A Pilgrim’s Progress – Notes on Crossing the Digital Divide

Well, it took a long time – most of a semester – and for a lot of the journey, I felt pretty doubtful. But recently, I do believe I have crossed the digital divide. Really crossed it, into the land of being excited about what I can do with Photoshop, digital storytelling, and more.

Part of the early journey was colored by my longstanding annoyance at this expensive new technology. It was out there, and it was taking over, and it was here to stay. I no longer seemed to have a choice about whether to invest the time, and money, needed to acquire and conquer.

And the financial demands did seem never ending. Every time I turned around, there seemed to be another $500 outlay required. Buy a laptop, in two years, its not longer up-to-date enough to do anything for you. “What? Your desktop is 6 years old? No wonder you can’t do anything! That’s actually pretty old for a Mac.” And so on.

And all the while, the digital world just raced on as ahead, slightly out of reach, blithely secure in its knowledge that we’d all be stumbling along behind, hemorrhaging money, sinking deeper into debt in hopes of avoiding personal and professional obsolesence.

It’s a tough world out there, and sometimes all things digital seemed too much a part of that. Ask all the folks out in rural areas who lost their analog tv signals this year, and won’t be watching tv again until they pony up several hundred dollars, at least, for new equipment because, oh, yes, forgot to mention, those $40 digital converter boxes mostly don’t work out in the country. Oops! Sorry! Hey, maybe you can subscribe to Netflix or something!)

(On a more personal note, late last week, I spent a fairly typical night in digital land, trying and failing to get my two year old refurbished Mac laptop to upload Photoshop Elements. I knew CS4 was out of the question, but i thought i had enough space on the hard drive and screen resolution to upload Ps Elements. Guess again.)

But recently, and mercifully, in fact, just last Friday and Saturday to be precise, in open studio, I crossed some kind of digital frontier, and started to believe that this digital world could be something I might be able to inhabit pretty happily.

The implications are huge. And not just in the classroom. For about a decade now, in my music, I’ve had to pay people to do digital stuff — promo, website, advertising types of things – that I wanted to do myself, and felt I could do, if I only had the training and the software and the time. (Hey, I’m channeling the Cowardly Lion!) Don’t get me wrong – I met a lot of wonderful people contracting that work out, but it hasn’t been cheap. And it was creative work that I’d have liked to be doing myself, at least a little of it.

I wanted to learn this stuff, have wanted to for years, but the mountain, to quote my blogging colleague crisingrid here,  just seemed so high. Even on my home computer, doing easy stuff on dirt simple  programs – Word, iTunes, real player – there seemed to be endless pitfalls, tar pits, sand traps and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Every time I hit a really serious roadblock, I had to pay someone to come over and solve the problem, which cost still more money, which made me even more annoyed and frustrated, and so the cycle continued.

But clearly, ignoring the technology wasn’t working, either. So what to do? Well, one thing was, I decided to take Digital Media. I really wanted to be there, I REALLY wanted to learn some of this stuff, but on another level, the cellular one (or maybe it was the emotional level, or maybe they’re the same – they’re certainly connected) I was highly doubtful that this relationship was going to work out! Digital media, it just wasn’t that into me!

And as it turned out, it was a pretty frustrating experience at times. But gradually, with each lesson, each presentation, each demo, I noticed I was feeling a little more knowledgeable and even confident. That seemed like a good sign.

But the final frontier was using the software myself, Photoshop in particular. I took pages of notes as Selila demo’d this brush or that lasso, and after class studied my scrawlings with Talmudic zeal. But sure enough, on my first solo visit to open studio, where I got into the driver’s seat for the first time,  I spun out almost immediately. (I later found out that part of the problem that first day was a faulty mouse.)

In hindsight, I have concluded that to enter digital land, there’s just a long, unavoidable trek through the foothills. It’s a  hard, losing-your-boot-soles kind of slog. When you’re at that stage, it really helps, in fact it seems essential, to have someone at your elbow, one way or another, that you can ask the dumb, endless and necessary questions. Selila said as much in class, and later, in studio. Once we got a chance to do that last weekend, with the benefit of the whole semester’s worth of presentations and demo’s behind me, things really finally, FINALLY thank god, started to click, at least a little. That’s a kind of digital way of saying – eureka! Suddenly, I could feel that I was past the beginning beginning and into the middle beginning, where things started to make a little more sense, and patterns could be discerned and connections made. I got to that point last weekend, during two full days – Friday and Saturday – spent at the computer, with Selila presiding in answer-a-million questions mode. It worked, it was great, and now I’m going to find a way to get a new computer, and maybe take Digital Media 1200, and then it’s on to Dreamweaver and then there’ll be no freaking stopping me. Thanks, y’all. Hollywood, here I come.

Ironies abounding …

… (as my old friend, the journalist Curt Suplee once wrote, in another context). I always liked that line  (it was the lead of his story that day, way back when), and I am quoting it here, with attribution, as the lead to this blogpost about copyright law and the implications of the Napster case for same.

I plucked the line out of my own super-personal personal computer, aka my brain, because it seems an apt beginning for a blog post about the intricacies and ironies of the current state of copyright law. I have some professional experience with the law, in my work as a singer-songwriter (www.littlepinktheband.com). To date, I have copyrighted three CDs of original music before releasing them on two different independent record labels, which themselves count on similar protections under the law. The process was simple – put the music, in any format – CD, audio tape, vinyl LP – in an envelope, include a check for a modest fee, and ship the whole thing off to the Copyright Office. Once the package has been postmarked, you’re protected. I first did that back in 2000, when the first record came out, and I have done it since, and I believe the process has gotten even more user-friendly. Recently,  the Copyright office went digital and all the creative content generator (formerly known as artist) need do now is fill out a form online, pay a (still) modest fee and upload some digital music files. (There’s a backlog at the Copyright office currently, so the government has come up with an expedited copyright registering process – it’ll cost you about $600. But although the major labels are said to be using the expedited process, there’s really no need for the indie or small player to go that route. Once you’ve got your creative work out there in any form other than in your head, (ie., on paper, on disc, on tape, the music), the songs are considered copyrighted and you are protected from unauthorized use.

Which is exactly what the Napster case was about. The question was, what constitutes protection, and authorized use, in the digital age? How does the 20o-year-old canon of copyright law apply when digital technology allows access to copyright material almost beyond counting? For a quick overview of the history of this debate, there’s a good story in the archives at CNN – here’s the link: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/LAW/08/07/copyright.overview/index.html

I have always regarded the Napster case with mixed feelings. On the one hand, like everyone else I know, I benefit from the free and uninterrupted flow of digital information on the World Wide Interwebs. On the other hand, the digital revolution has altered the music industry, of which I am a very small part, beyond recognition. I prefer vinyl, CDs and audio tape – my last record was made with 7 tracks and one-inch tape (the record before that was 2-inch tape) – but I can see the virtue of file-sharing services and I regularly receive mix CDs from friends who’re pulling music (legally) off of iTunes and other legal file sharing market places. In addition to Amazon, I sell my music in digital form on a site called CD Baby, until recently owned by Derek Sivers, who made transparency in his accounting and rapid payment to artists a selling point. CD Baby in turn sells my music to about 50 file-sharing and ring-tone vendors. (Actually, I have refused to allow my music to be used as a ring tone.) So I am a content provider and this makes me favor full copyright protections. On the other hand, I believe the critics of the record industry got it right when they said that the major labels, like the major film studios before them, made a big mistake when they sued Napster instead of trying to cohabit with it.

Dwight Garner, reviewing Steve Knopp’s book, “Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age,” in the New York Times Book Review recently, said it well: “The record industry bungled the coming of Napster. Instead of striking a deal with a service that had more than 26 million users, labels sued, forcing it to close. A result, Mr. Knopper writes, was that users simply splintered, fleeing to many other file-sharing sites. ‘That was the last chance,’ he declares, ‘for the record industry as we know it to stave off certain ruin.’ ” (The full review is at:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/books/07garn.html )

Back to that irony. I benefit from the digital revolution at the same time it has hurt me and two of the endeavors I most esteem – journalism, and making music. I’m glad the revolution will be televised (and Tweeted), but I also see the wisdom of the crowd at work in the slow-moving collective decision to go slow on copyright change. I don’t agree with the writers at Wired and elsewhere who think the digital revolution was reason to throw copyright protections out with the bathwater. The law is sure to change and evolve mightily in the years and decades ahead, but for now, I’m glad to have it in place, protecting me and my music.

My final project proposal

I would like to use Photoshop (and possibly Illustrator) to create a series of a half- dozen images that would be printed and compiled into a simple guide to art education resources for people with Alzheimer’s Disease and their caretakers.

The genesis of this idea is personal; my father has Alzheimer’s disease. He used to love painting, but recently abandoned it. I am searching for ideas to help him find his way back, if possible, and so would welcome the opportunity to research what’s out there in the way of museum or Web or print programs and ideas.

I would like these images to be beautiful and meaningful. They might one day even form the basis of a website for a wider audience. But website building is beyond the scope of this project, simply because I am still struggling with the rock-bottom basics of Photoshop. I took careful notes when the software was demonstrated, but we have not had much practice time in class, and I haven’t been able to make any headway on my own (3 hours and counting – hugely frustrating).

So I would welcome the chance to really learn this stuff, at least the basics, before the semester is done. That is far from being a sure thing, but it would feel like a real accomplishment to me, and in any case, time well spent.

Note: I don’t own either Photoshop or Illustrator software, and so will need to work at the Corcoran and make full use of the supervised classroom and lab time that has been scheduled. (One basic question I have as I type this is whether, if I were to sign up for Lynda.com, I will be able to access it from the Corcoran computer lab.)

 

 

Mr. Sweeny’s Digital Manifesto

Aux Armes, Mes Citoyens!

(On Robert Sweeny’s “Lines of Sight in the ‘Network Society’ “)

At its heart, this article is a humane, idealistic and quietly seditious call to arms for people who teach and think about visual art in the digital age. It is an attempt to understand what’s happening to us all in this Brave New World of Network Society, to find ways to talk about it, and once we’re talking about it, find ways to explain it to others, namely students. The article also is an appraisal and an appreciation of the work of three very interesting artists – an Australian, a Slovenian and a worldwide collective,  all new to me – who are working to grasp and illuminate the subtle ways the digital world is using, and changing us, even as we beetle on, imagining that we are using it. In the end, I admired this article, and it has given me a lot to think about. But before I move on to substance, I have a complaint and a question about the writing. This is a call to arms that relies on a literary style I find baffling and at times maddening. It seems needlessly dense and opaque, relying on blank words (“visuality”) and avoiding giving specific when that would be most helpful. It is hard to read, confusing at crucial points, and overall, seems to me to sap the power of the author’s argument. I am new to these journal articles, but I have come to recognize this style. But I don’t understand why it is used. It must have some reason, some merit, but I sure don’t see it, at least not yet. However, this is a question for another time. Now that I’ve vented, I gladly move on to the argument itself.

Sweeny’s begins by pointing out some seemingly obvious but nonetheless huge basics. First, that the digital world and all it contains – cyberspace, the Internet, digital networks (the World Wide Web, Facebook), visual surveillance cameras, the Sims, and on and on, world without end, Amen – has radically changed our world. The ways we live, think, interact, look at objects, think of ourselves, have sex, cook, watch TV, you name it — all of that has been altered, and continues to evolve, in ways large and small.  The changes are so enormous, and occur on so many levels, we can’t yet grasp their entirety. (Did serfs feel like this during the early Industrial Revolution? I don’t know, but I think about it a lot. And my best guess is, yes, probably.)

Second, the digital revolution has connected a lot of people, and also left a lot of people behind (at least for now).

Third, in this new world, simple reproduction has been replaced by a hydra-headed beast that Sweeny calls simulation. In simulation world, images from the material world (i.e., the physical, the “real” world) – a picture of your toaster, for example, or a postcard of the Mona Lisa that you hauled all the way home from the Louvre and tacked on your wall – can now be appropriated, turned into a digital image, and then used in a way that gives it a life of its own, a life, and probably a meaning, different – and separate from its original one. (I think sampling in music is an example of this in the audio world.)

Sweeny says that simulation, and the digital world it’s a part of, is both a challenge and an opportunity for people who teach art. Most ways of teaching art, he says, are still organized in traditional ways, or, as he puts it, around “socially dated modes of thought.” (Orwellian ring, there.) I think what he means by this, although he supplies no example, is that most art teachers are using old-fashioned, pre-digital tools in their classrooms — printed pictures of paintings or other works. (I am assuming that Sweeny’s intended audience includes classroom teachers – he talks about “educational spaces,” but doesn’t define the term.)

Sweeny then spends some time defining the structure of the digital world, especially the way  images and the electrons that compose the images flow back and forth. Like commercial airliners, these electron exchanges flow to hubs, where they are used by, and in turn affected by, the people who own the infrastructure (the people who run Facebook, Rupert Murdoch and Myspace, etc., among many others.) The Internet, and network society, may be amorphous, but at the very top, it has a very real power structure. But because the Internet is so decentralized, Sweeny says, it also presents an opportunity for individuals to shift the power structures in interesting and unexpected ways – to create new “flows” of electrons that might upend or redistribute or at least challenge existing power structures. The internet oppresses as it empowers, and vice versa.

He goes on to talk about visual culture. Nowadays, we in the internet-connected west are inundated by visual images. Unlike the native tribesman in a rain forest in Borneo, whose visual landscape might consist almost exclusively of things – trees, canoes, other objects, including art — we are barraged by images all day long. They come at us from advertising, from movies, from television, cereal boxes, newspaper boxes and street signs. There was already a lot of visual information out there (thank you, Andy Warhol), and the Internet has only added to that.

This is all true, and inarguable, and also bolstered by numerous references and quotes from other academic articles.

His next argument is less convincing. He says that the Internet has “radically transformed space and time,” and disembodied “localities from … their meaning” and “integrated [them] into functional networks” or “image collages,” which he says amount to “composite forms of experience.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.  It’s true, the Internet has created “composite forms of experience.” But when I visit it, San Francisco is still, largely, San Francisco. On the other hand, maybe what Swenny is talking about is just the latest version of a phenomenon that dates to the era of photography. That is the experience of going to a faraway place for the first time – the Masai Mara game preserve in Kenya, for example –  and having the eerie and somewhat confusing, even deflating, feeling that you have been there before. You haven’t, but you’ve seen the images so many times – in film, in National Geographic, etc., that it feels familiar.

On p. 80, Sweeny goes on to argue that “these composite forms of experience relate to the notion of simulation and decentralized identity…” He says that image collages emphasize the role that vision plays within the “network society,” creating complex layers of institutional information, cultural interaction and everyday experience. An example here would be very helpful and clarifying.

He talks about what you might call (or I am calling) the yin and yang of network society – the tug of individuals tactics v. institutional strategies. He uses the work of three very different artists to illustrate his idea that the digital world has created three new “Lines of Sight.”

The first of these he calls the Cyborg model. A cyborg is a combination of man and machine. Network society, i.e., the computer and Internet driven society we live in, is creating networks between individuals and machines that are new and important, and need to be examined. An Australian artist has attempted to explore this reality by attaching electrodes to his large muscles and having people far away send signals that make him twitch. This is a physical manifestation of the relationship between the network and the individual, and one, Sweeny says, that we need to be aware of.

Sweeny’s calls his second Line of Sight Cloned Perception – a Slovenian artist has taken footage from a famous pornographic movie and converted the images into now ancient ASCII computer code. As the viewer watches the film clip, the busy humans on view morph into code, and then back again, and all in an unhealthy shade of early computer screen green. Watching the work, you are meant to be constantly reminded that what you are watching is pixels, electrons, etc. It’s all very meta, and pretty ingenious and entertaining as a work of art and a work of thought. (Sweeny quotes the critic Walter Benjamin on how, in an earlier era, the technique of film montage changed our way of seeing in similarly radical ways. Typing this now reminds me of one of my favorite books in the world, “Ways of Seeing,” by John Berger. It is a book of exciting ideas, complicated ideas, expressed in language as simple and calm as a Shaker cabinet.) Sweeny suggests that art teachers lead their students into a discussion of this relationship about images and ourselves, electrons and ourselves, by examining older, mechanical, “reproduced” forms of vision, like film or photography.

Sweeny’s third and last “Line of Sight” is embodied by a street theater group called the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP). This is a collective, worldwide, loosely organized, whose mission is to “confront public surveillance technology using skits performed in the vicinity of the cameras.” These are skits, Sweeny says, that have direct reference to the politics of the surveillance (p. 85), and their aim, or their effect, is to examine and promote discussion the challenges to civil liberties and constitutional rights nested, like land mines, throughout network society. The SCP are very lo-tech – they use flyers, news broadcasts, and even surveillance images themselves in their work. Sweeny says the SCP’s tactics can form “a pedagogy critical of the panoptic gaze in operation within most educational spaces.”

Whoa! What? That’s interesting – Sweeny seems to be saying that within most “educational spaces,” ( i.e., classrooms?), Big Brother, in the person of network society, is watching, and that tactics like the SCP’s might show teachers and students a way forward.

But is he saying that? What does Sweeny mean, specifically, by the ‘panoptic gaze”? And does he indeed mean classroom, or at least include it, when he talks about “educational space”? And does a way forward mean fighting back? And if so, against what, specifically, and to what end?

I think what he’s saying is that we humans are caught like bugs in the web of network society, with all of tis video cameras, cellphones, visual surveillance machinery, and that these machines are quietly and relentlessly challenging our civil liberties, our ethics, and even traditional ideas of socially acceptable behavior. This is the Wild West of the new digital landscape, the web, or Web, in which we find ourselves. Sweeny’s point is that the tactics dreamed up by the brave souls of the Surveillance Camera Players show how individuals might “analyze and critique” their positions in network society, “within larger institutional structures,” and from there, find a way forward in the battle to find a way to teach, really teach, this new world of visual arts. Put another way, as we look at the (very, extremely) new, we should take care to consider it from many angles and try to connect it to previous forms of vision. We might very well come up with a new way of thinking about and understanding and even critiquing the visual world around us, including the part of it out in cyberspace. That is an important and immense task, and there is no way that teachers of visual arts can ignore it. And in fact, Sweeny says, they might treat the challenge as empowering. That is the crux, I believe, of Mr. Sweeny’s digital manifesto.

 

 

 

p.s., Ps

I have been trolling the Web this weekend, looking at how Photoshop is being used by classroom teachers. There’s a lot to see, and a lot of it is very encouraging for a Photoshop greenhorn like me. The sites, and links, that follow are ones that I expect to use, as aids, as I do the Photoshop work for this class.

(These useful discoveries make up for the other digital news of the weekend chez moi, namely that my MacBook, which is a few years old, and newer than my desktop, does not have Photoshop, or Illustrator, or even the lowly PowerPoint, all of which I could really use right about now. So tomorrow, when I go to the Apple store to look at flash drives, I will be asking about student-discounted software as well. But at least I will know what I am talking about. As with this blog, all of this is forcing me to become more familiar, and even comfortable, with technology I otherwise might never have learned.)

Anyhow, back to Photoshop for teachers. My first stop was a site called zdnet, a place I found by Googling “Photoshop for teachers”. (Surprise!) At the site, a teacher named Chris Dawson, who id’s himself as the technology director for a school district in northern Massachusetts, explains how teachers and students can use Photoshop, or Photoshop Express, to edit photos for presentations and reports and the like. He gives step-by-step instructions for some of the most basic Photoshop functions — retouching, reduction of red-eye, cropping. And he mentions that Photoshop Express provides all of this stuff free, in a package with 2 gigabytes of storage space. For a teacher (or student) just starting to use this software, this site could be a good first-step into Photoshop world. Here’s a link: http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1600

Next, I went to a site called “Photoshop for Art Teachers, an Introduction.” The site’s author is id’d as a teacher who’s spent the past 10 years helping his school district “evolve and develop” its “digital skills.” The site’s author also has a background in commercial photography. The site is well written, the approach is down to earth, and quite helpful. “After 10 years of teaching Photoshop I believe I have something of value to share with other art teachers who find themselves faced with this challenging task. This industrial strength world‐class image editing program is made for the professional – adapting it to the middle and high school art curriculum is problematic. This workshop is not a comprehensive overview of Photoshop. There are entire areas I never touch in the classroom – color management and profiles, Adobe Bridge, Curves, or any of the professional workflow features that enrich the current Photoshop. My Photoshop world is all meat and potatoes – teachable in Photoshop 5.5 or CS3. I try to combine skill mastery with engaging assignments that challenge students to experiment and develop strategies to solve problems.” Here’s the link: www.mmerchant.us/classwerk/psworkshop/01.PS-Introduction.pdf

Another site, “Photoshop Elements: Digital Imaging in the Classroom” (www.humboldt.edu/~extended/special/imoviephotoshop.html), looked promising, but eventually wanted $200 for even a peek at its content, and didn’t give a prospective buyer much in the way of a preview. I moved on.

“Free Photoshop for Teachers and Students Online,” a site sponsored by something called the Ed Tech Review, was a much better bet. A truth-in-advertising advisory at the top of the homepage noted that, once again, this is not a website that demystifies the higher realms of Photoshop  – CS3 or CS4. Instead, it bills itself, accurately, I think, as “a great FREE tool for basic editing of photos,” and one that requires no software downloads or other installations. Its very basic and admirable aim – e.g., no advanced tools, or layer functions, available – is to teach elementary and middle school teachers basic photo editing. Again, this a primer, but I learned things looking at it and will return to this site again. Here’s the link: http://www.edtechreview.net/photoshop/free-photoshop-for-teachers-and-students-online/

At LessonPlanet.com, which bills itself as “The Search Engine for Teachers,” I found a 10-day Free package that promises to teach you the basics of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CS3. It also will provide you with a Photoshop lesson plan, in case you are trying to teach photoshop to someone other than yourself – a class, for example. The site promises that you can “search 150,000 teacher reviewed online lesson plans,” “Find teacher approved lessons by rating and grade,” and “inspire student learning with innovative lessons and ideas.” But the lessons may be a little rudimentary, if the example provided is any indication: “Students use a program such as Photoshop to make photo calendars to give to parents.” On the proverbial other hand, however, making a photo calendar using Photoshop (or any other photo software) is something I don’t know how to do, so who am I to sniff? This is a website that I suspect I will return to.

My A- No. 1 find of the day is a blog at good old wordpress. Yes, a blog about Photoshop for Teachers, and a very good one. The blog is well organized, easy on the eyes, and current. There are links to pages that will show you how to add text to a photo, how to blur and crop, how to flatten and save files, how to use the history brush, etc. And then there are project ideas for use in classrooms, such as “designing character posters in a novel,” and “using photos to illustrate a scientific experiment.” (I’m not sure what a “character poster” is, exactly, but if you’re curious, this site will tell you.) The blog’s name, in case you want to search for it that way, is “photoshopforteachers – a blog”. The URL is:  http://lledphotoshop.wordpress.com/about/

At www.trainingbylee.com I found “Picture Perfect! Using Photoshop Elements in the classroom, by Adobe Certified expert. This consisted of a very basic, but again, quite useful looking pdf, of worksheets (lined paper included) to lead the student through the entire photo managing process, from A to Z, soup to nuts, starting with advice on how to take a good digital photo. Very clear language, suitable foreven 5th or 6th graders, I would think.

All of the websites seemed to bounce back between the term Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Obviously two very different programs, and you can guess what the difference between the two might be, but no one really explained it, so I decided to ask Google, and found a webpage called “Photoshop Tips + Tricks,” that explained all, in clear language. Useful. Here’s the link: http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/vs_elements.html

Next, I decided to try a search coming from the other direction, and Googled “Photoshop projects by middle schoolers.” This took me to some great pages, full of student work. The first one also included some well written instructions on basic Photoshop functions: Lesson #1, using sections and layers; Lesson #2, “visual puns, using masks and pen; and Lesson #3, “Allegory: using layer masks, clipping groups, shapes and adjustment layers.” Here’s the URL:  http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/high/Donna-PS.htm

The same Google search also took me to the site for the University of Chicago’s lab school, where there were many student galleries to browse, some with photo collages similar (I think) to what we will be trying to produce in our Digital Media class. To find it, you can Google “Eighth Grade Photo Media University of Chicago Laboratory Schools,” or try this link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/students/projects/index.aspx

Two other promising sites: Harold Olejarz, an art educator, who has a site called “Digital Imaging with Photoshop Elements and KidPix” has examples of student projects — altering the Mona Lisa, or taking your own photo and using Photoshop to make it look like an Impressionist painting — and instructions. The link is: http://www.olejarz.com/arted/imaging03/index.html

Olejarz has a similar but expanded site, with many more examples, at:http://www.wyckoffschools.org/eisenhower/teachers/olejarz/digitalimaging/index.html

And finally, just for fun, when you’ve had enough of Photoshop, I came across the following website, an easy, well written site that explains the ins and outs of Dreamweaver: http://webdesign.about.com/od/dreamweaverhowtos/a/dw_tutorial

 

“Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out”

The headline is from yesterday’s New York Times, a review of a new book called “The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox,” by John Freeman. (The reviewer, Ben Yagoda, teaches creative writing at University of Delaware (and blogs at – yes – WordPress.)

According to the review, the book makes the familiar argument that email and its ADHD cousins – IM, Twitter, et al – have fragged our attention spans, fried our collective nerve endings (some of ours, anyway), and eroded privacy at the same time they have super-connected us.

But it also provides some useful historical perspective, according to the review, including this, from a 1901 English newspaper editorial worried about that proto-email device,  the telegraph: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. We have minimized and condensed our emotions . .. We have destroyed the memory of yesterday with the worries of tomorrow. … We do not feel and enjoy; we assimilate and appropriate.” (There’s also a complaint from a woman at the turn of the 20th century about the ruinous effect the “postcard craze” is having on letter writing.)

Last week, Apple (I think it was Apple) announced a new software application that will make it possible to “mask” all of one’s e-devices – smartphones, email, GPS – and thus to disconnect for as long as one might like — 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days …

Hallo + Ha det! (echo, echo …)

Hallo + Ha det!

(That’s hello and goodbye in Norwegian, by the way.) (Thank you, Internet!)

Here are my thoughts after reading Jill Walker’s “Weblogs: Learning in Public,” what you might call my review of a review of a review.

First,  the article expanded my understanding of what writing a blog can do for a student, and an entire class. Walker convinced me that by being assigned to create their own blogs, students might be launched on the path of becoming masters of their own (web) universes. I also liked reading about the students’ blunt reactions and bitter complaints, and Walker’s calm wait-and-see reaction to same.

Several new ideas leaped out at me as I read. “Network literacy,” was one.”Writing that is a social, collaborative process” was another, as was the idea of “the ‘gift’ economy” where “writing a careful tutorial that is useful for others earns you good will, recognition, and a chance of returning the favor”. And then there was the idea of the positive side of  ”… promiscuous sharing of content”. (I don’t think the music industry analogy is apt, but that’s a blog post for another day.)

But the idea of writing “reviews” of blogs was an idea that stopped me in my tracks. After much cogitation, I’m afraid I side with the poor depressive on the other side of Bergen, horrified to learn that his blog was being reviewed  as part of a high school class’s exploration and dissection of the form.

To me, reviewing a blog seems a betrayal of the form, an idea, and a  practice, at odds with blogging’s true nature, and even a threat to its vitality. It’s true, as Walker and her students argue, that no blogger sends posts off into a private echo chamber. Anything posted to the Web is out there, seemingly forever, and for anyone to read.

On the other hand, treating a blog as something as something formal and “finished” enough for “review”  subverts the idea of blogging itself. The charm and utility of blogging has always the tension inherent in its Janus-like character — informal writing in a public space, dashed off quickly, by a quasi-anonymous writer. Surely its content is comment-worthy, and deserving of a reader’s dart or heart, either on the reader’s own blog, or in a comment to the writer’s page or site.

But a “review”? Nei! Say ain’t so!

the case of the copyright orphans

Re our Creative Commons browsing in class and out, did you happen to see Sunday’s New York Times Book Review? There was a story on the last page about a current, and very big, copyright law case. If it’s settled the way seems likely, the outcome will give Google the exclusive right to digitize thousands and thousands of books whose copyright holders cannot be found (making these books and other works the “orphans” of the title.) The essay is a good and quick primer on current thinking re copyright law and privileges. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Hyde-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Google%20and%20copyright%20orphans&st=cse

Or you can just go to the New York Times website and search for “copyright orphans.”

Amen! (Up to a point.)

I am an analog person, always was, always will be. So, while I understand, intellectually, that the purpose of Jenkins et al was not to make me doff my hat over my obscure keyboard and say “Well done!” that is what has happened, and it feels significant. (To me. And my blog. And anyone who’s reading this. Hello!)

Having come to the question of how or even whether to teach digital media in classrooms TOTALLY exasperated with the kudzu-like spread of digital technology over every inch of modern life, often to the detriment of older forms of communication – print, for example, analog, for another – and offended by the medium’s blithe insistence that we all spend large amounts of money constantly updating gear, I nonetheless can now see that ignoring or otherwise not dealing with digital media during the school day would be not only a huge error, but even irresponsible. It’s here, in a big way, and it can make us (is making us) smarter, at least in some ways. But not if you’re from a home without computers, or you have a computer in every room at home, but no idea how to gauge the truthiness of what you are reading. So, amen. I am convinced.

My concern, however, is that time made for teaching digital media in classrooms will squeeze out time for other things, just as it has in the rest of the world. Won’t time spent playing around with Wikipedia inevitably take time away from the teaching of literature, for example? Even though the authors insist, on p. 19, that digital should not, must not, push aside old competencies, old skills, and despite the fact that they present some very interesting examples of ways in which digital media already are being used in the classroom, it is hard to believe that time for reading Huck Finn, for example, won’t be eliminated in order to make time for, say, making a video game about him. While the video might be fun, and even educational, it’s not the same as reading a great work of literature.

To put it another way, let me be a hunter on my own time. In the classroom, I’d rather spend most of my time in the company of farmers.

digital media for – I mean – no, wait!

Inspired by Denise’s in-class account of her efforts this past week, I spent time this morning looking around on the Web to see what I could find about digital media for art educators. First, I Googled “digital media for art educators,” and then “digital media for teaching art.” The search results were not identical, interestingly. The first batch of links took me mostly to university websites, pages where professors discussed how they were gradually learning to overcome their fear and loathing of digital media in the classroom. An art history professor at Tufts, for example, wrote about how she is now comfortable turning to the Internet when she needs an image for a class lecture, instead of running up the four flights of stairs to the art history department’s slide library. (Aside: as someone who worked her way through college laboring in my college’s small art slide library — and loved it — I felt a pang on reading this, and wondered what the fate of university slide libraries will be. Have they already gone the way of the rotary phone? That would be a shame. There is something valuable about handling the slides, holding them up to the light board, or the window, staring at the tiny images. It would be terrible to lose that. You might think that there is no way a school would toss out something as unarguably valuable as a slide library, but you would be wrong. It’s like cleaning out the basement – you finally get around to it, and then it gets out of control. You start dumping everything. There are American newspapers that famously – make that notoriously – threw out cabinets and cabinets full of old news photos when newspapers went digital. They only stopped after a great cry was raised by the more traditionalist/archivist minded. This is my problem with the digitalization of the world as we know it — too often it is, or has been, seen as a reason to jettison original source material. I think that tendency has slowed in the last few years, but it is not entirely dead, not yet. The Internet, fast and global as it is, is no match for the aesthetic and exploratory appeal of an old art slide library. Carolingian III, anyone?)

Anyhow, back to the subject at hand, in that first search, I also found a UK site – JISC – with an interesting tale or two of how some new universities – The University of Cork, for one – had been able to use the Internet to build very respectable image libraries for their new art history departments.

So these were accounts from explorers – mostly teachers – who’d recently returned from the great new digital frontier with stories of streets paved with gold. I am persuaded, but not excited enough yet to sell the farm and head out to the Great Divide.

The second search produced links for sites more concerned with providing teachers with tools for the K-12 classroom. The best of these, again, for me, was a site called artjunction.org, which seems to be a blog by an art educator named Craig Roland. On the site, his site, he is described as an art teacher, and someone who contributes articles regularly to SchoolArt magazine. The site’s design is very clear and easy to read, and the headline was attractively straightforward – “The Art Teacher’s Guide to the Internet.” The subhed was enticing, too: “Ideas, Tools and Resources for Teaching Art and Design in a Post-Digital Age.” I had never heard of Craig Roland, but I recognized at least one of the tools on his page — a link to a podcast on Motivation, by someone named Daniel Pink. We saw part of this podcast in one of my classes this semester – Development, Behavior and Learning – and I liked it. There were dozens more links and articles that looked very interesting and potentially very useful. I didn’t explore them all, or even most, but I have bookmarked the site, because I expect to return to it.

I did not find anything else that I liked quite as much, and I didn’t find as much as I expected to find, either. I’d anticipated a huge mountain of links to result from my search, but I didn’t find it. (I didn’t find, for example, the MacArthur Foundation site that Denise mentioned in class, for example.) It may be that I need to revise my search phrase or words.

One interesting complication that pops up almost immediately during this search is the question of what you mean by your search words – do you want to learn more about tools available on the web to help art teachers in the classroom? Oar are you looking for better ways to teach digital media to classes of kids whose experience of art class has been restricted to tempera and  construction paper? (Or acrylic and photo print collage , etc. ) These are not the same thing, although there could be overlap.