I want a TV show...

I've always had dreams about being one of those goofy and energetic kid show hosts... but one that was cool and didnt wear primary colors all the time. I'd probably have to make it back over to Asia and start up an ESL tv show.  Anyway... this little project was a massive undertaking for me. This was my first time putting together an instructional video and after watching it you may not be convinced it is instructional. I speak minimal English in it. It's extremely fast paced. I barely explain anything. And I act ridiculous. 

Japanese GyoTaku Fish Printing from Gabriel Mellan on Vimeo.

During the shoot I enjoyed myself immensely but the post-production was laborious and painful. I learned very quickly that taking the time to shoot it perfectly will save hours in the long run. I opened up Adobe Premiere for the first time ever to import and edit my footage. Then I did what I've always done with a new software, click and experiment. Unfortunately time didn't allow for much experimenting so I quickly executed a rough cut. My workflow was messy, my timelines chaotic but at the end I'm really pleased with this instructional to Japanese fish printing.

Children Credentials

Last night I was shooting a wedding with 4 flower girls and a ring bearer. They were the coolest ones at the party. I of course would have preferred to jump around in the St. Regis Hotel flower beds instead of photograph... Something about kids and me connect. Kids treat me like one of their own... I treat kids with respect... sometimes I give them more attention then their parents, which can get weird for the parents sometimes when I introduce myself to their kid first.

My credentials weren't my camera, it wasn't my funky hair or charismatic smile... my connection with these 5 untamed wedding monkeys is what people would say to eachother about me.
It feels great. This blog post started out kinda vague and maybe it is still lacking a direction or voice... but I guess I'm just really encouraged when the father of the bride comes up and says "your heart is good... I was watching you interact with those kids, you're definitely studying the right thing."
Through all this academic and meta-academic teaching of future teachers, I still believe that without the ability to engage students a teacher will fail.

FINAL PROJECT IDEAS

As with most people on the planet... I'm indecisive, sometimes and impulsive occasionally.
Some ideas that have passed through the cheese grader have either failed to excite me or the technical execution has discouraged me.

FLASHER!
This teaching tool would be for junior photographers at a middle to highschool level. It would cover basics on how to use flash in a photograph. Assuming the students had access to a DSLR camera and some sort of strobe, I would create 3 videos to cover different lighting situations.  Gear would not be emphasized, just the basics of how to incorporate a burst of light into a photograph.


SMARTBOARD
In some counties, Smartboards are in every classroom. It is often that the incorporation of a Smartboard is a mandatory aspect of the Standards of Learning. Since most teachers are new to a smartboard, they will soon be required to be literate in something they know nothing about. I would first have to learn the smartboard basics and then create short and basic videos walking through some of the features of a smartboard.

GYOTAKU
Japanese fishprinting would be explained and demonstrated for elementary aged students. Good cleanliness habits would be stressed, hands-on-the-fish would be encouraged and Japanese costumes would be incorporated in the demonstration video. This would serve as a cultural exploration into an old tradition of documenting fish size to serve as a trophy. My adolescence in Japan would greatly influence the flavor of this video.

Black, white and media all over.

How can we ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, creative and economic life?

We are beyond controlling the internet and social media. We are severely delayed in incorporating digital media resources into our classrooms. Our students are socializing in an environment that are banned from classrooms. Are students then at a disadvantage because they're not being coached in social behaviors for their environment? Students without access or unequal access to digital media, media creation resources and technological training will be greatly disadvantaged as their peers with access excel.

For students in a family without modern computer equipment, schools need to pick up the slack and provide it. But just because a new computer is available in each classroom it doesn't mean that students will have access or be trained in digital media. If they have access to it already chances are they are more comfortable navigating social media than their teachers. So what if our teachers were to become adept in digital media creation? or just navigating a computer? or even just encouraging the use of something unknown to them?

Parents are the first educators for children. It is important for parents to continue or initiate analytical dialogue surrounding social ethics in an online environment. Parents should not simply ignore that one day their child will experience alcohol, the same with technology, online communities and social media. Parents should accept that their kids will sign up for a facebook account at some point wether they like it or not. If parents engage their children in questions of ethics, good social practices and morals, parents will be able to trust their kids online. 

seventy-two part one

"...first and last of every paragraph" is what my grad school housemate recommended. She writes five page papers in a one hour sitting without pee brakes.

I tried that. But ended up reading mostly half of the 72 pages. Yeah it's interesting. Yeah great points but I maxed out my intake and had to put it down... 

I think I have an understanding of what they're yelling about "participatory culture".  First thing that I thought of was the electronica music scene where DJ's will play, remix and rework tracks by other producers and DJ's.

Some other key points I scouted out and dumbed down:
Computers are not automated. They need an operator.
I guess this is in defense of computers in the classroom and fearing that students have it too easy.

•It matters more what is done with the tools than what tools are available. 

•"affinity spaces"
peer-to-peer learning, give & receive feedback, one can come and go as needed, the evolve

•Participation Gap
  -Unequal access: public computers slow down research, the elite students with computers and help at home excell.
  -Assumptions that kids are reflecting & articulating: students can't distinguish between professional and amateur information online.
  -Assumptions that ethics are formed in online societies: dangerous, asking ethics questions to students is key.

• Literacy
understanding sight & sound, use their power to produce. 

•Communicating through digital means won't replace reading & writing
They say they "fundamentally disagree", but I can write in script, i hate capitalizing and i heard of some people who use TXT lingo instead of the real word! Writing is changing i guess...? 

•Collaboration is good

•Skills taught in schools do not fit with job tasks.
Schools are training individual problem solvers but work wants collaboration and teamwork

•Play is important.
play engages, games engage, games are work with a payoff, payoffs keep us engaged.


•Games are problems that require: takings risks, failing, trial & error and solving the problem.


•"Projective Identity": fusion between actual user and their avatars

•"appropriation": students take apart culture and put back together. (which I think is key for understanding anything, which is why I'm dumbing this all down)

• Multi-tasking: students can do it better than adults think they can. they make split second assessments, they monitor and respond.

•Collective intelligence: sharing to get to a common goal.  

At that point in my reading I could no longer feel my legs or skull, too many serif letters jammed in. So i stopped. 
  

Altered not Stolen

Live trace is an Adobe Illustrator feature which enables a user to take a pixel based image and convert it into a line based image. 

The images here show a quick example of what Adobe Illustrator can do to the same image. After it is converted to line art each shape can be tweaked and simplified. 

Back when  I was starting out in the design field it was a stand alone program called Streamline.  Using it was extremely helpful to convert logo ideas that my boss had scribbled onto a napkin from lunch.

It seems that there are mixed opinions across forums and discussion sites. Although I bet many of the people who use livetrace would not admit to using it in their artwork as it is generally looked down on as a way to easily ripoff an image.

Flickr discussion on LiveTrace

Seems like most the users on Flickr are using LiveTrace to tweak their own photographs or scanned in drawings. 

 Threadless.com: LiveTrace OK vs. not OK?

A discussion on LiveTrace morality on a print-your-own-tshirt site.

The general thought is that it must be "changed enought to make it your own"

Dilbert Blog on copyright

A pretty short and honest post by the Dilbert comic creator. The comments following are range severely, quite interesting.

Copyright.gov 

This explains what the creators rights are and a bit about manipulation.


UPDATE:
I thought this was an interesting comment on the dilbert blog.

Blogucation

ANATOMY OF A BLOG

• Header
• footer
• body
• sidebar
• ads

BLOG TYPES

• personal journals,
• expert blogs: either for professional use or personal hobbying
• social commentary blogs,
• comedic blogs,
• portfolio blogs,
• then there are blogs in the classroom     

BLOG HISTORY

• Originally it was a list of new sites as they were added. 1992
• ...then an online journal with daily entries 96
• Free blog service launched 99
• Now: a publicly available online listing of either personal, internet or social commentary.

CLASSROOM BLOGS

• Involves curious parents
• Grandma can look at her grandson's artwork
• Helps and inspires other art Educators
• Classwork is shown in group project which students can share links to and helps to strengthen classroom community

STUDENT BLOGS

• Students take ownership of their blog and take pride in their work being shown
• An artist identity is possible through their blog
• Students can feel like their work isn't just shoved in a folder but is visible to the world

WIDGETS & PLUGINS

• widgets & plugins are add-ons to your blog that add specific functions. Some are functional, some are stupid.
• Search for widgets or Plugins
• links to video tutorials for plugin & widget use are at the end of this post

BASIC BLOG TIPS
"follow" a blog. WORDPRESS BLOGSPOT
Following allows you to receive updates when a blog changes and helps you keep track of all the stuff you’re trying to keep up with.

post an image WORDPRESS  BLOGSPOT
less words, more images.

tag/keyword WORDPRESS BLOGSPOT
when you post a blog you can add keywords so visitors can search your blog posting based on content.


SAMPLE LESSON
Assign a word to word-web off of.
Instruct each student to find the person on their left's blog, choose a word from their classmate's word web and find three images which they like that they associate with the initial word and ones taken from the word web.

GOALS
Students are challenged to look at visual interpretation from a different viewpoint and challenge their own association to language.



EXAMPLES
http://apexhsart.blogspot.com/
Highschool artists use blogs to share their digital artwork.

http://artmakeskidssmart.blogspot.com/
This elementary teacher is posting some great lesson plan ideas as well as finished products of his students.

http://artjunction.org/blog/
An art educator who is fully embracing technological progress and using it or trying to use it in the classroom. His blog is more of a traditional blog diary with some external links.

http://coconyu.blogspot.com/
Truly a collaborative group, posts news and events on their blog. It may help to utilize the "tags" blog roll on the right to find artwork.

http://smarthistory.org/about-smarthistory.html
SmartHistory.org began as a blog with audio supplements to the MOMA. It grew to include audio and video supplemental material for an art history survey course. Now they are all about web 2.0, collaboration & free content.

http://theartclassroom.wordpress.com/
An almost daily updated blog with images of student work and inclass project progress.
A great example of plenty of images & videos with less to read.


CLASSROOM IDEAS

Telephone scavenger hunt.
One person finds art online, posts the image of it on their blog, describe it & critique it. The next person finds an image of artwork to compliment or contrast the previous one. A short description and critique of each art piece.

Styling research
Students are required to find an artist with a clear style and post images of their artwork. Each student will conduct their own online research on how the process and how to do it. Then students are asked to emulate the artists style and post progress of their works on their blog.
Blog posts of difficulties and failures in the process are encouraged.

Our Neighborhood
An art class teams up with a school across the country or ocean or street. They share artwork of their environment & neighborhood. Students can broaden their understanding of cultures through artwork produced by students their age rather than reading a textbook.

DISCUSSION
What regulations would you implement when starting a classroom blog community?
What discussions would you have with your students in order to encourage trust and vulnerability? 


USEFUL LINKS
http://www.ehow.com/how_2318008_use-blog-college-classroom.html
some pretty straightforward points about using blogs in a college environment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEWPnHY8D3E
a feature film length video on how to blog. Do not watch while drowsy.

youtube demo for wordpress plugins

"wordpress for women" video demo

http://edubloggerworld.ning.com/
http://flatclassrooms.ning.com/

FOLLOW BLOG
http://www.google.com/friendconnect

TEMPLATES, PLUGINS
bloggerplugins.org

SOURCES

Online Diaries: Towards a Structural Approach

Viviane Serfaty

Journal of American Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Dec., 2004), pp. 457-471

Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27557549

New-Media Art Education and Its Discontents

Trebor Scholz

Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 95-108

Published by: College Art Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068369


THe short history of blogs:
http://nymag.com/news/media/15971/

Popular use of the term Weblog as we know it today cam from Jorn Barger of the weblog Robot Wisdom (robotwisdom.com) in December 1997

http://www.blogherald.com/2005/03/06/a-short-history-of-blogging/
 

Well some who have grown up as digital children might have to do, I had to look up the definition of “digital media” . Through some wiki-talk and dictionary-blah, I’ve come up with what I believe is an accurate description of “digital media”.

Digital Media: Any information communicated digitally.

As a digitally engulfed adult, even the term digital might need to be defined.

Digital: information communicated with digits.

Isn’t that crazy! Well of course everyone has experience with digits in math class but when you really think about the ability to send a photograph through the air using WiFi or Bluetooth technology, it is totally mind-blowing. And, well, because my childhood progressed as the digital age progressed, technology is all I know. I have no time period in my life where computers did not exist.

So during my quest to define “digital media” I came across a definition saying: “Digital Media (as opposed to analog media)…” From there I had to define analog as: information communicated by a mechanical or physical change. Of course my next thought was how much I’d like to go bang on my analog synthesizer from the 80’s. So I did:


This complete distraction from trying to define digital media brought to mind this whole backlash against the digital age. For example: the synthesizer that I was grooving on is older than me. It has no USB port, no Liquid Crystal Display, no memory, it cant even play two notes at the same time, but a Moog Rogue is being sold for over 500 bucks! Why?

Those that believe digital photography cannot compete with film photography are slowly becoming fewer and fewer. But there is an influx of photographers who are buying up old, all-manual film cameras. They want that tactile sensation, they want the magic of watching an image appear in the darkroom, they want the romance of tweaking the knobs on a funky synth, they want the non-digital.

So yeah, there is a certain hip status associated with analog gear, but this crowd still trusts their iPhone and digital SLR camera. I believe that those who grew up in a digitalized childhood have a certain fascination for the non-digital.

Now in this digital age, information organization is crucial. Our senses are targeted by ads from all directions using sight, sound, smell and emotion. Digital media is organized and conveyed with much thought. As technology advances the complexity of digital media advances and requires better organization of information. For example: A website in the 90’s would generally consist of text, often times to spice up a page colored text in different sizes would be on the page. Nowadays websites automatically fill your entire monitor with a graphic image incorporating sound and video. Sites that solely consist of text are ignored or laughed at. It is no longer enough to learn one software program and think that it will be used for multiple years. For anyone organizing information to convey it is extremely important to constantly be learning new technologies and software. Additionally, I believe it is crucial to have a design ability to cleanly display information.