• screenshot of the first page of ART31 course website with a headline "Welcome!" and an image of mosaic art
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    Teaching a Survey of Art History on the Commons

    I built a course site on the Commons for my course "Survey of Art History: Prehistory to the Present. Introduction to art and architecture across cultures and centuries." When time and attention are in limited supply, I’d prefer the students to spend those precious resources on reflecting on, let’s say, the relationship between images and seals in Fang Congyi’s fourteenth-century handscroll ink painting, the symbolic meanings of the Ghanaian kente cloth and the Burberry tartan, or the profound sense of alienation in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, instead of trying to figure out the inner workings of a platform such as Brightspace that they will never use after graduation.