Art Education 2.0

This network seemed especially wonderful to me. It is a social network for art educators and there are so many things available on this site. There are forums for exhibitions, places for students to go to learn about animation software, there are ideas for projects and examples given of projects that have been done successfully. I will be exploring this network in detail asap.

Hyperdrive Knowledge Comsumption

A learner is like a kite, it needs cooperation from the elements around it to sore, and once it is up and moving it cannot help but be noticed by those that take the time to see it and recognize its feat, and therefore effect their perception of the world.
I thought a lot about what sort of analogy I would like to write and the idea of a kite seemed relevant to me. After listening to a couple videos and reading the article by George Siemens I decided that the image of a kite represents the interconnectedness that is necessary to learn and quire knowledge. A kite is a wonderful concept, but unless it is up and flying it does not live up to its true potential. Just like a learner, who does not continuously acquire knowledge in order to flourish they too would just be a “nice concept” but pretty useless.

I found Siemens statement in The Changing Nature of Knowledge compelling and encompassing, he said, “The network that learners create becomes the learning” This was a semi new thought for me. I guess when you think about it, it makes perfect sense, we are all gaining knowledge from one another and each experience that we have, when shared, affects those around us. Technology has moved us into a speedier exchange of knowledge. Now instead of just books, that take a long time to be published and then read, and classes, which can be costly, we can access free information on the web. The age of hyper drive knowledge consumption is here. Karen Stephenson states

With in Siemens article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age” he sites Karen Stephenson who writes "Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people (undated).

This seems to sum it up we have to learn to depend on each other to an extent. We need to be aware of social sharing networks and immerse ourselves in new ways of exchanging knowledge.

Blogs in the classroom

When I think about students and how they use the Internet I immediately think of facebook, myspace, websites where you can download music, youtube.

If those are the sites that kids are visiting then I need to figure out a way to get them to pull useful information from these sites and link them to what is happening around them and in the classroom.

Aesthetic learning is something that I hope to incorporate into my teaching and something that I believe all teachers should be thinking about when they design a lesson.

Aesthetic learning is a "critical reflection on art, culture and nature" and I believe that viewing learning through an aesthetic lens is crucial to helping students become well rounded and inquisitive inside the classroom and out.

Providing a blog space where there is access to the sites that students are visiting as well as sites that I feel are important for them visit keeps them in the same place. They don’t need to leave my blog to search for a friend or post a question about class or put up a homework assignment.

I am not currently teaching but this would be a great start to a website that could become more my students than my own. Giving them daily links to visit that talk about upcoming shows, or new art, artists things that went on in class or a continuation of a discussion is what will hopefully keep them coming back.

Once the blog environment was established with the students, I could start to interact with them on a deeper level by asking questions in response to their posts and figuring out their interests, hopefully expanding upon what they are writing by providing sites for them to explore and ideas to think about.

So basically to sum this all up, I believe that blogs in my classroom woudl be useful for
1. Keeping my students connected with the latest "happenings in the art world and beyond"
2. Allowing them to talk to one another about what they read and see and listen to
3. Allow then easy access to classroom material and a place to ask questions and post assignments