Show and Tell

How to utilize cell phones in the classroom.
A big problem in schools is the debate of whether or not to incorporate or even allow cell phones in the classroom. When I had my internship in a high school ceramics classroom my mentor teacher used a site called polleverywhere.com
http://www.polleverywhere.com/

One can create a poll or ask questions to either a specific group of people or to the general public. This can be used for many different things, but my mentor teacher would use it to instigate talking within the class. At first I thought this was strange, using cell phones to instigate a conversation in the "real world", but what I saw really worked.
She would use the site to create a poll with questions like "Which work do you think was the most successful... What piece did you like the most and why... What did you like about this assignment" and others. The students would go on their cellphones and submit their answers. The website would gather their answers and the teacher would display the results on the projector. After looking at the answers the class would discuss the work and the answers to the questions asked. Normally in a critique the hardest part is actually starting a discussion. No one really wants to be the first to talk, yet using this process they write out their answers anonymously. I feel when the students saw that others thought similarly to their responses they were more confident and able to talk freely during the critique.

Interview with Alex Myers: Popplet

Darts, Visual Culture Jam: Art, Pedagogy, and Creative Resistance

Darts speaks about edutainment and how political ideals are mixing with entertainment. He states that visual culture is our everyday lives and that it is everywhere. Hidden forms of power (exposing and addressing oppression and encouraging social transformation) lie within visual culture. Within a school setting many students will resist and seemingly oppress themselves. These students attempt to make those around them acknowledge their identities and their lived experiences by setting themselves up for either apathetic aggressive behavior toward schooling. “Resistance need to be an effective pedagogical tool for exposing oppression and encouraging personal and social transformation… a location where students and teachers together are able to critically reflect upon and effectively challenge repressive practices and dominant structures that reinforce the inequities of the status quo…”(Darts, 317)

How can we as educators help empower students to meaningfully engage in the ideological and cultural struggles embedded within the visual?

Boyd, "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites"

Boyd mentions in the article that networked publics are where norms are set and reinforced. These sites are where identities are formed, status in negotiated, and peer-to-peer sociality or a way of connecting is utilized.

Not only can a person choose how they are viewed by the “publics” they are also given certain powers over others such as “friends only” restrictions and who they choose can be their friend. Teens join these sites to maintain connections with their friends. Yet things such as “Top Friends” allow a power play to grow between each “friend”, much like an invitation to a party or adding someone to speed dial. As long as you keep the leader happy, they will allow you to stay their “Top Friend.”

Along with these powers and privileges, communities or “networked publics” grow. Social networks allow publics to gather, therefore creating a new kind of public. “Publics, not simply public, and networked publics, not simply publics” (Boyd, 8). In real life the entire world is not watching because it is not physically possible. They might hear about something from word of mouth, but it is impossible for the world to be watching unless a form of technology, such as the television or newsprint, is involved. Using the Internet, four simple properties (Persistence, Searchability, Replicability, and Invisible Audience) make it easy to locate one’s “digital body” and view anything there is to offer.

How can an art educator utilize the "digital body" and the idea of networked publics in their classroom?
What sort of hidden powers lie in networked publics?

Jones and Fox

This article was quite interesting to read. It compared things such as email, gaming, social networking, broadband usage, online shopping and banking, between multiple generations. The results were fascinating. I enjoyed going through each chart or graph to compare my generation with others. I found it informative in certain areas such as the use of social networking sites between the generations. 

I know that both of my parents and my sisters have websites of Facebook. My parents use theirs to set up events for work, and to stay connected to their family and friends, usually by commenting on walls and uploading pictures. 

My older sister once used the site to promote her self-owned company, but now my feed from her has been taken over by pictures and stories about her children. I fear that my niece and nephew will have their own websites before they are 5, and that it will be completely normal to do so for your child.

 Social Networking Site for Babies!

Do you think it is acceptable or right for babies and toddlers to have their own social networking sites?

Retouching Self-Portrait

Artist’s Statement

I wanted to make my self-portrait a comment on the skewed vision of beauty in the mainstream media. It is foolish to assume that the celebrities we see in magazines actually look that way. I took an old photo of myself, from when I was three, and morphed myself into something that could be seen on a magazine cover. When looking at the photo I want people to feel unsettled. What they are supposed to be looking at is a young child, yet now they have been presented with something sexualized and morphed into somewhat of a cartoon. I changed my eyes, hair, lips, neck, and the general shape and size of my body in the picture. Afterwards it seems to be a completely different person. This is a good comment on how people change themselves on the internet and how they can create a completely different persona. 

Compositing Big Ideas

I based this idea on Sweeny's "Network Society". I wanted to explore how we are all interconnected through the Internet and how we have created multiple online communities. These Clouds are examples of my thought process.

This is the process I went to to get to these clouds...

1.    Select one Big Idea concerning technology broadly defined.

a.    The Internet as a Community

2.    Brainstorm a list of  themes that apply to this big idea

a.    Networking Sites

b.    Communication

c.    Inclusion

d.    Exclusion

e.    Connectedness

3.    Explore synonyms to this theme.

a.    Admittance

b.    Embracement

c.    Ban

d.    Boycott

e.    Ideas

f.     Connection

g.    Language

h.    Acquaintance, Friend, Enemy

i.     Link

4.    Use these synonyms to search Flickr tags. Prepare 3-5 clusters of images that are from your tag searching.

a.    Communication

b.    Computer

c.    Connection

d.    Ideas

5.    Pay attention to the tag clouds that you run into as you search through the Flickr photo streams. Include 2 clusters that come from an interesting tag that you found on Flickr.

a.    Linked

b.    Social Graph

This is my finished Collage. I used the information and images I found when creating the clouds...