History of Visual Technology

The History of Visual Technology, 3rd edition, accompanies The Story of Art 16th edition by Ernst Gombrich for an innovative course, GPH-205 Historical Foundations of Visual Technology at DePaul. This course surveys the civilizations and art of prehistory through 1900 with an emphasis on the concepts and tools used to create art and architecture. Formerly taught in the classroom, this course is now completely online; the third edition of the workbook was designed completely anew with a leading-edge approach implementing QR codes and custom short URL aliases to fully integrate multimedia. The workbook now IS the course, making it unnecessary to use a learning management system as the focus of an online course. Almost every page of the workbook carries a QR/short link that can be scanned by an iPod, iPad, smart cell phone, or tablet computer to access the author's video lectures and the other topics covered. Laptops and desktops can be used just as easily with the short URL aliases, such as piopi.co/205, which leads to the web site supporting the current term's course at DePaul. You're encouraged to explore that open web site.

The copyrighted workbook approach frees faculty from the burden of housing original materials in a proprietary learning management system. Faculty are encouraged to explore this workbook as an example of leading edge technology-enabled learning materials.