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Maria Palazzi

By Sally Hritz

Maria Palazzi is a busy faculty member with dual appointments: she's the director of the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD) and an associate professor of design as well. Both roles immerse her deeply in technology.

OSU's ACCAD is world renown for pioneering computer and visualization technology, especially digital animation and graphics. Computer software, by necessity, is integral to all her ACCAD work and study. Her teaching load is computer intensive as well. In recent years it has covered courses in 3D Computer-aided Design Visualization, Digital Cinematography, and Expressive Motion, plus a research seminar in computer technology. She taught the design visualization course winter quarter.

Starting three years ago, Palazzi began building Web sites for her courses to take better advantage of online resources, enhance her interactions with students, and simplify administrative details. Her course Web sites include descriptions, syllabi, calendars with hotlinks to class assignments, pdf files for students to download or read online, links to other resources, such as tutorials and other artists' works, and anything else she thinks would be helpful.

"I'm almost completely paperless now in classes," she notes. She feels the technology helps her to get organized. For each class, she builds an e-mail mailing list so she can easily make and update assignments and communicate with her students. Her students send her their questions and animation files via e-mail. She likes to be able to critique their work using e-mail because it makes a great record: "I can go back and see what my thoughts were as I evaluated student work."

In class, she and the students conduct group critiques of the movement, composition and visuals of their online work using a large projection screen. ACCAD also links students' assignments to an archive of other students' work and maintains a current gallery of their work. Sometimes creating a Web site becomes a part of the class. Her students begin to build a portfolio online, which "instills a sense of pride for them to see their work on the Web and share it."

Thesis students in her seminar class are required to build a Web site and post their work, as well as establish a connection with an alumnus working in commercial production. "Each alumnus, by commenting on the students' work on the Web, brings an outside viewpoint to the seminar," she says. "We couldn't do this without the ability to post movies and their theses writing on the Web." As an extension of this, she thinks it would be great to be able to introduce into the classroom live online chats with guest professors who may be doing the same thing with their students.

The director recently taught the collaborative class, Digital + Physical Lighting with Mary Tarantino, OSU associate professor of theater. "We built the class on the Web and it was a great way to view it, comment back to each other, and make changes when we couldn't meet in person. Students posted their own images on sites they were building, and we linked to them. We would then use the posted sites at our project reviews."

For another ACCAD project, a student's master's thesis on Roman baths in Greece (Isthmia at www.accad.ohio-state.edu/research/apley_isthmia.htm), they visualized an archaeology dig of what the site looked like originally and posted images on the Web to collect feedback from OSU History Professor Tim Gregory, an architect on the west coast and an art historian in Wisconsin.

"We couldn't teach our classes without the technology resources we have," she says. Her ACCAD staff build a Web site for almost everything on which they work. She likes how the Web fosters collaboration and how it can create small communities of people sharing their knowledge. ACCAD sometimes receives inquiries from other teachers who have seen the center's work on the Web. One teacher was building a computer graphics curriculum and ask if she could model hers after ACCAD's. Another ask if she could "borrow their 3D bird skeletons."

She and her ACCAD staff also take advantage of the WebCT course tools environment. To protect copyrighted content, they have used WebCT's secure video server to display commercial animation examples so their animators could view the work of professionals, and also to serve digital movies of animations they created as part of a TELR-sponsored Biology project (www.accad.ohio-state.edu/research/research_ibp.htm).

What would she recommend for faculty who haven't yet tried to use instructional technologies? "What really helped me was to get ideas by looking around at how other people use the Web. Realize that you can't know everything and be open to students' ideas and what they can do. Be willing to try a little something new. It's not as hard as it looks. If you see something you like or need, use it. For instance, I'm sure most professors lay out their work on a calendar. They could put their calendar on the Web using the same simple calendar I wrote with HTML code."

She notes that ACCAD staff frequently share templates, so they don't have to reinvent and points out that using the same templates throughout a course series also gives students an easy way to navigate around the pages. "That's what I love about working here," she says. "People are always doing new things, and it's often relevant to other work or areas of research."