With my teaching duties over for the Fall semester and my grades in, I can now devote some time to catching up with my online activities like this blog. I have an assortment of things to share in this entry, which may be my last one for 2006.
First, I finally set up personal accounts on Flickr and on Del.icio.us. I haven’t had a compelling reason to use these popular sites up to now, since I’ve always posted links and photos on my Web sites (e.g., see Stepping Out). But, the ease in which I was able to register and to make use of Flickr and Delicious certainly won me over and I plan to make more use of them in the coming year.
On a related note, I came across Alan Levine’s What Can We Do With Flickr? presentation, which provides a good introduction to educational uses of Flickr. His blog is filled with goodies like this one.
I also used a Wiki for the first time this Fall with my graduate curriculum class. We used Wikispaces.com (for free) to develop an outline for an integrated art unit on Our Relationship with Animals. The first five weeks of this curriculum class was devoted to studying the “Backwards Design“ model made popular by Wiggins & McTighe (2005). As a way of learning to apply the model to art education, I had the students collaborate on planning an art unit together during the remainder of the semester. Since much of this work was done outside of class, the Wiki served us well in that the students were able to log-on to the site from home and to contribute to the unit to edit each other’s work over the course of several weeks. Then, each week, we devoted an hour or so of class time to looking at our progress on the unit and making group decisions on how to proceed.
Although we ran out of time (leaving the unit in a somewhat unfinished state), the experience of using a Wiki to do collaborative writing was a good one for everyone involved. The only drawback we encountered in using the Wikispaces site was a problem with bold facing (i.e., for some reason, we were unable to turn off bold facing at times). Still, I recommend this site for any art teachers or art education classes involved in curriculum planning or other activities that involve group writing.
In the News
Now, for a few news-type items, some of which have been sitting on my desk for a few weeks (making them “old news”):
With the explosion of Web sites like Flickr, youTube, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, MySpace and other sites that promote user-generated content, this week Time Magazine named “You” as its “Person of the Year.” According to Time, “In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.” In a related story, Time named youTube at its “Invention of the Year” for 2006.
Last week, Time ran an interesting cover story titled “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century“ that claimed “A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.” The article makes a compelling case for teaching 21st century skills in the classroom in order to better prepare our kids for the new global economy.
The question is whether this call for action will fall on deaf ears given that much of the conversation about schooling in the U.S. for the past five years has been on minimum competency testing in subjects like reading and math (a.k.a. NCLB). Still, the number of voices clamoring for a radical overhaul of the U.S. education system is on the rise. The article quotes Marc Tucker, author of the recently released New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce report “Tough Choices for Tough Times“ as saying that the jobs in the new economy—the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated—put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos. There is also a comment included by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century) who suggests that kids today “must learn to think across disciplines since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations, design and technology, mathematics, and art that produced YouTube and Google.”
Taken together, all of this suggests that a new climate is emerging in this country that is more conducive to K-12 arts education [hooray! hooray!]. Of course it will take some work to frame an argument for stronger support for K-12 arts education with all the current attention focused on standardized testing. But, I do see a glimmer of hope here!
More Americans Online Than Ever Before
Adding to the recent buzz about the rise in online activities that occurred this past year, The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School recently released the results of its sixth year of tracking Internet use among a representative sample of Americans. The study found that 78 percent of Americans now use the Web, as compared with nearly 67 percent in 2000. The average time spent online has also increased from 9.4 hours in 2000 to 14 hours a week online in 2006. Other findings indicate that 21 percent of adult Internet users with children say that they kids are online too long, whereas 49 percent complain that their kids watch too much TV. When the kids were surveyed, about 80 percent said that the Internet is important for schoolwork although their parents said grades haven’t necessarily improved since they got Internet access.
How does this compare with art teacher’s use of the Internet? Help us find out by participating in the 2nd Annual Internet Survey for Art Teachers (that will continue to run until the end of January).
Now for Some Fun Stuff
I’ll close here with a few cool items to check out over the holidays:
The Electric December is the digital advent calendar offering a unique digital present each day during the run-up to the festive season. Explore 24 days of multi-media digital distractions created by diverse contributors from Bristol, UK. (sponsored by the Watershed Media Centre).
DepicT! is a the short film competition that challenges young filmmakers from around the world to make mini-masterpieces of under 90 seconds.
Panoramas.dk offers stunning interactive 360-degree panoramas submitted by digital panoramic photographers from around the world. One of my favorites is a view of The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Lastly, I’m not a big golf fan. But, Mini-Putt is addicting. I’m still trying to shoot one game of par.
This & That—Bringing 2006 to a Close
With my teaching duties over for the Fall semester and my grades in, I can now devote some time to catching up with my online activities like this blog. I have an assortment of things to share in this entry, which may be my last one for 2006.
First, I finally set up personal accounts on Flickr and on Del.icio.us. I haven’t had a compelling reason to use these popular sites up to now, since I’ve always posted links and photos on my Web sites (e.g., see Stepping Out). But, the ease in which I was able to register and to make use of Flickr and Delicious certainly won me over and I plan to make more use of them in the coming year.
On a related note, I came across Alan Levine’s What Can We Do With Flickr? presentation, which provides a good introduction to educational uses of Flickr. His blog is filled with goodies like this one.
I also used a Wiki for the first time this Fall with my graduate curriculum class. We used Wikispaces.com (for free) to develop an outline for an integrated art unit on Our Relationship with Animals. The first five weeks of this curriculum class was devoted to studying the “Backwards Design“ model made popular by Wiggins & McTighe (2005). As a way of learning to apply the model to art education, I had the students collaborate on planning an art unit together during the remainder of the semester. Since much of this work was done outside of class, the Wiki served us well in that the students were able to log-on to the site from home and to contribute to the unit to edit each other’s work over the course of several weeks. Then, each week, we devoted an hour or so of class time to looking at our progress on the unit and making group decisions on how to proceed.
Although we ran out of time (leaving the unit in a somewhat unfinished state), the experience of using a Wiki to do collaborative writing was a good one for everyone involved. The only drawback we encountered in using the Wikispaces site was a problem with bold facing (i.e., for some reason, we were unable to turn off bold facing at times). Still, I recommend this site for any art teachers or art education classes involved in curriculum planning or other activities that involve group writing.
In the News
Now, for a few news-type items, some of which have been sitting on my desk for a few weeks (making them “old news”):
With the explosion of Web sites like Flickr, youTube, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, MySpace and other sites that promote user-generated content, this week Time Magazine named “You” as its “Person of the Year.” According to Time, “In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.” In a related story, Time named youTube at its “Invention of the Year” for 2006.
Last week, Time ran an interesting cover story titled “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century“ that claimed “A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.” The article makes a compelling case for teaching 21st century skills in the classroom in order to better prepare our kids for the new global economy.
The question is whether this call for action will fall on deaf ears given that much of the conversation about schooling in the U.S. for the past five years has been on minimum competency testing in subjects like reading and math (a.k.a. NCLB). Still, the number of voices clamoring for a radical overhaul of the U.S. education system is on the rise. The article quotes Marc Tucker, author of the recently released New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce report “Tough Choices for Tough Times“ as saying that the jobs in the new economy—the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated—put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos. There is also a comment included by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century) who suggests that kids today “must learn to think across disciplines since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations, design and technology, mathematics, and art that produced YouTube and Google.”
Taken together, all of this suggests that a new climate is emerging in this country that is more conducive to K-12 arts education [hooray! hooray!]. Of course it will take some work to frame an argument for stronger support for K-12 arts education with all the current attention focused on standardized testing. But, I do see a glimmer of hope here!
More Americans Online Than Ever Before
Adding to the recent buzz about the rise in online activities that occurred this past year, The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School recently released the results of its sixth year of tracking Internet use among a representative sample of Americans. The study found that 78 percent of Americans now use the Web, as compared with nearly 67 percent in 2000. The average time spent online has also increased from 9.4 hours in 2000 to 14 hours a week online in 2006. Other findings indicate that 21 percent of adult Internet users with children say that they kids are online too long, whereas 49 percent complain that their kids watch too much TV. When the kids were surveyed, about 80 percent said that the Internet is important for schoolwork although their parents said grades haven’t necessarily improved since they got Internet access.
How does this compare with art teacher’s use of the Internet? Help us find out by participating in the 2nd Annual Internet Survey for Art Teachers (that will continue to run until the end of January).
Now for Some Fun Stuff
I’ll close here with a few cool items to check out over the holidays:
The Electric December is the digital advent calendar offering a unique digital present each day during the run-up to the festive season. Explore 24 days of multi-media digital distractions created by diverse contributors from Bristol, UK. (sponsored by the Watershed Media Centre).
DepicT! is a the short film competition that challenges young filmmakers from around the world to make mini-masterpieces of under 90 seconds.
Panoramas.dk offers stunning interactive 360-degree panoramas submitted by digital panoramic photographers from around the world. One of my favorites is a view of The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Lastly, I’m not a big golf fan. But, Mini-Putt is addicting. I’m still trying to shoot one game of par.
Happy Holidays!
cr