Why We Made smARThistory
For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art
history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students,
contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In
addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be
woefully uncreative.
We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history
courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts
for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the
personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the
multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to
create a more engaging "web-book" that could be used in conjunction
with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the
growing number of teachers who make their content freely
available on the web.