art ed + web 2.0 + [e]merging media blog

ok...i'll play now that i am done writing letters....now that i cannot merely enjoy the experience of Facebook due to this class, I am forced to analyze and critique the medium. So how about for an English class students create a fictional or satirical person for Facebook. Using dummy email accounts...I guess we need to turn to social networking sites since the likelihood of having a positive wiki experience might be slim.

regarding your question "How can you relate to your students (classmates) if you don't know what they're looking at outside of school?!?!"
As a recent user of Facebook I have been finding out what my former students are interested in. Use technology to survey and direct their interests into relevant curriculum seems fairly easy to do. Just imagine the depth of conversation and the ease with which a teacher might draw students into a conversation by concentrating on current events that are encountered in an online environment and one that students are already invested in?

OK...last one and short...
I was confronted with this quandary recently when a teacher said "I don't give art home work becasue my students are already so stressed with their other classes...they wouldn't do mine anyway. I believe in homework, planning, ideation and experimentation OUTSIDE of class for all art students. This produces better results and allows the teacher to keep class on pace. It places our class on par with others (even tho' we know it is actually the MOST important class)
Is there a way to encourage research, criticsm, preparation for art class by creating assignments that mimc the way students spend their time online when they get home? What if art homework could be done while on FaceBook or MySpace or through email...or search Youtube. While I realize this can't be done all the time, nor would we want to, doesn't it have some merit?
How about a scavenger hunt online?

One thought I have, related to what Jan wrote, would be to make MySpace or Facebook pages for the characters in a novel. For instance if students are reading the Great Gatsby, they could be assigned, in groups, to make the type of pages that they think the characters would have made for themselves. What would Daisy's page look like? What would Gatsby's page look like? If we wanted to make pages for artists, what would they look like?

Or, what about making Wikipedia pages for artists? Students could either make a new page or contribute to existing pages.

Great idea! I know of some web comics that have MySpace pages for their characters. It is interesting to think about students working to create profiles for artists. That reminds me of an activity that I heard a teacher talk about where students had to design the gift that one artist would give to another. For example, what gift would Picasso give Monet or what would Kruger give Bourgeois? It's fun to think about and I bet students come up with some great ideas. They have to justify and explain at the end of course.

I came back to re-read your initial post. It took me a while to get the "kicks rock" comment...but now I think I understnad more.

I've used blogs before with students and have had mixed results. I think that having you all maintain individual blogs has gone well - perhaps because you are required to for your journal. when I required a certain number of posts in the past on a class blog, the results were not good. The students wrote short responses that seemed forced and did not reflect a high degree of interest in the course or the blog.

I thought that giving class time at the beginning would encourage students to post on each other's blogs. Perhaps that is not working as well as I had hoped. When I go in and look at the blogs, there are usually some comments from classmates. However, there are not a significant amount of these.

Do you have any ideas as to how to do this and promote more comments from students on each other's blogs?

As far as the Visual DNA site, I was sort-of intrigued. But, it's odd that they only give you a certain number of choices that seem to merely reinforce social norms. When I was answering several of the questions, my reaction to some of the images was - I don't know quite what that is trying to convey. Then, in other cases, me response was - well, none of the above.

What do you think about it?

Ok this is frustrating - I have made a few LONG comments and they are not showing up and I do not know where they went. Last try is below.

It took me a while to get the comment that Katie posted "kicks rock" on her original post. Now, I think I understand a bit more. I agree that there have not been as many comments on student blogs as i had hoped. Perhaps I should not also have a class blog? However, I think that having you keep journals about the readings on your blogs has worked well. It gives me an insight into your understandings as they emerge. But, you're right - many people do not take the time to do that. When I used a blog before and required a certain number of posts on a class blog, it did not work well. The problem was that student posts were forced and seemed to be of low quality. I think they posted just because they had to, not because the really had something important to say or had really considered the readings or the topics from class.

I thought that giving you some blog time at the beginning of class would help this. Perhaps I was not specific enough about that. Do you have any suggestions?

About the Visual DNA - It is an interesting concept. But, I'm not sure that people are so simple as to have the same meanings associated with images. We're from different cultures, have different experiences, etc. and I think this influences how we "read" images.

What do the rest of you think?

I was waiting for someone to broach that. I was thinking that perhaps the upkeep of so many blogs was a bit frustrating. Posting summaries to our personal blog and any other fun things we might find, and then making sure we check the class blog, THEN also checking out everyone's personal blog...was a little challenging. A thought I had was to work the blogs similar to the discussions...perhaps every week or two the class would focus on two blogs and the ensuing dialogue???? Just a thought. I found it difficult to check everyones blogs, having to go into Blackboard...there just was no simple way to do this....more on Visual DNA to come.

I respect your frustration coming from the vantage point that blogging for you is fluid, valuable communication. It feels distanced, anachronistic, and artificial to me. This class has challenged my technophobia a great deal, and communicating via comments on blogs has probably been my most fervent sticking point.

After reading Shannon's post,I wonder if there is not a happy medium of some sort. Both Katie and shannon make good points. Maybe we need a "#" of posts. that seems a bit lame since we are grad students. As I was reading Katie's blog (whose I check the most cause' I know she'll have new stuff up as opposed to say...ME) A suggestion came to me that we might appoint someone a blog master for two weeks. That way someone would be in charge of developing their blog for a finite period. this might be a good way of bringing the technophobes into the fold slowly? Isn't this the same struggles we would have if doing this with students in our classrooms? How to we accommodate, challenge, train, etc... Not that this helps Katie much....

I think that Melanie is right, that the Visual DNA is limited, but it does give you the option frequently of choosing the blank square. If you choose to post the widget into your blog, you have the opportunity to add comments about each image so that when your viewer clicks on it your words come up underneath the picture. It is not the end product, just a place to start a conversation about media-driven imagery, social norms and such.
I am using it as a jumping off point for a discussion about collage and abstract portraits. I think it is a good place for students to start thinking about how to represent themselves with pictures and how viewer's interpretations might alter the meaning.

About the blogging and solution to the posting problems. I think it might work to have students work on a blog in pairs. And to have the class alternate focus on the blogs every other week. Meaning, group one would make posts and add to their blog during week one. Then in week two, group two would be the posters and everyone else would have to comment. And so on. This might take some of the pressure off. I found it annoying too having to navigate between all the different blogs. It would have been nice if there was one blog page with everyone's blog linked. But then, I guess that's sort of what the Blackboard page was and that wasn't really working.

Melanie asked how to facilitate the dialogue between students. My thought was that when students know each other well, the exchanges are better. If you look at what happened between Jan and I you can tell that we were used to talking to each other, bantering back and forth and playing off of each other in class before we went to the digital format. Maybe doing a class like this would work best if it came late in the grad student's careers. Or at least maybe you could do some sort of drama exercises to get students used to talking to each other.

I don't know what to say about this topic. I feel guilty that I could not join blogging activiry. But I'm slow thinker and English is not my first language so, it alway takes long time to understand your all journals.
I'm not sure if I have to write comments(if that is required), maybe I did.
Funny thing is that even thogh I'using really good tools of high technology for communication, that could not help my basic problem.

As Jan commented, visiting each others blogs throgh blackboard was little hard each time.

I think the blog is personal space. If we cannot link others' blogs in my blog, for discussion and sharing idea blackboard is more comfortable for me than blog. I can see all people's comments and opinion and write in that place.