The University of Florida’s Art Education Program is pleased to announce that noted art educator Olivia Gude will deliver a public lecture on Friday, January 20, 2012 in FAB 105 from 7 to 8 pm (EST). Gude is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Founding Director of the Spiral Workshop. Gude was awarded the National Art Education Association’s 2009 Lowenfeld Award for significant contributions to the field of art education.
Olivia’s lecture will be streamed live on the Web and be viewable through your web browser at this URL (which is also on the attached PDF file). You can also view a recording of the lecture at the same URL, after the event.
Viewing the webcast on your web browser requires that the Microsoft Sliverlight Player Plugin be installed on your computer. Note: It was an easy install on my iMac, accomplished in a couple clicks. Additional information on the player and its system requirements can be found here.
For those who use Twitter, I will be tweeting live (craigr) from the lecture from 7 pm to 8 pm (EST) using the hashtag of #gude_uf. If you have a question for Olivia, please post it to Twitter prior to the end of the session and mark it with the same hashtag #gude_uf.
To wrap up 2011, I’ve spent the past few days sorting through my postings, RSS feeds, and notes from the past year. Here, in no particular order, are ten items that rose to the top of the pile for me.
Creativity
As a follow up to a presentation I did at the NAEA conference in Seattle, I collected a dozen videos on “creativity” and posted them here back in March. That blog post garnered the most comments from readers during the year. Since then, I’ve bookmarked several new videos on creativity that popped on my radar screen, including Everything is a Remix, Part 3 which explores how innovations truly happen; What is being creative?, based on a student design project; and the following video titled Deadlines by a Hungarian ad agency Cafe Creative that raises questions about the amount of time we give children to “be creative” in our art classes.
This past summer, my colleague Brian Slawson taught a one-week summer intensive course at UF for graduate art education students on the subject of design thinking, a topic that’s getting some Internet buzz lately and one that I’ve long felt deserves more attention in the preparation of preK-12 (art) teachers. If you’re interested in exploring design thinking with your students check out Tina Barseghian’s Design Thinking: Creative Ways to Solve Problems on Edutopia and be sure to download the Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators from the international design firm IDEO.
Teachers Under Attack
It’s been a rough year for teachers, to say the least. While ‘teacher bashing’ is not a new phenomenon, I never would have imagined when this year started that teachers (and teacher unions) would become so vilified in the media. To gain some perspective on the tenor of the debate, read the March 2011 discussion titled “Why Blame the Teachers?” in the New York Times, and Richard D. Kahlenberg’s more recent article “Bipartisan, But Unfounded: The Assault On Teachers Unions” in American Educator.
All of this is particularly discouraging for young people who have chosen (or are thinking about) teaching as a career. Over the year, I’ve worked to counter the negative images of teachers presented in the media by showing my students (aspiring art teachers) more positive and inspirational messages, such as Taylor Mali‘s smackdown “What Teachers Make” in defense of his profession and the following student video titled “Teachers Inspire Us.” And, if you ever need a reminder of the importance of teachers, just go to Thanks for Teaching Us, a website that started as a 30-day campaign to recognize amazing teachers that has since turned into a global movement.
Art Advocacy
With rumors abound regarding the slashing and elimination of school art programs across the country, arts advocates have their work cut out for them these days. Huffington Post’s Nick Rabkin provides some historical perspective in which to view the current status of arts education in schools. One of the more effective arts advocacy pieces I saw this past year was the following video produced by the Boyertown Area Senior High School Art Department (PA) in response to the impact of threatened state budget cuts on school arts programs.
I also got a kick out of this ad campaign for Detroit’s College of Creative Studies. As the Art Advocado points out, this is technically an advertisement rather than an advocacy piece; still, she goes on remind readers of the role of humor as a useful advocacy strategy.
Curating the Web
Another trend I’ve been following this past year is Web curation, a practice that’s grown in popularity to offset the proliferation of information online and the pollution of spam gumming up search results. Instead of relying solely on the usual Web search to find something online that’s relevant and useful, people are turning to content-gathering sites like Bundler, Scoop It, and Pinterest to select, organize and share content on the Web. These sites rely on individuals with expertise or interest in specific topics to pull together collections of related materials and provide various crowd-sourcing features to help guide user decisions about what is important and valuable. To learn more about Web curation, watch the following interview between social media gurus Howard Rhiengold and Robin Good. Also, read Teacher-Librarian Joyce Valenza’s article “Curation is the new search: Seven tools you may not know you can search with.”
New Tools
As for new tools I’ve been messing around this past year, Pinterest is certainly at the top of my list. While I wasn’t an early adopter, once I created my first board it was easy to see why Pinterest has picked up so many users so quickly (over 4 million since August). So, what is it? Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that allows you to collect, organize and share stuff you find on the Web (aka, a web curation tool). Since you pin images taken from a site along with a corresponding description and URL, boards on Pinterest have a strong visual appeal to them. These boards are sharable and can attract followers, which gives Pinterest a social networking feel about it. Here are some boards I recently made and continue to add to: Books I Recommend, Art Education Blogs, Museums, and Videos I Recommend.
To join Pinterest and start creating your own boards, you need to either request an invite from the site or be invited by someone who is already a Pinterest user. To learn more, check out Mashable’s Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network.
As for other new tools, there is nothing that I’ve tried lately that I feel as strongly about as Pinterest. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I was happy to see that Delicious has been taken over by new owners who have set about rebranding and redesigning the site. That’s a site I still make heavy use of to save my favorite links. I also visit Google+ on occasion, which was launched back in July. It has some interesting features, or pluses, such as ‘hangouts’ that could prove useful for meeting remote colleagues or students online, it makes photo and video sharing quite easy to do, and there is a small community of art education users that make Google+ attractive for distributing your content to others who may find it of interest. Yet, it’s unlikely to replace Facebook or Twitter any time soon as a “go to” source for online networking with colleagues or friends. To learn more, check out Mashable’s Google+: The Complete Guide.
Art Education 2.0
Speaking of social networking sites, I’m happy to report that Art Education 2.0 gained over 2000 new members in 2011 and recently topped 10, 000 members. In 2011, Art Education 2.0 was favorably reviewed by the MERLOT Teacher Education Editorial Board and was selected as a finalist for Best Educational Use of a Social Network at the 2011 Edublog Awards. On behalf of all the members of Art Ed 2.0, I appreciate the nods.
New Online Resources
In addition to some new tools surfacing this past year, a number of new or revamped resources came online that should interest art teachers. YouTube recently launched YouTube for Schools that provides access to 1000s of educational videos from YouTube EDU, which come from organizations like PBS, TED, and Stanford. Plus, the Kennedy Center relaunched its website for K-12 arts education, ArtsEdge, which features a vast collection of free online resources including lesson plans, audio stories, video clips, and interactive online modules.
Several museums introduced new or improved educational resources on their sites this past year. For instance, the Metropolitan Museum has been rolling out changes to their website lately that are intended to make their vast collections more accessible via various multimedia sources. Their new MetMedia page is a good spot to start exploring what the site has to offer.
I’m happy to see the Whitney Museum is back with a For Kids page designed for young artists ages 8 to 12. The Whitney also has a Teacher’s Page that offers access to a range of curriculum materials, multi-media resources, as well as information about professional development opportunities. Another museum site worth checking out is the Guggenheim’s Learning Through Art page that provides information on their LTA residencies as well as a growing list of educational resources for teachers.
Before moving on, I should give a nod to Google Art Project, which was launched back in February and provides incredible access to over 1,000 works of art from 17 world-class museums and to create and share your own collection of masterpieces. This is a site definitely worth bookmarking on your classroom computer.
New Art Projects
There have been several new collaborative art projects launched this past year that have involved students in schools around the globe working together. The three amigos, Matt, David and Mike from The Student Creative wrapped up FLOAT earlier this year and are back with a third global art project titled Surrealistic Me, which invites students and classrooms to come together and share surreal self-portraits which reveal something about their dreams and the world in which they live. In another project, Kendra Farrell’s photography students at the International School in Beijing and Melissa Noack’s photography students at Yarmouth High School in Maine have been sharing and critiquing each other’s work for over year through a Ning site set up for the ongoing project. The following video provides an overview of the project and the learning that’s taking place between the students.
Another innovative approach to school collaboration can be seen in the Monsters in a Box Project that involved Theresa Gillespie’s kindergarten class in the Moline School District in Illinois sending their monster drawings to students at Apex High School in North Carolina who then turned them into 3-d clay sculptures and created unique package designs for each sculpture. A similar type of project was staged earlier this year between University of North Texas art students and local elementary students.
Still another collaborative art project that has generated some buzz this year is Oliver Herring’s TASK party, an open-ended, participatory public event in which people are invited to creatively respond to certain written prompts and to develop new ones. I know a number of art teachers and students have already staged TASK events at their schools or in their communities. We staged a successful TASK Party at UF (photos below) as part of our School of Art + Art History’s open house back in November (Here is a list of prompts that were salvaged from the event.). All of this activity is leading up to a huge TASK party that will take place at the NAEA conference in March. Don’t miss it!
Lastly, but certainly not the least, summing up 2011 wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the passing of Apple Co-Founder and CEO Steve Jobs this past year. We will not see the likes of him again in our lifetime.
That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. –George Carlin
Things have been pretty quiet on the Art Teacher’s Guide lately. You all know how it is. Once the school year kicks in, keeping up with classes (both residential and online) and other daily tasks just soaks up my time. I figure I’ll get to writing up a blog entry here next weekend and of course that never works out. I’ve found instead that the immediacy of tweeting and posting my web finds and other items of interest on tumblr is better suited to my daily routine these days. Still, I’m committed to adding a couple longer postings to this blog each month, particularly when the time is right—like now during Thanksgiving break—and when I have something to share.
With the fall semester winding down, I find myself these days occupied with cleaning up my school office, classrooms and storerooms, and my home workroom to name just a few of the places where I’ve accumulated “stuff.” My organizational system (if you can call it that) of “files and piles” typically ends up with more piles that files that can be put in a filing cabinet. I’ve long given up the notion that I can keep all my stuff neatly tucked away in closets, drawers, filing cabinets and so on—you know, all the places we have for storing stuff when it’s not being used. To say I have a problem with too much stuff, or clutter, in my life is an understatement.
The same is true for my digital life. Over the years, I’ve had the habit of backing up files on memory sticks and portable hard drives and, for good measure, creating second back-ups on CDs and DVDs. I see a sale at Office Depot® for memory sticks or portable hard drives and think, “I COULD use another storage device.” The result of all this backing up of files, of course, is more stuff (CDs, memory sticks, and so on) that I need to keep track of and store away. Lately, I’ve been thinking of getting a 2TB portable hard drive and transferring files from all those smaller storage devices on to it so that they’re all in one place—one place for all my digital stuff. jojo nicdao, CC Attribution License, Some rights reserved.
As an alternative, I’ve been looking at Apple’s iCloud—billed as a wireless sync and backup service, but which I see simply as another place for my stuff. Being an Apple junkie, I already have a free iCloud account that provides 5 GB of storage for document syncing and mobile backup. By using iCloud I can “stop worrying about where specific files save to, and instead focus on the information itself.” I can, for example, create files on my home computer upload them to the cloud and then access them anywhere on my laptop, iPad, or office computer. I get the principle behind cloud-computing, I just haven’t fully embraced it yet.
See, I’m the type of guy who got upset when my employer, UF, went to electronically sending my paycheck directly to my back account. There was something I appreciated about the ritual and physicality of taking my check to the bank every two weeks, handing it over to the teller and getting a receipt back in my hand. But, I adjusted.
There are other issues I have with using an online service to store my stuff. Remember the uproar among Delicious users (myself included) when Yahoo threatened to shut down the popular social book-marking service this past year? I’ve accumulated 6000+ links using that service over the years and the thought of losing them kept me awake at night. Fortunately, that issue was resolved and Delicious is still in service under new ownership.
There’s also the matter of security. Will my stuff be secure in “the cloud?” Will others be able to rummage through my stuff? Then, there is the question of “How much storage space do I need in the cloud?” As I look over and see a half dozen memory sticks hanging from lanyards next to my desk, it’s clear that I can fill up 5 GB of storage pretty quickly. So, in all likelihood I’ll need to pay for additional storage space in the cloud. How much will that cost? I have to think about this some more.
Meanwhile, I see Office Depot has a 2TB Seagate hard drive on sale for $79.99. Seems like a good deal.
Last year about this time, I attempted to “take the pulse” of art education in the public schools by conducting a poll to find out how preK-12 art programs were doing in the current economic downturn. Well, things haven’t gotten any better in a year and I continue to hear stories about art programs being eliminated or drastically cut back in schools. So, I figured it was time to conduct another poll.
I certainly don’t see this as a scientific poll. Nevertheless, it may provide some worthwhile information from art teachers around the country, as to how things are going in their areas. Click here to see comments or to leave your own comments.
With fall classes just underway in many schools across the country, the Labor Day break provides teachers and students with an opportunity to catch their breath before plunging headfirst into the school year. Art teachers looking to add something unique to their year’s repertoire of lessons and creative learning experiences should check out TASK.
Created by contemporary artist Oliver Herring, TASK is ‘a collaborative, improvisational art event that can be planned and played by anyone, anywhere, with any budget.’ TASK events generally come in two flavors: TASK Parties, which are open-ended, participatory public events; and TASK Workshops, which are tailored for use in schools or classrooms. Both require a designated area and a variety of inexpensive props, art tools, and found materials. Both are also structured around two basic rules that participants follow:
Write down a task on a piece of paper and add it to a designated task box or pool.
Take a task from the box and interpret it any way you want, using whatever materials are available. When your task is completed, write a new task and place it in the task box.
Herring is one of a number of contemporary artists who are interested in the complex interactions between art, artist, and viewer. Introducing a TASK party or workshop into your curriculum provides an opportunity for your students to explore Art as social interaction and the ways in which viewers’ beliefs and the social functions of art impact how contemporary art practice is seen in our society.
If I’ve tweaked your interest and you want to know more about TASK there are several places you can go on the Web for information and ideas. A key-word search on YouTube with the phrase ‘TASK party’ nets some 40 videos like the following one of a TASK Party at Illinois State University (my alma mater) in 2010 attended by some 300 people.
While some of the tasks mentioned in the video aren’t appropriate for a K-12 event, many are, and viewing the video provides a great opportunity to watch a TASK Party in action.
Another place to go for ideas on staging a TASK Party at your school or in your community is Oliver Herring’s Task Blog, which is filled with videos of past TASK parties staged around the country, lists of TASKS salvaged from past events, suggestions on staging a TASK event, and more. I particularly appreciated reading Sarah Nakano Purgett’s blog entry (March 3, 2011) about a TASK party put on by the Walker Arts Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) in February and what she learned from the experience.
To further encourage K-12 art teachers to get involved and plan a TASK event with their students, SchoolArts Magazine, Art21, ArtEd 2.0 and NAEA have teamed up with Oliver Herring to make TASK more accessible to educators, teachers and students. The culmination of this collaboration will be a huge TASK Party at the NAEA convention this coming year in NYC. You can keep tabs on the plans and activities of this group and the teachers who join in at TASKParty.com. Even better, join the TASK Party group on Art Education 2.0, where you can chat with other art teachers who will be planning TASK events in their communities or schools this coming school year.
Lastly, I’ve been brainstorming possible written TASKS to use at a TASK party we’ll be staging here at UF later in the school year. Here is a list of 24 TASKS to start with, not all of which might work at your school. Still, they may help you get your own pool of TASKS started (which I hope you’ll share here or in the TASK Party group on Art Education 2.0).
24 Possible TASKS (more in the works)
Using newspaper, scissors and tape, make the tallest self-supporting sculpture you can in 15 minutes. Have a sculpture-making contest with two other people.
Design a musical instrument out of found materials. Teach someone else how to play it.
Draw a picture of something invisible. Share your drawing with someone else at the party.
Using whatever materials you can find, create an imaginative gravestone with your epitaph on it. Display it in the corner of the room with other gravestones.
Create a creature from found materials and name it. Ask someone else at the party to write a story about your creature and display both in the room.
Make a hat and coat out of newspaper and tape for a companion. Have them wear it at the party.
Working with a partner, create a shadow play using a flashlight, your hands and any props you can make or find. Present it to a small group of people.
Using whatever materials you can find, create a mask that will give the wearer special powers. Give it as a gift to someone else to wear.
Imagine what you will be famous for someday and devise a way to communicate your contribution to others at the party.
Using whatever materials you can find, create a headpiece that exemplifies your importance. Wear it for the remainder of the party.
Draw someone’s portrait on an index card using five lines or less. Give them your portrait as a gift.
Create a work of art about something that cannot be seen. Put it on display.
With a black marker and index card, design a commemorative stamp about an important event in your life. Share it.
Working with 2 other people, create a self-supporting sculpture from cardboard and tape that touches the ceiling.
Create a work of art that will touch someone’s heart. Give it to them as a gift.
Design a hat out of found materials that will help someone think like an artist. Convince someone else that it works and to wear it during the party.
Make art on a post-it note. Create a gallery of post-it art.
Form a musical group with four other people. Sing a chorus of “If I had a Hammer” and then get everyone at the party to join in for a second chorus.
Hug ten people at the party. Ask them to “pay it forward.”
Make a map to get lost. Give it to someone else and ask them to follow it.
Draw a heart on an index card. Fill it in with a color of your choice. Give it to someone else at the party and tell them you love them.
Create rhythm with 3 other people.
Create a zine. Give it to someone else at the party.
Send a status update to your Facebook page. Invite them to the party.
Olivia Gude Lecture Streamed Live on Friday January 20
The University of Florida’s Art Education Program is pleased to announce that noted art educator Olivia Gude will deliver a public lecture on Friday, January 20, 2012 in FAB 105 from 7 to 8 pm (EST). Gude is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Founding Director of the Spiral Workshop. Gude was awarded the National Art Education Association’s 2009 Lowenfeld Award for significant contributions to the field of art education.
Olivia’s lecture will be streamed live on the Web and be viewable through your web browser at this URL (which is also on the attached PDF file). You can also view a recording of the lecture at the same URL, after the event.
Viewing the webcast on your web browser requires that the Microsoft Sliverlight Player Plugin be installed on your computer. Note: It was an easy install on my iMac, accomplished in a couple clicks. Additional information on the player and its system requirements can be found here.
For those who use Twitter, I will be tweeting live (craigr) from the lecture from 7 pm to 8 pm (EST) using the hashtag of #gude_uf. If you have a question for Olivia, please post it to Twitter prior to the end of the session and mark it with the same hashtag #gude_uf.
Craig