art, education and new media

Delicious Links

Daily links to art, education, media, and interdiciplinary connections from my
Del.icio.us shared links page.

Added later: More about Social Software, from Wikipedia.

New Media and the Art Classroom

One of the strongest arguments for integrating new media tools in the art classroom is to encourage communication between educators and their students asynchronously -- across time and space -- through active use of portals, discussion boards and weblogs, which all encourage the exchange of ideas. The adage is that interactive web tools are at their best when they make things "easier, better, faster." How can new media facilitate the art educator? This is the question to ponder while exploring its use.

Other practical uses for new media are virtual galleries that bring students together across physical barriers, allow a public display of effort and can be useful for educators with fire-code restrictions that prevent the hanging of much student work in their schools. Courseware can both create a rich environment for distance learning and augment the physical classroom.

AEContent
"The art educators' virtual drop-in center" -- news, discussion, lessons, forums, galleries, private journals, weblinks

Massarted Online
courseware for the art education department

Additionally, new media also describes a genre of art. Nonlinear storytelling, code art, collaborative projects, installations, animation, illustration and experiential interfaces are all facilitated with new media tools.

Some examples: Digital Art Resources
a list of new media artists and projects, arranged by declarative statement.
At the Art and Technology Wiki
Feel free to contribute your own finds.

Tips for learning and using Movabletype

All of the active student weblogs have been moved to the new installation of Movabletype and spam blocking is active. Any student who wishes to explore keeping their own weblog contact Eleanor Ramsay and I will set you up.

Here are a few tips for using Movabletype:

Learning Movabletype
Tutorials and helpful hints

Movablestyle
Alternative styles for Movabletype weblogs (3.x and 2.x)

Neil's Weblog Templates
More templates and styles for Movabletype and Wordpress

Movabletype Knowledge Base
Wiki-based knowledgebase contributed to by experts

Movabletype Support Forums
At the movabletype website. Online and intergrated documentation is also available.

Movabletype 3.1

This new install is ready to be used by the MassArt MSAE Art Education students. During the next few days, this will replace the older weblog. Resources will be available for current MT users to import their weblogs into the new installation. Abandoned 2.x weblogs will not be upgraded and will be removed. Contact Eleanor Ramsay if you would like to particicapte in the art, education and new media discussion, or if you would like a weblog of your own.

Using wiki's and weblogs for collaboration

Massart's "Renewal, Support and Growth" Summer Intitutes are utilizing web-based collaborative tools such as the Art and Technology Wiki and AEContent to extend the course beyond the eight hour day and one week schedule. The wiki was chosen for its ease of use, and AEContent for its robust collaborative features. In addition, visiting artist/educator Kathy Douglas kept a nightly course journal of the first week that reflected on each day's proceedings. AEContent features documentary photographs of the art work and collaborative experience.

How can these tools extend this experience? Each participant in the summer institutes received instruction in AEContent and learned a bit about wiki's and online galleries. Will they find these resources useful when they return to the classroom this fall? How can AEContent and other web-based resources truly benefit art educators today? How, when exposing talented but not necessarily technically saavy educators and artists to new media tools, do we encourage them to go beyond the discovery phase and utilize these tools in their everyday classroom experience?

Massart Announces the Summer Institute Schedules

Each summer, Massart presents intensive courses for art educators, which can be taken for either graduate credit or professional development points. The two institutes are held on the Massart campus and focus on classroom content, educator support and renewal, studio exploration and technology integration in the art classroom. Massart's new AEContent Network will be used to augment each course this summer.

Summer Renewal, Support and Growth Institute
Animating the Curriculum Frameworks
July 5-9, 2004

Exploring Digital Art.
Using New Media in the Art Classroom
July 12-16, 2004

The Summer Content Institute
Public Art and Architechture in 19th Century America
August 2- August 13, 2004
September 11, October 16, & November 20

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Summer Renewal, Support and Growth Institute
Animating the Curriculum Frameworks
July 5-9, 2004

Exploring Digital Art.
Using New Media in the Art Classroom
July 12-16, 2004

Join Massachusetts College of Art faculty and your colleagues in the visual arts at two invigorating one-week summer Institutes that concentrate on the Visual Arts Standards 6-10. Animating the Curriculum Frameworks uses playful studio and conceptual approaches to explore the vitality of these frameworks. Exploring Digital Art: Using New Media in the Art Classroom explores the frameworks through investigations into new media artmaking, aesthetics, literacy, software and the role of new media in the art classroom.

Participants can take one or both workshops. These institutes are free of charge for Boston Public School and Metro-Boston Art Educators.
• 67.5 PDPs will be awarded to participants who request them.
• 3 Graduate Credits are available for a fee of $435 for Boston Public School and Metro-Boston Arts educators.

Visit the Renewal, Support and Growth Institute Website for more information.

The Summer Content Institute
Public Art and Architechture in 19th Century America
August 2- August 13, 2004
September 11, October 16, & November 20

Employing a strong cross-disciplinary approach, this Institute will focus on late 19th century America. The Institute will explore the art forms of architecture, the design of the land and public art in the context of and as expressions of life in America. These art forms reveal public and private issues facing Americans in the newly industrialized society. Participants will explore the remarkable resources in the Boston environs to make explicit the many connections between the artistic, historic and social contexts.

Free-of charge for Massachusetts School Teachers for 67.5 PDPs
Graduate Credits available for the Cooperating Institution rate of $435.00

Visit the Summer Content Institute Website for more information.

Massachusetts College of Art
621 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Contact Liz Rudnick in Continuing Ed at 617-879-7174 for more information.

First Monday

First Monday is a "peer reviewed journal on the internet." I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the possibilities, infuence or effects of the internet on culture, memory and thinking. As its name descibes, on (or around) the first Monday of each month the site publishes about 5 new articles submitted by educators, theorists, scientists, new media artists and developers, graduate students or big thinkers that have been reviewed by the First Monday staff. The emphasis is on theory, clinical research and reflection, not "how-to's" or general social commentary. Along with the new articles, the site usually features an important article or two from its vault each month and also has an index listing more than 500 articles published since 1996.

The Tyranny of Windows and other thoughts

This morning, I read an article in the Boston Globe about PC repair docs who are making tidy living off of the "viral nightmare" that is the Microsoft OS and software running on 95% of all PCs. In fact, to most users PC means Windows. But, it doesn't have to be that way, and I wish more folks would break the bonds of Microserfdom and make their next computer purchase a Mac. Read Free Your Desktop and Your Mind Will Follow at my personal weblog for more thoughts and let me know what you think.

As anyone who talks to me knows, my latest obsession is social software and social web projects. AEContent is a social network, a portal designed for art educators. It is not very sociable there yet. Please, New Media students, stop by, register, play with the features, give us some feedback and perhaps it can become what it was meant to be, a virtual drop-in center where art teachers can connect and create.

There are free PDP workshops on AEContent for art educators this spring. The first is this Saturday. March 6. Contact Continuing Ed for more information.

Growing out of the social network world is what's known as the Blogosphere. This is a silly term that means the world of interconnected and cross-referenced weblogs maintained by pundits, professionals, provoceurs and private folks all over the Internet. All MSAE New Media students can have their own weblogs here at MassArtEd, just drop me a line if you're interested.

Here are a few social links projects to keep you on the cutting-edge of the net and provide some fodder for your own blog!

Delicious
As I mentioned, a shared links list. No agenda, no POV, just whatever any member finds of interest.

Hot Links
Originating out France (but, really, there are no borders in cyberspace or the Blogosphere) This is a shared links blog featuring selections from some well known, respected and tapped-in internet personalities. The interface is a great experiment as well.

MemeStremes
Another group weblog that I have just started following. it seems more along the lines of Delicious, with an open membership.

Grey Tuesday

I weigh in on the collective artist protest Grey Tuesday and discuss copyright and art and appropration a bit at my blog caught in the web today. Essentially, why is "rock music" considered a lesssor art not worthy of the fair use protections of visual art or classical music? I think its simply prejudice. Download the tracks of The Grey Album at my site (these tracks will only be up for 24 hours).

link sharing

I've been exploring a new non-commercial service called Delicious -- http://del.icio.us a "social bookmarks manager." The idea is to share your links on a public server where you can also categorize them and easily copy other links in the database to your account. I find this idea to be really intriguing because:

1) most folks who do a lot of web research tend to accumulate lots of links.

2) sharing those links with others broadens your search while also exposing trends and sources you might otherwise not access.

3) social use of the internet is one of its greatest strengths, one that is really being tapped with the emergence of weblogs and cms tools for shared content, as well as community portals.

4) the database structure of the site precludes multiple linking -- a url is added only once, but can be copied or linked to by any delicious member. While all the links are maintained in the database, only the most recent ones appear on the delicious homepage (or on your visible account pages).

5) it includes RSS feeds for dynamically adding your links (or the database) to another site, a weblog for example. I have my Delicious links fed to my new weblog Caught in the Web. with RSS.

Check it out, it's free and non commercial.

tooting my horn

Hey, since no one's posted to this weblog recently -- common all you new media art folks! (if you need info on how to become an author, or have forgotten your password, just email me) -- I guess I'll be the first of the new year.

My fall Teaching in New Media students' rocked. This was the first year that the graduate ArtEd students had to take the course if they wanted to graduate this spring. The course became a requirement last year, but a lot of folks put off taking the class I guess... so, we had a full house, ranging from no web and only limited computer experience to students with a fair amount of web design and computer arts skill.

Well, some of the least experienced students came up with the most original and thoughtful lesson plans and classroom projects integrating new media. We also had a lot of great digital video presentations and some cool robotics projects. Fred Wolflink directed the robotics section (natch). If you haven't played legos with Fred yet, your Massart experience is not complete!

Don't believe me? Just browse through some of the students' websites.

We also launched AEContent.Net at the November New England Art Education Conference. AEContent is a community portal created by and for Art Educators. Register and you'll be able to use the forums, contribute stories and lessons, read other's contributions, maintain an online journal (viewable only to other members) and gallery and access lots of other cool features. I'll be hosting some workshops at Massart January 26-30 from 3-5pm in the Virtual Classroom (third floor, Tower) for the Massart Art Ed community. There will be workshops for BPS and Massachusetts-based art educators beginning in February.

We're looking for feedback, so please register and let us (ok, me) know what you think.

Bye, Bye Slides??

From Monday's Boston Globe. Eastman Kodak has said that they will cease making slide projectors in July 2004. New purchases of slide projectors has dropped dramatically as more people use videotape, CD-Roms or the Internet to present slide shows of visual material.

]]> As more classrooms are equipped with video projectors the audience for new purchases of projectors has dropped. Apparently, few consumers bore their neighbors with slide shows of their vacations anymore either, according to sales figures quoted in the Globe story. While digital scanning and presentations can be effective and may, ultimately, be easier to run, at what cost? Will we lose our appreciation of the crisp color and reproductive quality of slides as we become accustomed to the inferior, but passable, quality of jpegs?

A Projector Slides off Into the Sunset

Art, Education and New Media

There are many ways to reform education with technology. Artists and art educators should take a central role in the development of visual and new media literacy and in expanding knowledge and discourse on new media form and aesthetics.

The Art, Education and New Media research group maintains the website MassArtEd.org as a development resource for students and researchers associated with the program. Contact Eleanor Ramsay for more information about using MassArtEd.org for your research projects.

Exploring Interfaces

An Interface allows two non-like things, a computer and a human for example, to communicate. Computer Interfaces transform information and guide the user's action so that effective knowledge transfer can occur. The ability of a user to affect a change in the presentation of an interface is part of what makes it "interactive."

While we generally think first of "page and window" interfaces, there are also dimensional and conceptual ways of organizing information. The design and user experience is determined in part by an interface's purpose and the audience it is designed to work with.

Artists explore interfaces as a storytelling or conceptual medium, sometimes exploring the abstraction of the media and code. Usability experts explore universal access and understanding. Game-makers and scientists use virtual reality tools to transform users into the world of the interface.

Select an interface you find on the web and describe the user experience (linear, informational, experiential, transparent, virtual reality). Why does this interface succeed or fail? Add your choice, with its complete url to the comments of this entry.

Open Thread: Share your questions or advice

In this class we learn ways to use new media to communicate with peers and share ideas. The class combines discussion and lab-time but it seems that there is never a chance to cover everything we'd like. Use this thread to post questions or share advice or resources you find. Sometimes the simplest bit of information can mean the difference between success and frustration.

Share your thoughts!

We can start new entries anytime. If you are interested in becoming an author here, or exploring blogs and community building tools there is information within the coursepages that you might find helpful, or email me directly.