Remix your childhood favorites

May 7, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

We have been talking about Remixes and Mashups in our Coetails classes off and on for some time now. It’s been great discussion for me because as an art teacher I can bring these concepts into almost any of my classes with very little effort. Two of my finals units now have incorporated some sort of remix or mashup into the students final product. I’ve found the students to be incredibly motivated and creative at the same time. As I move forward to create an animation class next year I am positive that these themes will continue to creep into my curriculum.

What I love about the buzz around mashups and remixes in todays culture is that this is nothing new to the art world. I can talk about these things with my students as a very easy segway into the history of appropriation in the arts. According to MoMA appropriation is the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images and objects. It’s been a part of western art for centuries but its a style that has rapidly increased with the rise of consumerism. Jonathan Lethem’s article in Harper’s Magazine “The Ecstasy of Influence” nicely describes how appropriation has been a part of the arts for a long time in many different ways. If you think remixing is anything new then check this article out. I personally find that using the word remix is just what helps me to relate to my students. From there we are able to dig a little bit deeper.

Using the word Remix also brings me to the idea of having a good hook for your students. I was recently introduced to a concept referred to as Fan Art. Again, to me this is another form of appropriation or if I was trying to pull in my students I would say Fan Art is another form of remixing. If you are unsure about what Fan Art is watch this OffBook short from PBS.

The thing I love about fan art is that so many people start out drawing fan art when they are little. When kids or even adults don’t know what to draw they will draw a character that they know from some sort of work of fiction. If you want to get a little creative you could draw them doing something new or out of character. I would say that about 70% of the independent drawings that my students do in their sketchbooks are fan art from their favorite shows. Fan art is yet another genre that falls under appropriation that I can easily use to stir up some creativity with my students. I’m not sure where all this is going just yet but I’ve got high hopes for all the places appropriation in it’s many forms will take my classes in the future.

ReVamp

May 7, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ Leave a comment

I recently took a little survey with my design class to see what type of project they would be interested in pursuing as we wrap up the semester. At our school all of the students have blogs that are used regularly so I thought one of the options should be to revamp their blogs and give them some more visual appeal. I was surprised to find that the idea of adding a personal touch to their blogs was very enticing to whole class. Several students claimed to have never done a single thing to their blogs because nobody ever showed them how. The level of enthusiasm for this project got me excited to develop this unit but I was even more excited because it so nicely brought us back to all of the design elements that we have been discussing throughout the semester.

To kick of the unit we watched the OffBook video on “the Art of Wed Design”. Side note, if you are not familiar with OffBook I highly recommend it. It is a great collection of shorts put together by PBS on Art in the Digital world.

This video gives a little history about web design and at the same time helps to generate some discussion about basic elements to consider when designing a web site. Some of these elements were typography, usability, layout, content, and color. With these things in mind students took a look at their own blogs and asked themselves two questions.

What bugs me about my blog?
If I could do anything what would I like to change about my blog?

After our mini brainstorming sessions we will be dug a little deeper. The second phase to our research process was to look at the article Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design by Brandon Jones. Students opened the article in an app that allowed them to annotate it in order to highlighting what they felt were the key components to each section. Afterward we took turns sharing what we highlighted for extra clarity. With this new information in mind students were then asked to return to their lists of things that bugged them and things they wanted to change to make any further clarifications or add-ons.

With a complete list in hand of ways to move forward we will set out to do make three major changes. Students will:

Pick a new theme
1. As students began looking deeper into wordpress themes they will have their lists of what they would like to change as well as their knowledge of the elements of good web design to help guide them.
Reorganize your content
1. Students will make sure the content fits into the new theme in a user friendly and aesthetically pleasing way. Some of these changes will include but are not limited to the following:
  1. adding categories to posts.
  2. Making a Home page more like an about me page.
  3. Parenting posts and ordering pages.
  4. Adding or subtracting widgets.
  5. Adjusting the layout of columns, scrollbars and posts.
Design a new header
1. We will use our adobe suite skills to create a new personalized header. We have been using many of the adobe suite products throughout the semester and students have done a great job developing their skills with digital imagery. They are allowed to use their own images, create a mashup, remix of an image using creative commons.

At the moment my students are about half way through revamping their blogs. Fun things are happening and I’m excited to see the end results. As kids finish up they will be posting a reflection to explain the reasoning behind all of their changes. I know thier have been a lot of little bumps in the road where students find they are not always able to do everything they want but this has been a good lesson as well.

In the end I’m most excited because this final project that accomplishes several things. First, it teaches the students several new concepts about web design. Second, it reviews many of the key components and tools that we have been building on all semester. Finally and most importantly this unit allows for the student to put some individuality and personal flare into a product that they will be continuing to use in the future.

Start with the story

May 2, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

As an art teacher it is not the visual part that gets lost. My actual title is “Visual Arts Teacher” so if I’m lacking in visuals when it comes to storytelling then I’m not doing my job. The part that I feel is left out of the Visual Arts Classroom way too often these days is the story. Art teachers often have their students create exciting images that completely lack narration. To often, especially in the elementary art scene, you see the students making 25 versions of the same idea. There is no personal story coming from the artist/students. At AES I have been working very hard in several of my classes to make sure the artist is telling the story they want to tell. I’m simply showing them how to use tools that will help them to do so. Isn’t this how real artist make art in the first place? I often wonder why idea this so often lost in the art room?

In most of my art classes I want to make sure that students are connected to what they are making and that connections usually come from a personal narration. This is where I am constantly trying to enhance what is happening in my room. This is also where I see myself turning to writing teachers. We create our context for our images by coming up with a story. I actually do this by giving students prompts to reflect on experiences and write about them. By continuing to reflecting on those brief writings of experiences and memories student are able to form their own expressionistic visuals. In this case and in most other works of art the artist is starting with the story, not the image. As a result students are more invested and the product is more visually enchanting.

I’m in the process of creating a new class titled Art in Animation. When the subject of course 3 turned to Digital Storytelling my mind obviously went toward the creation of this class. Yet again, the visual is not the challenging part for me, it’s the story. I have found from past experiences that when starting an animation project storyboarding is of extreme importance. I’m sure it is the same for any form of Digital Storytelling. Storyboarding is not all that different from the beginning stages of creating a Zen Presentation. The story needs to come first. Afterall, Movies don’t start with pictures they start with screenplays, and before that they often start with a book. I was actually in the middle of putting this post together when I discovered Garr Reynold’s blog post just this week on storyboarding. I urge you to check it out. In it he shares many video clips that show how storyboarding works. The following clip video that Garr shared in his post is the very one that first introduced storyboarding to me when I was a bit younger. I can recall watching this mini documentary when I was in high school and was convinced that storyboarding illustration would be the perfect job for me.

Can Flashy Prezi be Zen?

May 2, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

I use Prezi very frequently in my classroom. While reading about presentation Zen I noticed all of the examples being displayed were powerpoint or something similar. This got me wondering; Can Prezi be Zen? I decided to do a little fishing around to see what some others critiques might have to say about the Zen qualities or lack there of when it comes to Prezi.

I started with the creator of Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds. From what I found Reynolds had two main positive things to say about Prezi:

One is that “ Prezi is a good tool when used with discretion and restraint.”

and that

“Prezi works well in non-linear presentation situations”

The first quote by Reynolds could easily be applied to any presentation platform, or any tool in general for that matter. The second however is the one that I find to be more relevant. In a way Prezi’s can be set up like an animated infographic. Prezi will zoom into one section of the whole and then zoom out again to show the viewer how everything is connected, helping the viewer to never lose sight of the big picture. Like Garr said, it works well with non-linear situations.

Not everyone though seems to think that Prezi has the potential that Reynolds does. Scott Burkun has a post dedicated to his hatred of Prezi. Stating that:

“The people most drawn to use Prezi are those who are more enchanted by the pretense of style, rather than substance.”

Burkun’s statement may be true for many Prezi users but who’s to say those users are in any way knowledgeable with the concepts behind Presentation Zen. From what I read the biggest critisism of Prezi is that the transitions are to flashy, distracting the viewer from the content. These transitions definitely go against the Presentations Zen model. They are what I believe Reynolds was referring to when he said that Prezi is a good when used with discretion and restraint. So are there Zen Prezi’s? Chris Anderson has a wonderful Prezi that he uses in his TedTalk on how web video powers global innovation and I would say it’s getting the job done.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

In this presentation you can see many of the advantages to Prezi as well as the distracting transitions. My conclusion is that when creating a Zen presentation there can be a place for Prezi but you should think carefully about the content and whether or not a non-linear presentation platform enhances your content.

On the other hand I don’t use Prezi just for presentations and talks. I’m sure that a lot of presentations that teachers make are not so much presentations as they are reference points for students. I actually use Prezi as a sort of weekly planner that helps to organize the information my students need for each class. I have one Prezi for every week that encompasses all of my classes. Different areas of the Prezi are dedicated to providing the students with images, video or links they might need but mostly it is a way to communicate what the class period will consist of along with some key points. If it was only visuals it wouldn’t be very helpful to students. In this way Prezi is not being used for presentations but it is a reference for my students. Since I have started using Prezi here are what I have found to be it’s advantages, Zen or not.

You can create a presentation that is are non-linear, displaying the big picture and how concept overlap and are interconnected.
Prezi is web based so it can be accessed from different devices and has a user friendly app.
It can be kept in the public domain so it can also be accessed by your students.
Embedding video, images and links is extremely easy and allows you to keep more information in one place.
It can be shared with others to make presentations a collaborative effort.

I would like to leave you with a course relevant Prezi example that may not be exactly Zen but it nicely displays that advantage of Prezi without the Presenter. This is something prezi can do well when needed.

https://prezi.com/embed/bm9alx1pbtmc/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined

Breaking Down the Walls

April 24, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 2 Comments

Picture courtesy of Visual Thinking Strategies

I’m enjoying the topic of course 3 because I feel visual literacy is often overlooked and yet increasingly essential. I would argue however that visual literacy is being taught more than most realize and it’s happening in the art room. Visual literacy and sometimes media literacy are core subjects in the art room. George Lucas stated in his Edutopia article that “We need to take art and music out of “the arts class” and put it into the English class.” This statement points to what I believe is a largely overlooked problem in schools today. I believe each subject tends to be too compartmentalized when in reality, outside school walls the world is not run by lone subject matters but more often a collaboration of subject matters. Visual literacy doesn’t need to come out of the art room and go into english class. Teachers need to demonstrate how subject areas overlap more naturally. Many teachers do this to a small extent but kids still don’t make the connections. When you tell a student to make a visual for a science class do they stop to apply the elements and principles of art the learned in drawing? Mostly likely the answer is no. I often think that if our school systems were set up with less compartmentalization between subjects then our students would be more equipped to see how everything is intertwined and overlapping. If only we could break down some of the walls between our subject areas. Then, just maybe students would be more likely to apply visual media and literacy skills they have been nurturing in the art room to observations in literature, science and technology.

As an art teacher I thought I would attempt to start this process by sharing some simple tools that I use to enhance visual literacy. Hopefully a few of you will find this useful in a classroom outside the art room.

VTS, otherwise known as Visual thinking Strategies is a great way to get kids verbally talking about imagery, breaking down there thoughts and expressing them out load. One thing I love about VTS is that there are no wrong answers, just curiosities and self expression which helps kids to build there confidence. The following is a video of VTS being facilitated with a group of adults.
“Picture This: How Pictures Work” by Molly Bang is a wonderful book that shows how simple shapes in different arrangements create expression.
The Elements of Art and Principles of Design are considered to be the common set of vocabulary for talking about and describing visual components of a work of art. This vocabulary is used in art classes from kindergarden through 12th grade and could easily be used in other classrooms when looking at, creating visuals, or developing descriptive writing

I hope some of my non art teacher colleges might find some of this useful. If you have materials that you think would make a good resource in the art room I would certainly like to hear about it.

Spring Cleaning

April 10, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-04-03 at 5.35.32 PM — Magazino wordpress theme

As I set out to bling out my blog I decided I would work to get rid of the things that irritate me about me most about it. As an art teacher there are always little visual irritants that eat at me. The screen shot to the right is what my blog used to look like.

I love the look of the Magazino theme but I was always struggling to get the pictures to look the way I wanted them. As you can see the heading image would always be cropped awkwardly and the thumbnails pictures on the bottom would only show up occasionally. To me I felt these inconstancies made things look a bit unprofessional. That being said I decided to switch my theme to something similar but a little more user friendly and less time consuming. I wanted the most recent post in the header and tiles of posts below just like Magazino but I didn’t want to put so much time into making sure my picture settings just right. I managed to get a little simplicity and the look I was going for with the Photogram theme posted below.

The second little irritant on my agenda was to organize my content better for my users. I did this by making a bunch of categories, applying them to each post, and adding widgets related to categories. This may not completely fall under the category of making my blog more visually appealing but it definitely hikes up my usability factor. The screen shot below is of a post with new widgets to help navigate through my blog. None of these changes are earth shattering, rather they are small changes that can go along way. Like most things it’s a matter of getting the framework set up first and from then on out life should hopefully be a little easier for me and my readers.

Photogram Theme - View of a post — Photogram Theme – View of a post

Appropriate dress

February 28, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

This semester I’m teaching a design class and I’m finding myself in new territory. I’m constantly focused on making our projects to be meaningful and relevant. One very relevant project we were recently working on in class was designing a new cover for next years school agendas. In a way the class was hired to a job with very specific criteria and functionality. Knowing this we took our task very seriously. Students broke off into small groups to work on their ideas, periodically regrouping to discuss design elements until we came up with something that we all agreed was aesthetically pleasing as good design. I feel the project was a huge success, used a collaborative design process, and helped students to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign.

One little bug popped up in the process that brought me back to our copyright discussions in CoeTail. We started out our design process with a set of images that we owned. At one point students wanted to use other images and began grabbing things off the internet without thinking twice. I quickly realized that in a class where we are constantly on the computer and we are working with layout and design that copyright needs to be addressed. As a matter of fact I should probably be addressing it in all of my art classes to some degree since appropriation is a common artistic practice. With this thought in mind I have decided that the introduction to our next design project, which is t-shirt design, will begin with concepts of appropriation, copyright and remix culture. We have just finished creating our own personalized logos and have published them to our blogs. Ownership of their own work and fair use of others are things that each of my students should be considering at this point.

This unit will be introduced to my students by addressing the issue we ran into a few weeks ago when images were taken from the internet for our cover project. The class will be broken up into groups of two, with each group researching one of the following topics and reporting back to the class.

Explain copyright and who it is meant to protect.
What is appropriation? Give 3 examples of famous artists using appropriation in their work.
Tell us about Andy Warhol and one of the copyright lawsuits he was involved in.
What are considered the fair use and artistic standards for artists involving copyright?
Give two possible scenarios where copyright would affect us in Design class.

Once we have all been informed of each others topics we will take a closer look at our schools RUP. This will give the students time to not only review the RUP but also discuss what points in the RUP relate closely to our work in Design.

It is at this final point in the discussion that I will introduce students to Creative Commons, it’s purpose and how we should be using it from here on out. Creative Commons has two wonderful videos that I plan to share with the students to not only explain what Creative Commons is but also how they have contributed to the remix culture of modern artistic appropriation. The following is the first of those two videos. With help from the Creative Commons search engine we will be finding images to turn into remixed graphics on Adobe illustrator. Our final graphics should also be changed according to artistic standards of copyright so that they could be legally printed onto a t-shirt or submitted to a design company such as threadless.com.

I’m excited for students to do their own research into this topic and see how copyright enters the visual art world. I’m also excited to hear the discussions that might follow. This unit will being within the next two weeks in my class, stay tuned for updates.

Who to blame for the bullies?

February 25, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 2 Comments

scene from film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

It seems as though we hear about cyberbullying more these days then bullying, as though cyberbullying is the only kind of bullying. Was the avenue or venue for bullies ever talked about as much as it is today? To me it seemed as though the internet is just a newish place for people to act out in ways that they already have been for years. I completely agree with Danah Boyd when she wrote in “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers that

“technology is not radically changing what’s happening; it’s simply making what’s happening far more visible.”

But after a little more research I’m feeling I’m a little bit wrong. Maybe cyberbullying is more prevalent today than bullying was 20 or 30 years ago. I still agree with many thing s Danah had to say but I also feel as though the internet has created a platform that only makes it easier for the bully within to come out. Recent cyber bullying statistics certainly make it seem as though it is a growing thing. The ability to comment on what people say and be anonymous adds a whole new level to bullying that the public has never dealt with before. So how do we deal with it and how should bullies be punished? Laws aren’t getting to the root of the problem. They are mostly using scare tactics to keep people from bullying. Why do people desire to, isn’t that the question? Institutions, public and private seem to be chomping at the bit to stop cyberbullying as though that’s where the problem starts. My classmate Dave Hoover shared and interesting case with me a couple of weeks ago that involves a school district in California. The district of Glendale apparently hired a firm to monitor their students social media accounts. I find this very interesting because social media accounts are mostly utilized outside of school hours which really brings into question the authority the school has to hire this surveillance firm in the first place. This case in Glendale also rolls right back into questions of surveillance, what is being done with information being collected, and who has the right to collect it. I would rather not dive into the surveillance topic right now but it is important to consider how many of these cases deal with particular freedoms, whether they are a right to privacy or freedom of speech. With the case of cyberbullies we are dealing with freedom of speech. The difference is that your speech is now in text for everyone to read and even join in on. You can be held accountable in very different ways now that it is in print. Still, I’m more skeptical of how surveillance and scare tactics will help this situation. The internet and the venue isn’t the problem. I have a hard time believing cyberbullying is going to go anywhere unless empathy becomes a bigger part of our cultural practices.

Let them link

February 20, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ Leave a comment

To link or not to link? Really, that’s the question?

I’m strongly in favor of linking here. I can understand Mr.Carr’s point in his article against hyperlinking in the text. He claims it’s distracting. Hyperlinking in the text causes people to click from link to link until they end up five pages away from the original page. Still, despite being the victim to an occasional clicking jaunt, I still prefer my links in the text. I actually treat them as I would a highlighter on the web. I think it’s great that it’s already done for me and I’m sure anyone with a little curiosity in there bones feels the same way. Without the hyperlink right there in the text I would waste time finding my text again and then matching it up with the proper footnote. It does take a little self discipline of being able to finish one thing before moving onto another. But leave that up to the reader and their own learning styles and ability to focus. As far as I can tell hyperlinks are really just doing what footnotes wish they could. We should be singing praises to the hyperlink for helping us along and saving us time when we want to look a little deeper into an author and their sources.

Professionally I believe linking is an especially useful tool when working with students. Hyperlinks help to show students the importance of citing references in a more accessible and convenient. It also gives them a quick and easy way to look deeper into a subject if they are so inclined. I use hyperlinks for handouts and references to artist on my classroom blog all of the time. Without hyperlinks helping to keep all of that information at my students fingertips I would expect to be flooded with a lot more questions and papers to shuffle thank I have time for.

I would have to say that when it comes the argument of linking or not I very much fall in favor of Mathew Ingram, who uses many interesting links to back up his argument but most of all I agree with him when he wrote:

“not including links (which a surprising number of web writers still don’t) is in many cases a sign of intellectual cowardice. What it says is that the writer is unprepared to have his or her ideas tested by comparing them to anyone else’s, and is hoping that no one will notice. In other cases, it’s a sign of intellectual arrogance — a sign that the writer believes these ideas sprang fully formed from his or her brain.”

It seems to me that if we want any sort of respect for the things that we are writing then we should be providing links to the things that we are referring to and the articles that helped us to form our decisions. I would want that from the authors what I am reading so why should my readers expect any less from me.

Disney is Watching

February 15, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ Leave a comment

Image courtesy of Christian Lambert Photography

I seem to be posting one post after another these days about technology and privacy in the real world. I’m not sure if I’m completely weirded out by it all yet but I am learning a lot about how different corporations are tracking us. I’m still unsure about how I feel about it all but I’m at least happier to be a little more knowledgeable on the subject. The most recent creepy tracking device I have discovered are the Disney magicbands. At first it appears to be very harmless and maybe it is to most. If you are going to Disney World you now have the choice to wear a wrist band. The magicband is your ticket into the park, key to your room and can be swiped to purchase things because it is linked to your credit card. I suppose on one hand it’s really nice for you as the customer because you don’t need to carry a wallet and it makes things a little more convenient (except for the fact that your kids might be buying things left and right with your credit card). On the other hand it is a genius marketing strategy that is constantly collecting data on your every move while in the park.

When you sign up for the magicband Disney asks for your name, age, sex, favorite disney character and so on so that they can track your every move and categorize it properly. This way if you are standing in line for a long time they can send your child’s favorite character over to say Hi or even Happy Birthday to distract them while you’re waiting. Disney will be especially likely to help you out in this way if they can see that you are a big spender in the park. The amount of data that Disney can track on you and your families every move is endless and they can use it to tailor experiences for you and others in the future.

Some are comparing Disney to the NSA with their new fancy tracking devices. I don’t know enough about it but I can certainly see some the the parallels. If you have read any of my other posts recently you would see that I have been reading up on privacy in the real world a bit more than cyberspace privacy. The common thread I see is that nothing is for free. I’m happy to be reading about tactics such as the magicbands because I’m more aware and cautious about what is happening to the information that I am giving out. Often times, at least to me, the trade off of what is being offered is not worth the sharing of personal information. I really don’t know enough about what companies are doing with some of my information to feel comfortable. I hope that in the future some of this will be made more clear to the consumers and that the the choice of what to share and when to share it, at least in the real world, will continue to be a choice.

Cassandra Pupovac

Art Teacher and Service Coordinator

Author: cpupovac