is it plugged in?

In my previous existence, well, in one of my several previous existences, I was responsible for bringing the Children's Defense Fund into the realm of technology and then to teach/train everyone how to use it all. I the networked the organization, as well as gave everyone their first email addresses, but then came the hard part....teaching everyone how to use the new stuff. Keep in mind that most of the equipment that I worked on, and then taught on, were all donated PCs. Old PCs. We are talking DOS prompt old. BUT, on the bright side, this equipment was much newer than the typewriters and the few PCs with WordStar on them. It was a win-win for me...everyone was eager to use their new insanely powered computers with COLORED monitors! No more blinking amber or green screens. During my time at the Children's Defense Fund, we realized that I had a 'gift' to teach people things - I could teach anyone anything.

Unless it involved a keyboard. All bets are off for something that is completely foreign and TECHNOLOGY. Forget trying to explain the mouse at this point...it wasn't yet a verb.  And "click here" mentality?....forget about it. We had to start at the basics.

How do I, as an educator, explain the most basic elements while knowing that many people will have different levels of familiarity with the tools.

So, I spent weeks, maybe even months, talking to everyone in the office and what their needs were with their new digital co-worker. Because computer and digital technology was so new, people didn't know how to even BEGIN to use it to streamline their work, let alone try new things or understand that the way they did things could be done quicker. Quicker. No more IBM Selectric produced mailing labels. I was about to teach everyone some new tricks.

Not so fast.

I spent the better part of two months creating my lessons for my first series of 'Training' sessions with the administrative staff. I made the first fatal mistake by assuming that everyone was on the same ability level. Even though I did my 'pre-assessment' of their skills, I later realized that anytime someone comes around the office with a 'survey' about skills and job effectiveness, people will lie.

You'd be surprised at how many people who responded with 'experienced' to describe their comfort level with computers did not know how to turn one on.

I think that anytime there is a lab-style learning experience, there are bound to be people who not only learn differently, but know different things. When it comes to teaching something in the digital realm, I think that the most important thing to start with are the basics - the basic basics - how to turn something on and understand the basics of the tool/hardware that you are using. Students will have different equipment, so making sure that everyone understands the common elements of the computer, then learning the common elements of software would be easier. As an educator, it will be my responsibility to make the information as accessible to the broadest range of people. (Of course, this would be for 'intro' level courses)

The key to learning a program, and teaching the program is to 're-learn' along with the students - not 're-learn' meaning you have 'no clue', but 're-learn' in the aspect that this information could be 'new' to someone. You must put yourself as a teacher back in the bucket of learner. I think discovery is the key to learning programs, not necessarily trial-and-error. As the educator it is important that I provide those moments where something 'clicks.' This can be easily achieved by shortening lessons and repeating tasks. Over and over again.

Once you have spent enough time teaching - truly teaching, not just showing - you can speed up the remaining lessons because you don't have to spend as much time with the basics.

At this point there may be a divide in the learning curve - some people are getting it, and some are not. As we progress in our teaching the basics to the more advanced stuff the classroom dynamics may shift. There will be more demos that are geared towards the levels that people are at - there is nothing more frustrating than an advanced learner being forced to re-learn something for the sake of someone a little slower.

It's easy for me to reflect on how to teach digital technology, but the thing that will always keep me current is that - as a user - I must keep current with the tools and technologies - and most importantly how these things are being used. Keep in mind that in my early PC tech days I spent several hours trouble shooting a tricky printer. After giving up and calling my boss for assistance, her first question to me was:

Is it plugged in?

It wasn't.

appropriately appropriated

Sorry for my absence on the blogging. Much like I would expect, my hard drive crashed again on my Mac Book and I had to get a new one. I'm normally pretty good about doing regular system back-ups and all that - but of course for the past few weeks I've been working 'rogue' at home and bouncing around...NOT connected to my monitor and thus my external hard drive. Fast-forward to my new hard drive and a computer that doesn't remember my blog account password, and a password that is outside of my normal password structure..thus, no blog post. until now, in a stroke of genius, I remembered my 'this is brilliant' NEW password structure. And, now I can blog again. Back to my story... ...I was excited that they could fix the computer, however still a bit worried that this is the second time this has happened, or third even, so I'm now in a constant state of worry. All that said, with my new hard drive, I had to do a back-up from my most recent back-up, which was several weeks ago. I also recently upgraded to Lion and was concerned that my new hard drive was formatted for Snow Leopard and my back-ups would not work. Luckily, the Apple Genius said he had an image of Lion that he could put on my machine. That seems to work for me, but I immediately got concerned that this 'image' of Lion wasn't the real version that I purchased. Could I still use this? Would I be stealing work that was protected under copyrights?

Much like in art, we collect images that we use in our art, be it just a simple notion that we visually revisit at some point, not a copy but a nod to the idea. This is absolutely fine, as is the use or appropriating images for use in work as long as they do not represent what they originally represented. Or, even further, the IDEA that was represented.Once this topic is usually openly discussed, the subsequent discussion on plagiarism must also occur. I suppose because I also 'own' the software, I could use the image freely.

In some of my own work, I have appropriated images. For a piece I did last year in CORE studio, I downloaded and reprinted 50 images that were taken during The Artist is Present with Marina Abramovic, a retrospective of her work at the MoMA last year. She is a favorite of mine and I wanted to sit with her so badly, instead I just watched people watching each other. The work that I created from someone else's images - photos on a flickr stream - were all modified in such a way that they had new meaning and were different than the intended purpose of them (which was most likely just for documenting each person). Had I called the images 'mine' would have been problematic...they aren't mine.

I think that I appropriately appropriated images in this case. But a bigger question is always out there - when are images not used correctly and what can happen? The most recent and important image stealing case has to be that of Shepherd Fairey and his famous Obama HOPE poster image. The actual piece is a collage of newspaper articles, but the image is that of an AP photographer. This all probably would have gone away, after all, they were fighting over the use of the image of the President (which once elected, the POTUS image is the MOST protected visual asset we have as Americans and you can't use it for any purpose) The issue got uglier once Shepherd started lying under oath. Oops.

Last year during the ARTS 101 lessons that Sussannah, Hannah and I created, we used images of artists work. Clearly we didn't modify it's use, or make new art work from it, but we made informational posters with images from Mondrian, OKeeffe, and some others along with images of posters that were actual reproductions of works of art from the Corcoran Collection. Clearly multiple offenses of inappropriate appropriation happening here. Well, not really. The Corcoran most likely owns the rights to the images of their collection (and why you can usually take photos of museum's permanent collections, but rarely for travelling exhibits) so they can do with them what they want - like make posters for art educators (like ME) - who can then make posters from the posters. A clearly clever negotiating the legal side of artwork reproduction. Never did these posters make any financial gain, only educational gain.

I think that as an artist and future art educator, it is ok to appropriate images when used .... errrrr.... appropriately. Obviously we all have enough ethics to know that we don't pass off another's work as our own. As teachers, we have just be be aware of the current laws and make sure that we don't intentionally break them.

the new modality?

I am afraid that my ideas for my masters thesis will have to be based on old information. This bothers me because every article that I have found is based on information that is many years old. The concepts are generally unique, but as an integrated marketing specialist I have a hard time basing current knowledge and theories based on old data. I'm not sure of the answer to this problem and hopefully with think of something as I consider my ideas further. In the white paper:  'Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century' by Henry Jenkins (with Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robinson, Margaret Weigel,)  most of the ideas are based on research by the Pew Internet & American Life project which states that ". . .more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced." Sure, when this white paper was created the increase in smart phone technology and usage was not considered. That is the problem with anything 'new media' related. The research becomes as outdated as the latest iPhone.

I fully agree with the general thesis of this paper in that teens today are a different 'participatory culture' but just as soon as one entry point is discovered and studied, it is no longer relevant. Current studies by PEW state that the numbers are staying about the same but acknowledge changes in behavior (even this updated report is a bit outdated, since the adoption rate to smartphones seems to grow exponentially on a daily basis!!)

I think the bigger issue at hand is that what happens when the student outpaces the educator in the digital realm? We discussed in our class that this generation will be the first to graduate high school and enter college in a time when the internet was always a tool for communication and convenience. More interesting studies should be focusing on how to educate the old die-hard educator who still writes checks and carries a filofax or dayrunner.

I am in full support of a fully digital integrated classroom. I have my problems with shared content and all things Web 2.0, mostly because it makes us all lazy and changes the way we think. Even at home, we still have yellow-pages sitting around. I'm not entirely sure why, and to be frank I could never really find things I wanted - the taxonomy always seemed off: to find a taxi, you had to know to look under automobile services, and then cab services, and then taxi. Today, I use an iPhone app and am on my way.

Shared content, participatory or not also makes things more prone to mistakes. It drives me crazy to look on a news web site and see typographical errors. Where's the editor? We rely too heavily on spellcheck features and not the old fashioned draft review. We have shortened our language to just a series of acronyms. Hell, even GOOGLE knows what I am searching for before I finish typing it. Let's not even discuss the Tea Partiers and the 'participatory' 'fixing' of wikipedia pages to alter historical facts.

Ok..off my rant and back to the article singing the praises of this new culture....this new modality. Teens and sharing content. It is true that teens are more ABLE now to make better jumps between concepts and ideas because they are able to think of things in more than one manner and make the connection between differing ideas quicker.  But this was when myspace and online content sites were being used more, even the online gaming sites (WOW, etc...) seem to not be in favor much anymore in lieu of facebook and texting or the set-top game systems (Playstation, Wii (which admittedly is probably the best for shared learning), and Xbox) What does Gears of War and Vice City teach?

I do not see how texting and facebook is helping kids to focus more on their work and digital learning when they spend more time face down trying to secretly text a friend. This is no longer a participatory approach to existing and learning, it's more isolating...solitary. Borg-like. a shared mind that is only 'on' when connected to something else and if one knows...all know. Where is the learning in that culture of instant data-driven knowledge?  The white paper gives great examples about digital learning, (the young man discussing what class systems are and how the kid interprets them - by how close he builds houses to the Senate in this game...) These are great examples, but I feel they are few and far between.

What most of this means to me and makes me worry about, as I mentioned before are the speed at which technology changes, leaving the slower behind (including the teachers) and then the accessibility to the latest and greatest gadget. I was one of those people that stood in line on the day the iPhone came out and paid $699 for this device. Not everyone can do this.

Until everyone is on the level playing field, and there is a general plateau of developing new systems and devices (it HAS to stop at some point, right?) then adapting educational guidelines based on the new, new, new, new, digital culture will never work.

This is NOT to say that integrating digital learning into the classroom as a mechanism to bridge curriculum and help the history teacher teach english and the english teacher teach art will never happen, or shouldn't happen. It IS to say that we need to make sure that everyone can speak the same language.

LOL, right?

very meta.

For the first blog post as a response to my Digital Media for Art Educators class, we are to find blogs by teachers and 'blog the blog' - an interesting concept that will serve many purposes in this class as a way to increase our practice in blogging, but also to network in the world of blogging. As a former Integrated Marketing consultant/expert, many clients would ask about blogging and the need for anything Web 2.o oriented. Keeping in mind that as the web became more 2.0 focused, I began to lose interest. I often had a problem with web sites that started to rely on user-generated content as a means to put a staff writer out of a job. AND, have you ever noticed the number of typos on sites these days? I think the other day I counted over 5 on the Washington Post web site alone. same for the local NBC news site. (but then again, they keep Barbara Harrison around...)

For me, there are many factors that make me want to dig-in to a blog and become a regular reader and follower. At first glance many things must happen for me as a site visitor:

• Does the blog look 'professional'? If there is a children's drawing as a main image, i'm gone. and won't return.
• How much content is on the main page - or in most blog cases, how is the blog organized? Is it a jumbled mess of ads?
• How long has the blog been around? (depth of content) Was the blogger/teacher an early adopter or was this blog a last minute fulfillment of some requirement - it shows.
• When was the most recent post, posted? Why should I read something that is six months old? You MUST blog regularly
• Are images used? and are they used well? Is this blog really just a digital refrigerator? Blech.
• Does the blogger understand the basics of writing for the web? You should be able to read a post in one sitting.

There are several blogs I like to visit routinely, but only one  that is a regular stopping ground for me is that of my partner John Copenhaver. His blog Talking the Walk was started a couple summers ago as a means for him to blog about the fine line between teaching and making art - in his case, writing a novel. The creation of his blog was mostly as a marketing tool to get his name out there, but also to provide insight into the process HE was following to get his book published while trying to maintain a full-time teaching position at Flint Hill School in Virginia.

Because John is my partner, and the love of my life, it's hard for me to be biased about his blog - and, well, I forced him to do it. BUT, he has really taken it to the place that he can really 'talk the walk' and maintain it on a regular basis. At first he blogged quite frequently and I would give him prompts that I would give any client as a means to get more readership and exposure. Over time, he realized that the grueling writing schedule interfered with the purpose of the blog, and he now blogs less frequently but with more intentionality.  His site stats have continued to grow, and he is very aware of how he needs to understand his traffic and who is linking to him and who posts comments. He is great at replying to comments and has started many dialogs with readers that he would not normally come across in his daily life. This is one of the aspects of blogging that I find most useful - the sharing of ideas and the dialog that is created by people that just stop by to read.

While not specifically a 'teacher' blog, I also regularly visit the blog at the Chronicle for Higher Education. This is a great resource for me as a future educator because there are many posts/articles about what is happening in education these days, something that I think is important to stay on top of. A particular interest of mine is the use of technology in the classroom. Technology changes with the wind it seems, so it is important for me as an early adopter to stay on top of trends so that I can keep up and change my focus as necessary. I believe that teachers much always stay ahead of the curve - especially since many teachers don't even know how to use computers (a generalization, I know) it worries me that a student will not be able to learn from me if I don't understand where they are at technologically. The blogs on the Chronicle site are very easy to read, but what I find most interesting is that because of the audience to the site, the dialog that is started in the comment area tends to take the ideas further and really make deeper connections of the thoughts.

For me, a blog really shouldn't be just a series of 'how-tos'  - most teacher blogs are just that. I think what makes a great blog is the sharing of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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