenshot above shows the results of my bing vs Google test.  Not entirely conclusive but there you go!  I may yet break the Google habit, time will tell. 

References

Nichols, Mike (2012) ‘Take the Bing It On Challenge!’. Available at: http://blogs.bing.com/search/2012/09/06/take-the-bing-it-on-challenge/ [Accessed: 12th November 2014]

Bibliography

Altoft, P, (2014) ‘Yahoo Organic results powered by Bing from 3^rd August in UK’. Available at: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/yahoo-organic-results-powered-by-bing-from-3rd-august-in-uk/ [Accessed: 12th November 2014]
Bing, (2014) ‘Bing it on’, Available at: http://www.bingiton.com [Accessed: 12th Novmber 2014]
Ward-Bailey, J. (2014) ‘Search engine wars: Microsoft invite Google to “Bing it on”’. Available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0907/Search-engine-wars-Microsoft-invites-Google-to-Bing-It-On. [Accessed: 12th November 2014]
Bing (2014) Available at: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Post%20Impressionism%20Van%20Gogh [Accessed: 12th November 2014]